The B2B Trap

I spent the first two decades of my career working on well known consumer brands like RedBull, Mercedes Benz and Innocent. I marketed the most famous artists of the day on the The Big Three record labels to music fans and promoted paragons of TV innovation like Big Brother and Skins and Channel 4 and sister channel E4, respectively. These brands had a story to tell, and they had charisma.

And like all recognised brands, whether up and coming, established or somewhere in between, they understood something fundamental: people rarely engage with products or services in isolation. They engage with meaning, emotion, identity and experience.

More recently I've worked with an increasing number of businesses selling to business customers rather than individual consumers, aka B2B, and over time, a pattern and an attitude has become hard to ignore.

If a brand is defined as an organisation’s relationship with its audience or customer, or put another way, how those people talk about you when you’re not in the room, why is it that businesses who target other businesses so often fall flat in their brand building efforts? Why do so many B2B brands fall into a familiar trap?

They over-intellectualise their message, leaning heavily on jargon, features and functional claims, while neglecting narrative altogether. They communicate without emotion, mistaking neutrality for credibility, as if logic alone drives buying decisions. They undervalue design and underinvest in experience, despite overwhelming evidence that perceived quality and attention to detail influence trust. Look up Jony Ive’s curious story about the joy of unboxing an Apple USB cable and you have a case in point.

Perhaps most damagingly, they mimic one another. Same language. Same layouts. Same claims. A sea of sameness only punctuated by occasional, half-acknowledged “inspiration”.

But at its core, the problem is simpler. Somewhere along the way, many B2B brands forgot something essential: the buyer is still a person.

Some of it can be explained by long sales cycles, procurement processes and layers of stakeholder approval. Some of it is a hangover from an era when “serious” was equated with credibility. And some of it is undoubtedly fear – fear of standing out, of getting it wrong, of being seen as unserious.

But at its core, the problem is simpler. Somewhere along the way, many B2B brands forgot something essential: the buyer is still a person.

People with biases, emotions, cultural references and limited attention. People who make decisions in environments of uncertainty. People who want to feel confident, reassured, understood – and occasionally inspired.

This doesn’t mean that B2B brands should simply copy the B2C playbook page for page. Context matters. Stakes are often higher. Decisions are collective rather than individual. But the fundamentals still apply.

Strong brands start with a clear point of view. They articulate a coherent narrative that can hold multiple messages together over time. They speak in human language, recognising that words are not just vehicles for information but signals of intent, intelligence and care. Increasingly, this matters more, not less, in an age where generic, AI-generated language is easy to spot and easy to ignore.

They understand culture. They reference the world their audience inhabits. They acknowledge human truths rather than hiding behind spreadsheets, even when the product itself is complex.

And crucially, they invest in distinctiveness. Ownable assets. Consistent expression. Repetition over time. Not novelty for its own sake, but familiarity built through deliberate design and communication choices.

Whether you run an agency, a technology company or a logistics enterprise, your brand is not your logo or your website. It is the relationship between you and other humans. And just like consumer brands, you are ultimately trying to elicit an emotion, and prompt an action.
To do that, you need more than competence. You need energy. You need soul. You need sex appeal.

The organisations that win in B2B over the long term are rarely the loudest. They are the ones willing to play the long game: investing in creativity and storytelling and showing up with intent, not apology.