CEO STORIES: Howard Breindel, co-CEO, DeSantis Breindel

BRAND AS AN ASSET

As a B2B brand strategy and brand experience firm, DeSantis Breindel works with B2B companies to maximize and leverage one of their most important assets. The firm defines brand as “the promise a company makes to all of its key stakeholders and the experience it delivers to those stakeholders to fulfill that promise.”For young companies, the challenge is defining the promise. For more mature companies, it’s the realization that brand is not a static thing.

B2B vs. B2C

If branding is focused on the promise and the experience, marketing is about putting it out for the world to see. B2B marketing is largely about considered decisions, according to Breindel, where consumer marketing is about impulse decisions. The stakes are usually higher in B2B, so the kind of information and experience companies need to provide to their customers is greater and more complex.

KEEPING CREATIVITY ALIVE

DeSantis Breindel is accustomed to working closely with its clients, and like all other companies, has had to learn to operate digitally at the same time its clients have. That shared learning curve has been an advantage, Breindel believes, as clients are often using the same tools. To keep employees engaged, all interaction is done by Zoom – no more phone calls. Internal meetings are scheduled to enable employee interaction without an agenda. What’s impossible to replicate, of course, are the casual, spontaneous conversations that happen in the hallway, in the kitchen, when walking by someone’s desk. Those won’t happen until a vaccine makes people comfortable about returning to the office.