News needs the focus of B2B publishers

There is a lot to learn from B2B transformation projects

My first job in journalism was in B2B publishing, although in those days it was known as the trade press. I was the first employee in a small company that wrote about global custodian banks. Yeah, I’d never heard of them before either.

These are banks that look after the share certificates and cash held by pension funds and insurance companies. They make sure that when they do trades in the market that the share certificates – mostly paper in those days – and money were exchanged on time. It was very arcane and even those who worked in the field described it as “the boring bit of banking”.

At the time, I thought this job was all about teaching me how to write on a topic I didn’t know or care about. But actually there were far deeper lessons that I really appreciate now.

At the heart of the publication was the ethos of providing tangible value to our readers, things that would make their jobs easier to do. Central to this was proprietary data that a consultant had sourced from banks around the world. This allowed our readers to compare their performance against their rivals in a way they couldn’t otherwise do.

We spent a lot of time sourcing guest columns from the great and good of the industry. We became the place for them to share their ideas with their colleagues. I also accumulated a lot of air miles visiting markets which were then quite unknown to people in New York and London, who were our main audience.

We charged around £1,000 a year for a subscription and rapidly built a good business. Indeed it was sold to Euromoney within three years. My bosses became rich.

I was thinking about this recently, as we’ve been talking to a number of bold, innovative, B2B publishers. In my opinion, they have a lot of useful learnings for their B2C counterparts. The B2B world feels like it has really embraced the idea of business transformation in a more dramatic way than their mainstream cousins.

What are the main lessons B2C can learn from B2B? Here are just a few.

1 Understand your value proposition

We have spoken to a lot of B2B publishers who are thinking hard about what they are actually for, what they really offer their customers. Some talk about being an intelligence service, others about connecting their industry’s community. I like it when they get down to brass tacks. One told us that their job is to “allow predators to find their prey” – or, more prosaically, to help firms find their clients.

Above all, the idea is that you have to understand what people are getting from you. I think a lot of B2C brands might struggle to say much beyond that they “do great journalism”. Many do, but increasingly that is available from a lot of non-traditional sources. Why should they choose you?

This deserves far more consideration than it is currently getting, especially given the speed of change in the market around us. Indeed, we often start our consulting engagements with a simple question: who are your for and what do you offer them?

2 Don’t be afraid to pivot hard

B2B publishers also seem less afraid to make big swings (I’ve been in America this week…). Euromoney, to whom my bosses sold all those years ago, has changed dramatically in the interim as the market has shifted.

They used to be the leading European magazine for the financial services industry. Now if you look at their website, you’ll see that they don’t do journalism any more.

Instead, they style themselves as “a leading provider of competitive intelligence and certification for the global banking and finance industry”. They are a benchmarking and certification business.

They did this because their traditional journalism business was no longer tenable. But I like that they had a look at how they might evolve based on the strength of their brand and acted decisively, even if it was a painful process.

3 Treat AI as a friend not a rival

The debates about how much journalists are using AI or whether they even should are less pointed in B2B publishers. Instead, we see them asking how they can turn it to their advantage.

A number are building out closed AI models built around their content and other inputs (data, sales calls, etc) from their business. In this way they feel they will be able to offer a deeper and more expert experience than any general LLM can offer. I guess we’ll find out in time if they are right but they are moving without fear.

In many cases this is framed as a conversation about how to provide a better service to readers rather than how it might affect the purity of the journalistic enterprise. I think this is a more positive way to see AI than you see in many B2C newsrooms.

Of course, there are now many people in journalism who are becoming more optimistic about the effect AI can have on our businesses, but we need to spread that feeling, and quickly.

These are just three points that jumped out at me. I’m sure there are many more examples of innovation and transformation out there. The B2C industry would do well to seek them out and learn from them.

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