B2B Marketing Strategy: What the Evidence Says About How B2B Brands Grow

The 95/5 Problem

Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg — who built their reputations at the LinkedIn B2B Institute before founding Evidenza — have been the most consistent voices on this in recent years, and they have appeared on That's What I Call Marketing to discuss it in depth. Their central argument begins with a number: at any given time, only about 5% of potential buyers in a B2B category are actively in the market. The other 95% are not buying right now.

The implication is stark. Almost all B2B marketing — lead generation, content downloads, webinar registrations, intent data, ABM targeting — is designed to find and convert the 5% who are already looking. That is demand capture. It is necessary but not sufficient. What most B2B marketing completely neglects is demand creation: reaching the 95% who are not in the market now, building brand awareness and positive associations so that when they do enter the market, your brand comes to mind first.

This matters because the buyers of tomorrow are invisible to most B2B measurement tools today. They are not clicking on ads, filling in forms, or engaging with content. But they are forming impressions. The brands that reach them now — with emotionally resonant, memorable advertising — will have a significant advantage when the buying window opens.

B2B Buyers Are Human

One of the most persistent myths in B2B marketing is that business buyers make purely rational decisions. The research says otherwise. Jon Lombardo has made this point repeatedly, drawing on both academic psychology and effectiveness data: B2B buyers are as susceptible to emotion, memory, and brand perception as any consumer. The difference is not in how they make decisions — it is in the organisational context around those decisions.

B2B purchases involve risk mitigation. No procurement manager was ever fired for choosing the brand they had already heard of. This means brand familiarity — mental availability — is actually more valuable in B2B than in many consumer categories, because it reduces perceived risk. A brand that has built awareness and positive associations with senior decision-makers over years will win deals that a brand with identical capabilities but lower awareness will lose — not on merit, but on mental availability.

B2B Brand Building: The Evidence

Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg applied Binet and Field's effectiveness research directly to B2B, and the findings mirror what has been established in B2C. B2B campaigns with emotional, fame-driving creative significantly outperform rational, product-focused campaigns on every business metric — revenue growth, market share, pricing power. The categories are different; the underlying human psychology is not.

A panel episode on That's What I Call Marketing featuring Tara O'Sullivan, Caroline Kelly, and Seamus Moore examined this from a practitioner perspective. The consensus: the question is not whether B2B should invest in brand building — it clearly should. The question is why the industry has allowed itself to become so boring. The answer is usually risk aversion, committee decision-making, and a fundamental misunderstanding of how B2B buyers make decisions.

The same principles that apply to B2C brand building apply in B2B: reach broad audiences, use consistent distinctive assets, create emotionally resonant work, and invest for the long term. The executional context differs — B2B brands need to reach business audiences through channels where those audiences actually spend time — but the strategic logic is identical.

Thought Leadership: What Actually Works

Thought leadership is the primary brand-building tool available to most B2B organisations — but most of it does not work. Jon Lombardo's standard is uncompromising: thought leadership only works if it makes buyers genuinely smarter. Content that exists to make the brand look credible without delivering real intellectual value is not thought leadership — it is marketing dressed up as editorial. Senior professionals can identify it immediately and ignore it accordingly.

The test Lombardo applies: would a senior professional share this with a peer because they found it genuinely useful? If not, it is not thought leadership. If yes, it is the most efficient form of B2B brand building available — reaching exactly the right people through the most trusted channel, peer recommendation.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

The misalignment between B2B marketing and sales is almost always a metrics problem. Marketing is measured on MQLs and lead volume. Sales is measured on revenue. These incentives create a predictable conflict: marketing optimises for quantity of leads, sales complains about quality, and neither is thinking about the long-term brand work that would make all those conversations easier.