By Paul Coxhill, COO, LIONS & President, LIONS Intelligence and David Tiltman, Chief Content & Customer Officer, WARC
This article was originally published in the Brand Finance Global Most Valuable B2B Brands Index 2025
At WARC, we’ve been tracking – and contributing to – the growing sophistication of B2B marketing theory over the past decade.
While there is always more to learn, we now have a reasonable set of mental frameworks, backed by data, that are helping B2B marketers raise their game. The big message here has been that B2B and B2C are much closer than previously assumed – and that strong brands command.
The basis of this emerging ‘best practice’ can be summarised as follows:
- Most potential customers are not in-market most of the time (the famous ‘95/5 rule’ first put forward by Ehrenberg Bass Institute and LinkedIn).
- When potential customers do enter the market, they favour brands they are already familiar with (the so-called ‘day one consideration set’).
- That means marketing communications has two jobs: nudging people who are currently in-market to choose a product or service; and making the (much bigger) set of potential category buyers more predisposed to those products or services over time.
- Plus, there is a potential third ‘job’ that is specific to B2B, in that a strong, trusted brand can help secure the tacit approval of so-called ‘hidden buyers’ – executives outside the buying team who nevertheless wield some influence (this research, from LinkedIn and Bain, was featured as one of WARC’s ‘Ideas of the Year’ for 2024).
This thinking, alongside the patient advocacy of the likes of LinkedIn and Stein IAS, has led to a fresh focus on creativity and brand-building within B2B.
The comments of Ed Birth, head of brand marketing at Hiscox UK, in a recent interview by WARC’s sister company Contagious, show these mental models in action.
"One of the traps with B2B is you think, because it’s business, that suddenly it becomes a high-interest purchase. But all the customer insight we’ve seen says that is not true… The job for comms is priming. To be the name that’s top of mind for the one day that you are in the category, that’s why we show up quite like a B2C brand."
This shift is something the team at LIONS are keen to champion – both in creativity (through the Creative B2B Lion in Cannes) and in effectiveness (through WARC and Effie award schemes).
And it’s fair to say there is still work to do here. In the B2B category of the latest round of the global WARC Awards for Effectiveness, just two silvers and two bronzes were awarded. In the Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions last year, just one clearly B2B idea scored metal (a bronze for a Workday campaign).
It seems, then, there is still a gap between theory and practice when it comes to building creative campaigns that drive big results. So, what can CMOs in the B2B space do to start to meet this challenge?
The recent WARC report, The Multiplier Effect, focused on the case for brand-building as part of an advertising portfolio, alongside so-called ‘performance’ techniques. That study, built with data from a range of partners, identified a crucial blocker to breakthrough work: silos.
Resolving internal barriers matters if CMOs are to move the needle in favour of creative brand-building. CMOs need to tackle issues like:
- Teams divided into ‘brand’ and ‘performance’ units, each with different objectives and metrics (in B2B, this may be compounded by marketing’s relationship with a separate sales team).
- Marketing communications divided between brand and performance investment (with brand-building always the ‘nice to have’).
- Siloed campaign assets, with ‘brand campaigns’ seen as separate to revenue-driving performance work.
We argued that CMOs think in terms of integrated creative ‘platforms’ – ideas big enough to be used across different asset types. Brand and performance ads then start to reinforce each other, and consumers start to ‘join the dots’ between different touchpoints – this is when the ‘multiplier effect’ kicks in. It sounds simple, but getting to that place in a modern business environment can be fiendishly difficult.
The interesting finding was that this approach could take many forms. In the report we used an example from Zen Business, which took what could have been a dull promotional offer – a giveaway of basic business set-up services – and turned it into a brand-building moment. The company focused a ‘free LLC’ promotion on mothers who had fallen out of the workforce during COVID-19. The initiative saw record results for the company, outperforming a previous ‘brand’ campaign that had run solo. The key was understanding how a performance moment could take on emotional significance that was true to the brand, then doubling down on that idea once momentum started to build.
As Michael Fanuele, the CMO behind that work, told the WARC podcast: “It was the same exact offer that our competitors were putting into the market – ‘free’. But we gave it some meaning, some brand depth and texture… And it did both that ‘top of the funnel’ job of building distinction and interest and awareness, but boy did it also do the job of getting us real flesh-and-blood customers who would go on to be extremely valuable.”
The theory, then, should not be seen as a straitjacket for creativity, or a one-size-fits-all playbook. The challenge – but also, the opportunity – for B2B brands is to find their own take on it and deliver their own multiplier effect.
