Why brand matters in B2B

The Royal Albert Hall London

Brand is older than advertising. The word comes from the Old Norse brandr, meaning to burn. Cattle ranchers burned marks into cattle to signal ownership. Potters stamped their clay. Merchants marked their barrels. The mark said, "This came from me, and I stand behind it."

That’s still the job: to signal ownership, origin, and accountability.

I first felt that clearly one day at the Royal Albert Hall.

I was there the day Kevin Roberts, then CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, gave his Lovemarks talk at the IoD’s Annual Convention. His thesis: the brands that win don’t just earn respect. They earn love. High love, high loyalty: Apple, Harley-Davidson, Nike. The people queuing outside a shop at midnight for a phone. Th

e people who tattoo a logo on their body.

I remember sitting there with a very specific feeling. Professional envy, mixed with admiration.

B2C brands can reach for that kind of irrational loyalty. When your product sits on a shelf next to 20 others, and your buyer decides in 3 seconds, you’re competing for an emotion. Pour that feeling into the advertising, the packaging, the cultural moment. Do it well, and people choose you without thinking too hard.

For a minute, I wished I were a B2C marketer. But something about working with B2B brands drew me in and kept me there.

What drew me in was where the brand actually lives.

In B2C, you can control most of your brand expression: the campaign, the packaging, and the cultural association. In B2B, the brand lives in your people. Much more so than in B2C. I’m not saying culture and people in B2C don’t matter, but you can buy a can of Coke or an iPhone without interacting with anyone who actually works there.

In B2B, your people, how they present, how they interact with prospects and customers, are the brand. The living, breathing embodiment of it. And it can be easily damaged. The sales rep who didn’t sense the mood. The poor onboarding call. The missed support ticket. The renewal meeting where a client felt underappreciated and processed.

Building a strong B2B brand requires clear positioning and consistent values that resonate across the organisation, particularly among those who interact with customers. Every person carries some version of your brand promise in how they behave and engage. That’s a harder discipline to build and sustain than a campaign, and I’d argue it requires more skill, not less.

The human element is the variable you can’t design away.

What I’ve seen up close

I’ve worked inside some of the strongest B2B brands in UK education. The Institute of Directors is an iconic brand, respected globally, offering world-class training and education second to none, and home to members who genuinely value what it stands for. The Key is trusted by senior leadership teams in schools across the country as an indispensable aid. Team Teach is the UK’s leading provider of behaviour support training.

What do those brands share? Customers trust them and keep coming back. They trust the people who work in them and the product itself. A genuinely good product, with genuinely good people. In B2B, both are load-bearing.

The irony, compared to the cereal aisle, is that a consumer brand can create a premium for products that are largely interchangeable with competitors'. In B2B, the brand is only as strong as the product behind it. You can’t build lasting trust in a product that doesn’t earn it. Especially with subscription-based offerings, the first year the customer is buying on hope; the second year, they are buying on experience and results, and it had better stack up.

That’s a more honest relationship between brand and reality, and I’d argue, a harder one to build.

The evidence for investing in brand

The commercial case for brand investment isn't intuitive. Short-term activation is easier to justify: run a campaign, point to the numbers. Brand is slower, murkier, harder to prove.

Les Binet and Peter Field gave us the best analysis we have on this. Their 2013 paper, The Long and the Short of It, pulled 30 years of IPA effectiveness data and found the optimal split between brand-building and activation is roughly 60/40. Brand first. Activation draws down on it.

You can't keep running short campaigns off an empty brand. At some point, there's nothing left to convert. Short-term activation doesn't translate into long-run profitability on its own. But the brand does trickle down into it. Volume can move quickly; pricing effects take longer. As Binet and Field put it: "a focus on short-term results will not maximise long-run profitability."

You need both. They just work differently.

The 95:5 rule

John Dawes from The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute put a number on something most B2B marketers know instinctively. At any given moment, 95% of your potential customers are not in the market for your product or service. They won't be ready to buy for months, maybe years. Your advertising is seen mostly by people who aren't ready to buy.

That's not a reason to stop. It's a reason to think differently about what advertising is for.

Brand investment in advertising builds mental availability in the meantime. It gets your brand associated with the right problems and solutions, so that when those 95% do enter the market, you're already in their consideration set. That takes time. Which is exactly why short-term activation alone doesn't compound the way brand does.

The commercial lever most companies underuse

But the strongest commercial argument for investing in brand isn’t awareness. It's price.

A strong brand reduces price sensitivity. A 2016 study by Prof. Berk Ataman and team analysed 7 years of data on 350 brands across 39 categories and found that advertising reduced price elasticity, with the effect being strongest for niche brands or more expensive categories.

For B2B companies, this matters enormously. The knock-down effect in sales, the moment a prospect asks for a discount and the conversation shifts from value to price, is a brand problem as much as a sales problem. Preference built over time is what protects the margin.

The commercial case stacks up from three directions.

Three levers. One investment.

Brand keeps your activation campaigns working. It keeps you in consideration during the years your buyer isn't buying. And when they are, it's what lets you hold your price.

The problem with underinvesting in brand is that it takes time to show up. Activation campaigns work for a while, but over time the pipeline slows, and discount conversations start; your competitor with better recognition wins a deal you should have won. By then, the gap is expensive to close.

The evidence isn't ambiguous. Thirty years of IPA data. Ehrenberg-Bass. Seven years of econometric studies across 350 brands. It all points the same way.

The mark on the barrel cost something. It returned more than it cost. That's still the deal.

If your pipeline is stalling or you're under price pressure, it may be a brand issue. Drop us a line. We love to chat.