The Differences Between B2B and B2C Branding

Both B2B and B2C involve selling to people, you need to be "easy to mind" (mental availability) and "easy to find" (physical availability), but the market dynamics are different, and those differences have a big impact.

1. Purchase Frequency

In B2B, companies don’t switch vendors often— if it's a once-in-5-years cycle, only 5% of the market is buying in any given quarter (95:5 rule from Professor John Dawes).

Among these in-market buyers, most prefer the brands they had in mind from day one. Only roughly a third end up selecting a brand that wasn’t on their original shortlist (percentages vary by study; I recommend Bain & Co study or Messy middle)

So there are three consequences:

1. Marketers don’t move buyers in-market. (B2B marketer can't just generate an immediate sale outside of this 5% pool). It takes longer to see the impact of brand campaigns on revenue. (Especially if there is a dominant player in the market, that they usually capture the majority of first-time buyers.)

2. But when they do move in-market, we should make sure our performance channels get to them.

3. To grow beyond the 1/3 of buyers who pick a brand that wasn’t initially on their mental shortlist, you must focus on out-of-market buyers.

2. Decision Process

Multiple stakeholders are involved in B2B decisions, making the process longer and more complex.

In B2B, there’s more at stake for decision-makers—they risk their political standing, promotion, or even job security. Emotion plays a role, just like in B2C, but in B2B, fear is a much bigger factor.

According to research from “The JOLT Effect,” 40-60% of potential deals today end up in “no decision.” This means the best product doesn't always win—it's the product that is easiest to agree upon.

3. Buyer Pool

The total potential buyers in B2B (category buyers) are much smaller—sometimes just a fraction of a percent of the population.

This makes targeting more challenging. On the other hand that advantage in B2B is the ability to think at the account level. You can gather insights from multiple people within the same company.

4. Deal Size Spread

B2B deals vary far more in size than B2C. You might sell to one client for $500 and another for $5M. Imagine a B2C scenario where heavy buyers have to purchase thousands of books annually to match this disparity.

5. Marketing’s Role in B2B

Marketing is not just the advertising. It shapes the product, positioning, pricing, and much more. And to do marketing you need to have power to influece the whole company. In B2B, marketing often pulls the shorter rope (check the B2B Marketing Power Problem Gartner results)

I really liked an examples from an an interview with April Dunford on positioning—if positioning is only "baked" in marketing and not aligned with sales, customer success, and product teams, it simply won’t work.

So, that was just the first question I got in the hour-long interview in the uLab podcast ??

Let me know if you’d like me to continue writing articles about the topics we discussed there :)