Insights

The value of understanding the story

Having designed and delivered insights projects for a lot of different B2B clients over the years, the one thing that still holds true is how different the story is behind each one. Each organisation has its own narrative, characterised by mergers and acquisitions, restructures, cultural change and innovation - the cumulation of years, if not decades of operation; that same organisation is subject to a set of external forces which are continuously evolving such as rising competition levels, maturing technology, shifting regulation and economic instability, all of which bring different pressures and demands.

Then there are the the clients I speak to, the individuals that typically sit in the middle of all this. These are the people tasked with making sense of the markets and categories their employer operates in, trying to reconcile their organisation’s objectives (which are influenced by all that history) with their own personal goals and measures of success.

Understanding and accounting for this diverse set of factors is crucial in determining the success of any project, and critically, is often overlooked in in the rush to recommend a pre-packaged approach or product. Maintaining knowledge of an organisation's story, their markets and their view of the world demonstrates both your commitment to the relationship and helps inform the design of the next piece of work. Additionally, knowing something about your client's story is extremely valuable at the start of a project - their motivations as an individual, where they seek meaning and purpose, their story. All of this sets the context for the request and what the parameters for success are.

This last part is critical - going back to those personal goals and measures of success mentioned above. I recently saw a presentation from Gideon Wilkins from McCann Central, where he referred to a study of B2B buyers he had conducted, which showed personal payoffs are twice as motivating as business outcomes when buyers are considering a new B2B deal. This is where additional value comes from, because understanding more about what your client wants to personally achieve should shape what you recommend. Whether it’s creating an impact in the boardroom by presenting a new view of the customer, or driving up pipeline conversion to demonstrate how well sales and marketing can work together, or quantifying the impact of a marketing campaign to boost next year’s budget, these valid, more personal motivations (which in turn support the loftier objectives of their organisation) should be captured to create the impact our clients really need.

So dig a little deeper to find out more about the story, both for the organisation and the individual you're working for, to deliver something with real impact.

Empowering the Agents of Change

Why marketers are Agents of Change

I like to think of the clients I work with as Agents of Change – they are the people tasked with delivering the big initiatives that alter the way the market thinks about their brand, its products and its pricing. They are evangelists for their employer and their brand, but they must also ensure an accurate and objective view of the customer is integrated into their decision making.

Reconciling the two forces of what the company wants and what the customer wants remains an eternal challenge, and marketers are the people who have to do it. On the one hand, companies want to be able to justify higher prices, simpler product ranges or lower-cost customer interfaces; on the other, customers want familiar brands, services which are easy to buy and access, and of course, lower prices.

These are all valid strategic levers which marketers can recommend pulling to either boost profitability or drive sales growth, but if you pull too hard on any of them in the short term without knowing the likely customer response, don’t expect to see a good outcome in the long term.

Accounting for external conditions and internal constraints

Added to this, the marketers I work with also face continually evolving supply-side environments, and this is especially the case in software and technology services. The barriers to entry are relatively low compared to other categories (think automotive or pharmaceutical), with a large pool of skilled developers available, easy to access open-source ecosystems on which to build new services, and application marketplaces that offer global reach. There are literally hundreds of emerging brands across sub-categories (e.g. productivity, ERP, CRM, etc), snapping at the leaders’ heels for market share, each with their own unique take on what the market needs.

I have nothing but respect for the people and teams trying to make decisions about marketing strategy and tactics in this environment, especially when budgets remain under pressure [see here]. These are the dynamics for people like me to understand when I start engaging with clients.

The questions to ask

In my last thought piece [see here], I discussed the value of the knowing the story (both the organisation’s and the client themselves) and this remains a critical part of delivering impactful work. But, from a client’s perspective, asking the right questions when you start working with an insights provider allows you to both quickly define the scope of work and identify what kind of changes you really need to make for your organisation’s benefit.

The 3 key questions I would suggest asking at this point are: Who is my buyer? What do I want my brand to represent? And how do we get there? This is an intuitive flow from defining your customer or ICP, reflecting that profile in what your brand stands for and offers, and then developing the strategy and tactics that will allow you to deliver that desired brand experience and offer.

I love getting deep into this stuff with clients when kicking off a project, and it was reassuring to see customer insights as coming out top as the most in-demand quality for B2B marketers in a recent survey [see here]. Ultimately though, this is all about empowering the clients who have to come up with the ideas, manage the risk, and make the tough calls.....the Agents of Change.

