Is Pepsi ok?

If you’ve ever ordered a Coke in a pub or bar, you’ll know the line.

"Sorry, we don’t have Coke… is Pepsi ok?"

It’s one of those phrases that instantly implies a hierarchy. Coca-Cola is the thing you asked for. Pepsi is the substitute. The fallback. The “next best”.

But here’s the funny thing: in blind taste tests, Pepsi often wins. The famous Pepsi Challenge experiments — first run in the 1970s and repeated many times since — regularly found that people preferred the taste of Pepsi when they didn’t know which brand they were drinking.

And yet culturally, Coke still carries the prestige.

I sometimes think B2B marketing sits in exactly the same place compared to B2C marketing.

It’s treated like the Pepsi of the marketing world.

When marketing gets celebrated, it’s almost always B2C. The big brand films. The Super Bowl ads. The emotional storytelling.

Meanwhile B2B marketers are sometimes introduced with a slightly apologetic tone, as if to say:

"Yes, I’m in marketing… but it’s B2B."

As though it’s the lesser version of the craft.

I’d argue the opposite.

B2B marketing is often the more complex, more nuanced, and frankly more interesting discipline.

Think about the variables.

In B2C, you might be selling products that cost £5, £50 or £500 to millions of people. The buyer is usually the user. The purchase journey can be minutes, days or weeks.

In B2B, the range is enormous.

You could be marketing:

• a £10/month SaaS tool

• a £50,000 piece of manufacturing equipment

• a £1m+ enterprise platform

• a niche consulting service bought by five companies in the world

The sales cycles might be two weeks or two years.

The buying group might be one person or fifteen.

The industry context might be finance, engineering, healthcare, logistics, energy, agriculture, software or aerospace — each with its own language, regulations and culture.

And then there’s the emotional weight of the decision.

We often pretend B2B purchases are purely rational.

They aren’t.

In fact, they’re deeply emotional.

When you buy something as a consumer, you’re spending your own money. If you make a bad choice, the consequences are usually small. Maybe you bought the wrong headphones or the wrong holiday.

Annoying? Yes. Career-limiting? Not really.

In B2B, you’re spending your company’s money.

Whether that’s £10 or £1m, the stakes feel different.

Choose the wrong supplier, the wrong platform, the wrong partner — and it can have real consequences:

• budgets wasted

• projects failing

• reputations damaged

• sometimes even careers derailed

So every B2B purchase contains an emotional calculation:

"Will this decision make me look smart… or stupid?"

That’s a far more complicated marketing environment than convincing someone to try a new soft drink.

Which is why I’ve always found the “Pepsi problem” around B2B marketing slightly odd.

Because when you really look at it, B2B isn’t the lesser version of marketing.

If anything, it’s the stronger flavour.

More variables. More stakeholders. More pressure. More complexity.

Maybe we’ve just been letting B2C have the Coca-Cola branding for too long.

So the next time someone says:

"Oh, you’re in marketing… what kind?"

And you answer B2B.

Don’t treat it like the substitute.

Treat it like the drink that wins the taste test. Be proud, b2bproud