The B2B Marketer's B2C Comparison Problem

Pick up almost any marketing book. Scroll through a marketing blog. Attend a general marketing conference. Chances are that the examples will be Nike, Coca-Cola, Apple, or Amazon. The frameworks will all be built on consumer behaviour. The case studies will feature products you can hold in your hand or buy on the high street.

If you work in B2B marketing, you have spent your career translating.

Search for it and you will find the comparison problem is alive and well with content from Forbes; “What B2B Marketers Can Learn From B2C Giants,” MarketingProfs sharing what “B2B marketers Can Learn from B2C Marketing Strategies,” and podcasts like B2B Better with an episode titled, “How to Apply D2C Best Practices to Your B2B Marketing Strategy”.

B2B marketing is often treated as a niche; but it isn’t one. According to B2B Nations Institute Research approximately 48% of total UK output is sold from one organisation to another. In 2023, the UK’s B2B economy generated a trade surplus £118 billion against a consumer facing deficit of approximately £150 billion.

The problem isn’t that B2B is small or unimportant. It is what happens by default, in the mainstream marketing content everyone meets first, long before anyone goes looking for anything B2B-specific.

What 100 B2B marketers told me

Earlier this year, I surveyed 100 B2B marketers across the UK. The final two questions were open-ended: what do you enjoy most about working in B2B marketing, and if you could change one thing about it, what would it be?

Fourteen people brought up B2C, entirely unprompted. Some used it as something to aspire to: “I would make it less formal and corporate, and more human and fun like the B2C,” wrote one respondent. Others used it as something to push back against: “I enjoy the more direct nature and understanding business needs, compared to trying to meet the whims of B2C, which can be much more challenging and flippant,” wrote another. The question didn’t ask for a B2B/B2C comparison — but they reached for it anyway.

A few other answers caught the same tension. One respondent’s frustration was structural rather than emotional: “Upper management often insists that we emulate high profile B2C companies as they are personally impressed by their approach, however this doesn’t always translate well to B2B — e.g. trying to use popular influencers to promote industrial products to a professional audience does not work well.” Another framed it as an equal viewing issue: “Seeing it more equally to B2C — after all, the decision makers are still human.” And one respondent (thank you!) flipped the comparison into a point of pride: “Strategic thinking and intellectual challenge play to my strengths and personality more than B2C marketing.”

It is not only marketers who are translating

Do B2C marketers sit in sessions built around B2B examples and have to mentally reverse-engineer the lessons? Do they read articles about long sales cycles, buying committees, or procurement processes and wonder what it means for their work? I think not.

There is a key reason why I believe the comparison issue keeps surfacing. As consumers, we grow up with B2C brands. We have decades of first-hand experience with Nike, Coca-Cola, Apple, Amazon; we are the customer, the end-user, the target. Those names are woven into our daily lives long before anyone puts “marketing” in our job title.

B2B is different. Depending on your sector, you may never be the customer or end-user of what your company sells. The brand names are likely to be completely unfamiliar.

Similarly, our customers are drawing on their own B2C experience as an unconscious reference point, whether or not it fits the context they are actually in.

I see this need for translation within industry training too. When I run social media sessions, most people’s mental model of a platform comes from personal use — Facebook for keeping up with friends and family, Instagram for travel pictures. Before we can talk about using that same platform to support their job, I have to help them translate that mindset: different audience, different intent, different measure of success.

Why does it matter?

It matters because the translation work has a real cost, and it is not just wasted time. When leadership pushes for a campaign because it worked for a B2C brand they personally admire, when a social platform gets adopted because a decision-maker likes it personally or their kids are on it, it does not stay theoretical — it starts steering budgets and briefs.

B2B marketing operates within a fundamentally different set of conditions. A deal can move through months of approvals and more than one decision-maker who never expected to be signing off on marketing spend. Relationships carry disproportionate weight. Rational and emotional factors interact in ways that differ from impulse B2C purchasing. The metrics, the channels, the creative approach, the content strategy — all of it requires different thinking, not just adjusted thinking.

When the examples and frameworks you are given do not match the reality you are working in, you do not just waste time translating. You risk misapplying ideas that were never designed for your context in the first place. Picture a 24-hour flash-sale email landing in the inbox of someone whose purchase needs four approvals and a procurement process spanning months - the urgency does not just fail to land, it looks completely out of place!

What this really means

The B2B marketing profession does not need to prove its worth against B2C.

Consumer brands are visible. B2B brands tend not to be, unless you happen to work in the sector. That asymmetry shapes what gets taught, what gets written about, and what gets celebrated.

But visibility is not the same as importance.

B2B marketers are navigating some of the most complex commercial environments in existence: multi-stakeholder decisions, long-horizon relationships, accountability to revenue in ways that are often more direct than consumer marketing allows. That deserves its own intellectual infrastructure — its own events, its own frameworks, its own canon of examples.

The good news is that infrastructure is being built — there are good B2B-specific events, books, and communities out there if you go looking for them, and more arriving all the time. The question is whether enough B2B marketers choose to invest in it, rather than continuing to adapt lessons from a world that was never built with them in mind.

So perhaps the more useful question for those of us in B2B is not how to close that gap. It is why we keep making the comparisons in the first place. Next time a consumer brand gets held up as the standard, it might be worth asking: is this actually the right comparison — or just the most visible one?

Back to the research: what the other answers were actually about

I asked: ‘What do you enjoy most about working in B2B marketing’, and ‘if you could change one thing about it, what would it be’? Strip out the direct B2C references and a much more specific, much more B2B picture emerges — one that has nothing to do with feeling like the understudy to consumer marketing.

On the enjoyment side, the two things mentioned most often were the variety and constant learning the role demands, and the creative and content work itself. Close behind was the analytical and strategic thinking B2B marketing requires — several people specifically framed this as something that suits them better than a more emotion-led discipline would. Relationship-building came up again and again too, usually described in the language of partnership and trust built over time, not a single transaction. As one respondent put it, the job means being treated as “a trusted advisor and expert,” not just a supplier.

On the frustration side, the most common answer by some distance was better alignment and closer working relationships with sales — shared insight, less siloed communication, fewer promises marketing is left to make good on. Close behind that: the pace. Long buying cycles, slow approval processes, and a general wish to “keep up with opportunities.” A recurring third theme was being underestimated as a discipline — “everyone thinks they’re a marketer,” as one person summed it up, with input and second-guessing from people who, in their words, “don’t have a clue.” Budgets, jargon, and internal politics rounded out the list.