B2B Strategy Guided by B2P (Business-to-People)

We use a human-first, business-to-people perspective because every B2B decision starts with a person, and every meaningful conversion stems from a prior meaningful connection. Keeping that lens in play grounds your brand in real behavior and gives it the strength to grow.

Conventional B2B marketing relies almost exclusively on capturing existing demand of buyers already in the market. Marketers default to rational campaigns emphasizing product features, benefits or pricing to produce immediate sales. Efficient, yes, but short-sighted. 

Research shows that only 5% of target customers are actively in-market at any given time.¹ As brands compete for these limited prospects, demand is quickly exhausted, acquisition costs rise, differentiation erodes and growth plateaus. Meanwhile, the remaining 95% of potential buyers go largely ignored. As efficient as performance marketing is, it can only harvest demand where it already exists—it cannot create it on its own.

Effective B2B marketing must therefore operate in both the short-term and the long-term: capturing existing demand today and building future demand for tomorrow. The latter is the role of brand marketing, and this is where a human-first approach matters most.

Brand marketing builds familiarity, meaning and affinity across all category buyers, not just tightly targeted to the 5% in-market today. These campaigns engage emotionally and memorably, leveraging high-quality creative to communicate a brand’s positioning or beliefs. The result is increased mental availability and positive associations that ensure the brand is well remembered when the purchase decision arises. 

Whereas performance marketing excels at driving immediate sales, brand marketing excels at delivering larger, long-term business outcomes such as increased market share, pricing power, loyalty, trust, differentiation and awareness. In fact, long-term brand campaigns not only achieve higher sales growth than short-term performance campaigns, they are three times more likely to generate profitable growth.²

The value of a B2P approach is evident in modern buying behavior. Millennial and Gen Z buyers are more emotionally driven, independent and anonymous than past generations. They value meaning over specs, trust their instincts and often stay under the radar until they’re ready to act. By the time they signal intent, 41% have already chosen a vendor and 92% have a shortlist.³ Without a prior connection, the sale is already lost.

Effective B2B marketing recognizes that most buyers spend far more time out of the market than in it and are therefore more influenced by emotional, creative messages than by hard sales pitches. Yet, standard practice still prioritizes short-term sales with quickly decaying effects over long-term brand building. The result is mediocre growth. 

A human-first approach takes human truths into account, balancing short-term performance with long-term investment. By aligning how people actually arrive at purchase decisions over time, brands can capture immediate results today while also building a pipeline for tomorrow. Connect before you convert. Inspire before you persuade. That’s the power of business-to-people marketing.

Sources:
¹ Professor John Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, 2021; WARC, 2025
² Peter Field and Les Binet, IPA, 2013-2023³ Forrester Research, The State of Business Buying, 2024
³ Forrester Research, The State of Business Buying, 2024