How B2B Marketers Misunderstand Their Customers
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While consumer marketing typically incorporates appeals to emotion and intangibles like status, B2B marketing has traditionally emphasized sales pitches based on product specs, value propositions, and vendor comparisons. A study of B2B purchasing decisions finds that they are often driven by considerations that aren’t purely rational — and that they’re heavily influenced by individuals to whom marketers aren’t speaking.
Businesses are striving to adapt ever faster to keep pace with rapid change, and yet B2B marketing practices have remained surprisingly static. Sure, the tactics have shifted to digital executions, and the use of data has made targeting B2B buyers more precise, but marketers remain rooted in fundamentally flawed assumptions about the corporate buying process.
For far too long, marketing leaders have operated on the belief that B2B purchasing decisions are almost entirely rational, driven primarily by product-feature superiority and competitive pricing. However, this conventional wisdom supposes that buyers live a Dr. Jekyll and — let’s say — Mr. Spock existence. In their private lives, they are fully formed human beings subject to all the cognitive and affective influence that B2C marketing wields to shape personal buying decisions. But when they step into the office, they become emotionless, like the famous half-Vulcan first officer of the starship Enterprise, and all of their decisions are informed solely by logic. This assumption undergirds nearly all B2B marketing efforts.
Nevertheless, the truth is that B2B buying is far more emotional and socially influenced than C-suite leaders have accepted. The same emotional triggers, social forces, and cognitive biases that influence us in our personal lives remain in play in our professional lives as levers that marketers can use to shape B2B purchasing decisions.
B2B buying is far more emotional and socially influenced than C-suite leaders have accepted.
This shift in understanding isn’t just relevant for marketers in exclusively B2B settings; it’s a crucial insight for CMOs across industries, who often have at least one segment of business customers. Netflix must simultaneously attract individual subscribers and court advertisers; Google markets consumer-facing search along with enterprise cloud solutions. Even educational institutions like the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where I teach, must appeal to both individual students for its MBA program and corporate partners for its executive education offerings. In each case, the underlying principles of how to influence decisions are similar, but marketers are unlikely to use similar tactics.
Of course, marketing and go-to-market strategies are going to be different for B2B than for B2Cs, even if they work on similar leverage points, because the buying processes are so different — and, as we’ll discuss, more relationally complex for B2B.