The missed opportunity for B2B Technology Advertising

A strong sense of Deja Vu

Walk around the exhibitor stands at any B2B technology conference or spend some time looking at advertising from B2B technology brands (as I’ve been recently), and you’ll start to get a strong sense of déjà vu: heavy focus on features, functions and capabilities, and a sense of urgency to do something about the latest tech trend or fall behind the competition. Why is this? I get it, technology is intrinsically about solving problems, making running businesses easier, better, faster or cheaper and as a result, more profitable, so it makes sense to talk about what your company’s products can do to help your customers achieve these things. However, when everybody is saying the same thing in the same way, you tend to forget what makes any of the brands different from each other, and why you would buy from one vs. another.

The challenge of differentiating when products are so similar

As an example, the data centre category (which was the focus of one of the events I went to recently) has been around for a while but is in very good health. It’s forecast by some analysts to double in value by 2030, largely driven by the considerable demands of cloud computing and AI. You can tell a category is doing well when companies supplying associated products, like HVAC, data cabling, lighting and even the hinges for the cabinet doors are peddling their wares at the same event as the brands in the main category. So, that’s a great place to be for the brands operating in this space, but as a layperson walking around the exhibition floor and talking to some of these companies, you’d be hard pressed to understand what really makes them different from each other, and why one company’s data centre, or data cable or cabinet hinge is better than another’s.

Recognising there is a broader audience of buyers

So why focus so much on the technical benefits when they’re all pretty similar, regardless of who’s selling them? I should acknowledge these conferences are partly geared towards technical buyers, people who understand the subtle differences in specifications and capabilities and what impact that might have, but what about the broader audience of buyers and those who influence buying? From research I’ve conducted recently among buyers of B2B technology, depending on the category, 30-40% of decision makers (those with sole or joint responsibility for buying technology) are not in “technical” roles. They’re in Procurement, Finance or C-Suite roles. This becomes more of an issue when you look at digital advertising, where you still see a lot of the same focus on technical capabilities.

Similar looking ads make it more difficult to stand out

There’s also the format and content of the digital ads. I must have looked through hundreds of LinkedIn ads from dozens of B2B technology brands over the last few weeks (mainly for an image evaluation experiment I’m doing using AI, more on that in my next post). Several of the brands I’ve looked at stand out and they’re clearly thinking about how to engage their audience, but the vast majority of the ads are hard work. Text-heavy, obscure technical images and primarily oriented to the bottom of the funnel. What about something different? Humour? Engaging visuals or animations? How about showing people? These are all effective in generating recall, and would help engage the audience, especially those in non-technical roles.

Recognising and appealing to the emotions that enable engagement and memorability

Going back to the point about selling to non-technical buyers, these people, like any other buyer are influenced by a myriad of other factors when considering brands. So, what about using the ads as an opportunity to generate feelings of trust, warmth, safety, ambition, success or protection, all of which would better position the brand in the mind of the broader base of buyers, many of whom have the final say on which provider to use?

It's a perspective that’s shared by the LinkedIn B2B Institute via a Marketing Week article which coincidentally arrived in my inbox today. While it’s referring to the wider scope of B2B Marketing, there’s a couple of very relevant quotes in there to consider: “B2B marketers, perhaps more than any those in other sector, need to make sure they are developing creative that sells”..and..”It is essential for marketers to develop a palette of distinctive brand assets – logos, fonts, colours, characters, jingles, and more – to build the effectiveness of your creative.”

The greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal

I’ll be sharing insights from the LinkedIn ad analysis I mentioned above in my next post, but perhaps a good way to finish is with some provocative words from Mad Men’s Don Draper (which I share with tongue in cheek), which encapsulate how marketers could be thinking about how to promote their B2B technology products: “This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want.”

Is B2B Technology Advertising Ready to Take the (Creative) Leap of Faith?!

A common theme in B2B advertising is that it lacks the same licence to entertain as consumer advertising. The logic is that the audience has different priorities, the decision-making processes are different, and brands can’t appear to be frivolous or provocative when talking about something as dutiful as Productivity Software or Managed IT services. Some of that’s true but playing it safe with creatives just leads to a disengaged audience and swathes of ads which look very similar. So how is all this playing out in the world of B2B Technology advertising, and are B2B Tech brands ready, like Indiana Jones when he stepped out into the void in The Last Crusade, to take the leap of faith.

