Building brand for a buyer who doesn’t think they care

What B2B brand work actually rests on

Five conditions, well-evidenced across recent B2B effectiveness research: Category creation or category clarification. Many B2B brands operate in young or unclear categories. The brand work often starts with naming the category itself, defining what kind of solution this is, and helping the buyer understand where it sits. Mental availability at low-frequency moments. B2B buyers purchase infrequently. The brand has to be present in memory the moment a tender opens or a problem becomes acute, which may happen once every three to five years per buyer. Trust as a structural requirement. B2B purchases are higher-stakes than B2C. The buyer is putting their company's data, infrastructure, or compliance posture in your hands. Trust is the substrate everything else rests on. Distinctive assets that work in technical channels. Visual codes, narrative consistency, recognisable language. These work harder in B2B because the buyer encounters the brand across analyst reports, vendor lists, conferences, and procurement decks, not only in marketing. Investment ratio between brand and demand generation. Binet and Field's B2B research with LinkedIn places the long-term optimal split close to half brand-building and half activation, with brand carrying the larger share at the longest time horizons. Most B2B companies invest closer to 5% brand and 95%demand generation. The opportunity is structural.

What the discipline looks like in operation

Five practices the strongest B2B brands hold consistently: Name the category, then own a position inside it. Don't argue that the product is "different." Argue that the category has a structure, and you sit at a specific place within it. Build distinctive assets that survive technical contexts. Visual identity that works in a procurement deck, an analyst quadrant, a conference banner, and an integration page. Same codes, different channels. Communicate trust as a brand outcome, not just a feature. Security, compliance, references, customer logos. These are not only sales-enablement assets, they are brand-equity assets that compound. Invest in mental availability through low-attention channels too. LinkedIn sponsored content, podcast sponsorships, industry events. Not only SEO and conversion campaigns. Measure brand outcomes that fit the B2B sales cycle. Brand searches, share of voice in the category, inclusion rate in considered-set research, time-to-close on inbound leads.

What good B2B brand work actually requires

The most expensive mistake B2B companies make is treating brand as something they will do later, when growth allows. In categories where the buyer doesn't think they care about brand, the brand has to do its work quietly, in the spaces between marketing and the sale. It shapes the considered set before the buyer ever opens the brief. It shortens the sales cycle once the conversation begins. And during procurement, it defends pricing that pure feature comparison would erode. Done well, B2B brand work is the most invisible and the most commercially decisive form of brand investment there is.

Showcase: Smart Flows & Didomi

Two B2B companies, two extreme cases of the same dynamic. Didomi operates in privacy and consent management, a category created by regulation (GDPR, CCPA, and adjacent frameworks) and dominated by compliance-driven buyers. The category itself is structurally invisible. A successful consent platform disappears into the user experience, and a successful brand disappears into the technical stack. The brand work has to do something specific that other categories don't require. It has to make the invisible credible, the technical understandable, and the compliance-driven choice feel strategic rather than defensive. Smart Flows operates in airport passenger flow analytics, working with airports that include Paris, Munich, Geneva, Hong Kong, Seattle, and Riyadh. The buyer is even further from "thinks they care about brand": an airport operations director evaluating technology-agnostic infrastructure, often deciding on the basis of integration, deployment speed, and security posture. The category has almost no brand-led incumbents. The brand work in this kind of category becomes the discovery layer, the credibility layer, and the differentiation layer at once, because there is no consumer-marketing tradition for anyone in the category to compete against. What working on these two brands taught me is that the deeper the buyer's conviction that they "don't care about brand," the more decisive the brand work becomes. Buyers in these categories make decisions through a series of small signals over long sales cycles. The companies that win the considered set are the ones whose brand has done the persuasion before the sales process even begins. The B2B brand that arrives at the procurement meeting having already shaped how the buyer thinks about the category does not need to argue for itself. The B2B brand that hasn't done that work spends the whole sales cycle catching up.

Corporate Website

Product Video