The B2C Agency in a B2B Suit

We have all been there.

You ask: "Do you have B2B experience?"

They reply with a B2C case study, then tell you it is basically the same thing.

Or you read a B2B thought piece, only to discover it was written by an advertising agency that has suddenly decided B2B is the new sunny upland they will dominate in twelve months' time.

I have been on both sides of this now. I have hired agencies as a Group CMO with a budget to protect, and I sell into that same room as a fractional CMO. The pattern has not changed. If anything it has got worse, because the tools that used to expose a shallow supplier now disguise one.

The thing they get wrong is not tactics

Let me be fair for a moment, because the point is not that consumer marketers are less capable. Some of the best marketers I know came up in B2C, and a fresh perspective on a stale category is often exactly what a B2B business needs.

The problem is not craft. It is the model of how a decision gets made.

In consumer marketing, you are largely persuading one person to make one choice, often quickly, often emotionally, with a low cost of being wrong. The feedback loop is fast. The measurement is relatively honest. If it works, you see it.

In B2B, you are persuading a committee of between six and twelve people, most of whom you will never speak to, over a period of months, where the dominant emotion is not desire but career risk. Nobody in that room is trying to be delighted. They are trying not to be blamed. The person who champions you internally has to defend that choice to a finance director, a legal team, an incumbent supplier's account manager, and a colleague who preferred someone else.

Your marketing is not there to make them want you. It is there to make them defensible.

That single difference reorders everything. It changes what content is for, what brand is for, what the website is for, and what a lead actually means. An agency that has not internalised it will produce work that is beautiful, well argued, and completely useless in the meeting where the decision actually happens.

The confidence problem

Here is what has changed, and it is the reason this matters more now than it did two years ago.

It used to be that a supplier who did not understand B2B revealed it in about four minutes of writing. The proposal was thin. The language was consumer inflected. The case studies did not survive a follow-up question.

That signal is gone. Anyone can now produce a proposal that sounds fluent in complex buying committees, procurement cycles and multi-stakeholder attribution. Fluency has become free. Which means the written pitch, the credentials deck and the LinkedIn thought leadership no longer tell you anything about whether the people behind them have ever actually operated in your world.

The volume of outbound has made this worse. I get sequences every week from firms who have clearly never sold to a buying committee in their lives, written in language so confident it took me a while to work out there was nothing underneath it.

We used to be able to read competence. Now we have to test it.

What B2B marketers are actually up against

Talk to enough B2B marketing leaders and the same feelings come up.

Isolated. At odds with the wider marketing discourse. Confused about why recruiters and influencers have become the loudest voices in B2B. Unimpressed by people who have never run a marketing team explaining how to run marketing teams.

That is not bitterness. It is a rational response to an industry conversation that mostly is not about us. The mainstream marketing discourse is built on consumer case studies, consumer measurement, and consumer timescales, then applied to a discipline where none of the underlying conditions hold.

The gritty, complex, interwoven, underfunded, wildly inventive version of marketing that most of us actually live in does not get written about much, because it does not photograph well.

What to do about it

Not much, at the level of the industry. This is not a problem I can fix by complaining about it, and neither can you.

What you can do is change how you buy.

Stop treating a good pitch as evidence. Stop accepting a consumer case study with a B2B framing bolted on. Ask what the buying committee looked like in their last engagement, who the internal champion was, and what that champion needed in order to win the argument. If they cannot answer that, they have not been in the room.

And ask them what they think B2B actually requires that consumer marketing does not. Not as a trick question. As the basic entry test.

If the answer is "longer sales cycles," they have read about it.

If the answer starts with the buying committee and career risk, they have lived it.