Recognition that things could be better and a desire to do things differently in B2B advertising

Looking at the situation more broadly, there is evidence of frustration among B2B marketers that content strategies are not working as well as they should. In a recent survey from The Content Marketing Institute, nearly 7 in 10 B2B Marketers said their content strategy was either moderately or not very effective. This has been echoed in studies conducted by LinkedIn with its research partners, for example, their work with System1 from 2021, which found 75% of B2B ads were ineffective. More recently, research conducted by LinkedIn with Ipsos, unearthed some interesting insights about the use of creativity in B2B advertising:

Just under 9 in 10 CMOs are advocating for bolder, more creative campaigns
2 in 3 are increasing budgets for brand building efforts
6 in 10 say they see more brand engagement coming from outstanding creative.

They also tested a range of B2B ads among B2B decision makers and found:

Most are underwhelmed by the ads they see
2 in 3 say ads lack humour or emotional appeal
6 in 10 say ads lack character connection and are not relatable
Decision makers are 40% more likely to consider a B2B brand if its ads are seen as creative.

Observing the same trends in B2B Technology advertising

With this context, at Lucent Insights, we recently evaluated the extent to which some of these trends are borne out by B2B Technology advertising on LinkedIn. We sourced 300 single image ads from 24 well-known, global B2B Technology brands from LinkedIn campaigns which were live in Q1 2025. To be clear, this was not about testing the reaction to the ads with an audience but classifying the ads into different categories. The ads all ran in English-speaking markets. We used AI (ChatGPT) to do visual analysis of each ad (more on that below) but manually validated all the classifications it made.

So, what were we looking for? Firstly, who was the target audience – technical or general buyers? In a previous post I mentioned the importance of appealing to a broader audience given the role of other job roles in decision making. Secondly, did the ads have a bottom of the funnel/ activation focus, or top of the funnel/ brand building focus? The recommendation is something close to 40% on activation and 60% on brand building. Thirdly, is there a person present in the ad? As mentioned above, connecting with a character and being relatable matter to the audience, so seeing people in ads can help with that. Finally, is there any humour in the ad? Humour can help engage the audience and make an emotional connection. So, what did we find?

6 in 10 of the ads were oriented towards technical buyers. This was based on the ads using technical vocabulary, referencing technical benefits and having a more product than brand oriented message.
6 in 10 had a bottom of the funnel/ activation focus. This was based on the ads containing offers of trials or demos, focusing on product benefits, and not containing brand-level messaging more aligned with broader customer needs or priorities.
Just under 1 in 2 had a person present. This was straightforward, so was there a person visible in some part of the ad.
Less than 1 in 20 contained humour (only 9 ads out of a 300). Straightforward again, so was there something irreverent, tongue in cheek or plain funny about the ad.

More work to do on creatives to connect with the audience of buyers

Clearly, LinkedIn is not the only channel B2B brands can use, and many of them will be using different ad formats in different channels (Outdoor, SERP, Static Display, Video and in some cases TV). There are also some great examples of B2B Technology brands being brave and innovative with their ads – think Rockstar from Workday and The Big Meeting from Slack.

Nonetheless, based on research we’ve previously done, LinkedIn tends to capture most of the ad recognition for multi-channel digital B2B campaigns which include it. As such, most of the B2B Tech brand creatives we evaluated missed the opportunity to engage the full audience of buyers and support longer term brand growth.

It’s tough to cut through the noise with B2B ads but we see 3 clear steps to maximise their impact: identify the emerging use cases and unmet needs which will drive future buying intent; develop associated messaging and positioning and integrate these into creatives which engage (increasingly with humour and a human connection); measure the effectiveness of related campaigns and the impact on brand performance – learn what works and repeat.

PS. Our experience using AI to categorise these ads was mixed. After some research into the best tool to use, we chose ChatGPT (-4o version). It struggled with the high volume of ad images, and we had to resort to batch processing. We also had to provide a lot of additional context to try and train the tool, so what classified an ad as being for technical buyers, what classified an ad as brand building in nature, etc. It correctly classified about half the ads, so clearly, we had to manually check all of them to make sure the final outputs were correct. An interesting experience, and something of a learning curve, but the tools are getting better and no doubt the proportion of images it can correctly analyse and categorise is going to improve over time.