Paul Hewerdine

By Paul Hewerdine, account director, Loewy

Farcical. I finally got round to sifting through a recent copy of Marketing that had been cluttering up my desk for a couple of weeks. To be honest, I've become a little disillusioned with Marketing and Marketing Week's lack of coverage of anything vaguely business-to-business related in recent years but nothing could prepare me for the horror of Marketing's ‘Power 100.'

Billed as ‘a definitive guide to the UK marketing community's biggest players', as I flicked through, I was aghast to find B2B about as under represented as England at Euro 2008. In fact, I had to do a double take just to check that by ‘biggest' players they weren't referring to those with the most ample girths in the industry, but this lot looked pretty slim.

Well, there's the chap from BT and you could say it's big on business-to-business marketing, but no - it means BT's ‘upward looking consumer chief'. Ok there are a few marketing chiefs from the mobile operators but not one stand out B2B brand. No marketing big hitters from the likes of IBM or HP. No Fujitsu or Accenture. No one, dare I say it, even from Microsoft. You can interpret power as you will - but surely there are some B2B marketing movers who should have been up for consideration.

Perhaps we're not as good as an industry at showboating quite like our friends operating in the consumer end of the market? Perhaps it's just lazy journalism? But from where I'm sitting, B2B is no longer the hairy arsed brother of B2C. As an industry we've now got some of the most innovative, intelligent and creative marketers around. It's high time the mainstream marketing press recognised this - if only for the reason that as long as they overlook B2B, we're going to have difficulty attracting and recruiting the next generation of talent. And that will only be our loss and I hate to say it, B2C's gain.

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