5 B2B brand myths that could be holding your business back

There’s a wealth of assumptions in B2B marketing that sounds perfectly reasonable when you take them at face value.

Your customers know what you do. Buyers make logical decisions. Professional brands must sound corporate. More awareness means more opportunities. And once the rebrand is launched, the hard work is done.

The real problem is that these assumptions can make it much harder for a good business to communicate its value to potential customers.

Here are five B2B brand myths we think need to be challenged.

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Myth 1: “Our customers know what we do.”

This might be true for your existing customers. They’ve spent time working with your team, they’ve experienced the things that make your business different. Your next customer hasn’t got that knowledge.

They’re seeing you alongside competitors, recommendations, endless search results and a growing list of other options competing for their attention. And they’re unlikely to invest the same amount of time working out what makes your business special. This is where familiarity can become a blind spot.

When you’re living and breathing a business every day, certain things become obvious. You become fluent in internal language; your services get described in shorthand. The things that make your offer unique can become so familiar that nobody thinks to explain them anymore.

But in B2B, clarity carries weight. A potential customer should be able to quickly understand what you do, who you do it for, and why choosing you will make their problems go away.

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Myth 2: “B2B buyers are rational.”

B2B buying decisions often include procurement processes, budgets, businesses cases and more people quietly evaluating the risks than you can imagine. But those people making the decisions are still people. And people don’t make decisions purely based on rational facts alone.

They want to feel confident that they’re making the right decision. They want to trust and believe in the people that they’ll be working with. They want reassurance that the decision they’re making isn’t going to create a big issue for them to solve six months down the line. That means familiarity, credibility, trust and preference all play a part.

There might be two businesses that look equally capable on paper, but one feels like the safer choice, or the more experienced choice, or simply the business the buyer understands and remembers. That’s brand at work.

Strong B2B brands don’t replace rational decision-making; they help to shape the way those rational factors are interpreted. They give potential customers confidence before the sales conversation has even started.

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Myth 3: “We need to sound more professional.”

In the world of B2B, “professional” sometimes becomes code for saying not a lot in as many words as humanly possible.

Businesses fall into the trap of talking about delivering innovative solutions, driving excellence, creating value and leveraging expertise. None of these are technically wrong, the problem is that everyone else is saying the same things. Professional doesn’t have to mean formal, complicated or unnecessarily stuffed full of jargon. In fact, clarity often feels more confident.

Strong businesses tend to communicate in a way that makes complex things easier to understand. They know what they want to say, and they know who they’re saying it to and why that matters.

That doesn’t mean that every B2B brand needs to become informal or playful like Monzo Bank. The tone of voice should still absolutely reflect the business; its customers and the overall context it’s operating in. But sounding credible and sounding human shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. Sometimes the most professional thing you can do is just say what you mean.

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Myth 4: “We just need more awareness.”

Of course, being known is useful. Being known for the right thing is far more valuable. It’s always easy to focus on visibility: more followers, more impressions, more website traffic, just more people seeing the brand. But awareness alone doesn’t necessarily create demand.

If someone recognises your name, but doesn’t understand what you do, why you’re different to competitors, or why they should even care – that awareness has very limited commercial value.

The stronger questions is: what do we want people to think when they hear our name?

This where your positioning becomes important. Effective marketing doesn’t just make more people aware of the business; it also creates an association between your business and something that your potential customers value.

That could be your particular expertise, a distinctive methodology, a category you want to carve out a niche in, or a problem you’re especially well equipped to solve. The goal shouldn’t be to become more visible. It’s to become more relevant, memorable and easier to choose.

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Myth 5: “Once the rebrand launches, the job is done.”

This is where a lot of people get wrapped up in the big shiny launch and think they’ve crossed the finish line. Actually, this is where you need to jump out of the blocks and hit the ground running doing the real work.

You can develop a strong and clear value proposition, create a brilliant visual identity and launch a new website – but the value comes from what happens next.

• How is the brand going to show up in campaigns?
• How are the sales or new business team going to use it?
• Are your internal teams confident when communicating your proposition?
• Is the brand helping you to build customer preference over time?

Your brand should be an active part of how your business grows and develops; not simply something to be unveiled, celebrated for a week and then left to gather dust.

This is why we think about brand as a journey. Clarifying what makes the business valuable is only one leg - building your identity around that value is the next. But then you need to put it to work – launch it, activate it, test it, learn from it and grow.

Ultimately, a successful rebrand isn’t defined by how polished everything looks on launch day. It’s defined by what your brand helps potential customers achieve afterwards.

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Good businesses shouldn’t be difficult to choose.

Most strong and ambitious B2B businesses already have lots of value locked up inside them. The expertise and experience are there, and the people, processes and proof points are there.

The challenge is making the value understandable for potential customers - that’s what a strong brand can help you do. It’s not simply there to make you look better, it’s not there to just get you noticed. It’s there to do the heavy lifting and help the right customers understand what makes your business valuable, build a preference around it, and make choosing you the obvious choice.

If your brand is putting barriers between you and potential customers, we can help you unlock your brand's value. Let’s talk.