Are B2B Buyers As Rational As We Think?

Are B2B buyers really as rational as we think? While logic and data undoubtedly play a role in decision-making, emotions play a large part in convincing our buyers to purchase from us. In this post, we'll explore the power of emotional priming and how it can revolutionize your B2B marketing strategy.

I’ve recently been going through a B2B buying journey. I have been meeting with and selecting a range of marketing professionals to do different marketing services for myself as well as for my clients (e.g. ad distribution, email marketing, SEO etc.). And while I have been doing research and making the most rational decisions I can, I have to acknowledge that how I feel about the individual or business is a huge part of my decision making.

Buying is a risk. We can do all of the research we’d like to, but at the end of the day there’s no guaranteed safe decision. So if a business helps me feel confident in them, that’s powerful.

Have you ever heard it said before that emotions matter in B2C marketing, but not B2B?

That the B2B buyer is rational and makes purely rational decisions?

There are many studies coming out that are showing the profound effect that emotions play during the B2B buying journey and how advertising that inspires emotions sets up brands for greater long term success.

To show the importance of emotional marketing, let’s start out with the 95:5 rule.

The 95 represents the percentage of buyers that aren’t ready to buy currently. The 5 represents the percentage of buyers who are currently in the market to buy.

So much of our marketing is spent on the 5% of our potential clients who are in market right now.

The 95:5 rule encourages us to not only focus on the 5%, but make sure we’re advertising to the 95% as well.

“Why advertise to people who aren’t currently in market?”.

People don’t typically shop via searching, they shop with their memories. And they are more likely to go with a brand they are familiar with, than a brand they are not familiar with.

So the goal of advertising shouldn’t be to only stimulate a sale, but to create a memory link for your potential buyers. These memory links are consistently built and refreshed over time. So when your buyer comes into market, their memory link to your brand activates.

“If your advertising is better at building brand-relevant memories, your brand becomes more competitive.” - Professor John Dawes.

It’s one thing to get buyers to think of your brand, the further work of advertising is to help strengthen people’s preference for your brand.

Rational advertising is shown to work very well for short-term sales activation, but studies have shown that it doesn’t perform so well at long-term brand building which requires advertising to that 95% of out market buyers.

What does work? Emotions.

Emotional priming is a psychological phenomenon where exposure to one stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus, often without conscious awareness.

In advertising, this means it can shape your buyer’s perceptions and behaviours by activating certain associations in their minds about your product before they’re in market.

This B2B ad for teamwork.com is a great example of using emotions in advertising.

They play with the emotions of fear, overwhelm, and humour to create an ad that potential clients actually enjoy watching. It develops a connection with all of us who have had the pleasure of dealing with particularly demanding clients and brilliantly positions their product as not only the solution to their problem, but the solution for their fears and troubles.

Or how about this ad we produced for Yulio? We used emotions to showcase the relief that comes with how easy they have made VR presentations. We could have made an explainer video about all of the features, but this ad engages the viewer and emotionally primes the prospective client to associate Yulio with a sense of relief and ease.

One of my favourite Rory Sutherland quotes says,

“The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.”

If we are trying to connect with people based purely on appealing to their rational selves, we will be missing out on huge opportunities to influence the way they feel about our brands which has a much greater effect over the long term.

Let’s not try to make people understand what we want them to, let’s help them feel it.

And Lord knows how boring rational marketing can be. And boring can be costly…..but maybe we’ll get into that in the next blog :)

Additional Resources:

https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/b2b-institute/b2b-research/trends/95-5-rule

https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/b2b-institute/how-b2b-brands-grow

https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/marketing-solutions/resources/pdfs/advertising-effectiveness-and-the-95-5-rule.pdf

https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/b2b-institute/marketing-as-growth