Workbooks’ ‘The No BS CRM’ voted your campaign of 2024

After a fortnight of voting across four rounds, Marketing Week readers have named Workbooks’ ‘The No BS CRM’ campaign their favourite of the year.

The campaign from the B2B CRM software firm, which positions it as a no-nonsense offer for medium-sized businesses, defeated the British Heart Foundation’s ‘Streams of (un)consciousness’ in the final round of the competition.

Over the course of the vote, both campaigns have knocked out fierce competition from brands including Coca-Cola, Elf Beauty, Specsavers and John Lewis, all of which featured in Marketing Week’s top campaigns of 2024.

The winning campaign

The value of humour in marketing communications has been well documented, with many B2C brands eager to take advantage. But a number of B2B brands are now following suit.

Take this bold campaign from Workbooks which promises users a bullshit-free CRM solution that is clean and easy-to-use without showing the product once. It also covers its stars in copious amounts of horse manure to hammer home the point.

While still early days for a campaign, which only launched in October, Workbooks has done a fantastic job in embedding the ‘No Bullshit’ line across its product and homepages, building the connection between the consumer pain point and how the brand hopes to solve it.

Not just a hunch, either, the campaign was built off solid research that shows most people were unhappy with their CRM and were looking for an alternative.

Workbooks chief marketing officer Dan Roche told Marketing Week that it needed to find a way to get across that message in a way that was “emotionally resonant” to help its voice cut through in a crowded market.

“We don’t have any competitive differentiator in terms of our product marketing,” he explained. “We believe our product is better, but there’s so much noise in the market that it’s very hard to cut through.”

It seems to have worked. Roche wrote on LinkedIn about how the campaign has driven meetings from prospects who hadn’t engaged with any of its previous work – and its OOH billboard in major stations in London and Reading have seen potential customers excited enough to book a demo.

“Through having this emotional campaign,” Roche said, “we have actually got people’s attention.” JS