Every year, someone publishes a report telling B2B marketers they need to “be more emotional.” Every year, a conference panel agrees that “humanising the brand” is the way forward. And every year, the same organisations nod along, go back to their desks, and produce another product-led campaign with a stock photo of someone smiling at a laptop.
The reason that cycle never breaks is because the industry has been borrowing its definition of emotion from a playbook that was never written for it. When a consumer brand talks about emotion, they’re often talking about desire, identity, aspiration, belonging. When B2B tries to import that language wholesale, it sounds hollow, because the emotional landscape of a CIO evaluating a cybersecurity platform and a 24-year-old choosing between sneaker brands are fundamentally different territories.
So let’s be specific about what emotion actually means when the buyer is a committee, the purchase cycle is nine months long, and someone’s job is on the line if the decision goes wrong.
The emotions that actually matter in B2B
In a recent conversation with Mike, our Creative Director, we started mapping the emotional triggers that show up repeatedly across the enterprise buying groups we work with. They look nothing like the emotional frameworks you’ll find in most brand strategy textbooks.
Here’s what we kept coming back to:
“Don’t make me look stupid.” This is the baseline. Every person in a buying committee carries a version of this fear. They’re being asked to evaluate complex solutions, form a position, and defend that position to peers and seniors. The emotional need here is protection. They want to feel confident that engaging with your brand, sharing your content, or advocating for your solution will reflect well on them. The moment your creative feels gimmicky, superficial, or disconnected from the reality of their role, you’ve triggered the opposite response. You’ve made them feel like endorsing you is a professional risk.
“Make me feel understood.” Mike put this well when he said the real job of B2B creative is to make the audience feel seen and heard. That sounds simple, but it requires something most B2B brands skip entirely: genuine understanding of what the buyer’s day actually looks like. We did this work for a major platform technology brand, exploring what a day in the life of a CIO genuinely feels like; the isolation, the competing priorities, the constant pressure to translate technical complexity into business language for a board that doesn’t speak it. When you reflect that reality back to someone with precision, you earn something that product messaging alone never delivers. You earn attention, because the audience recognises themselves in what you’ve made.
“Reduce the risk for me.” B2B purchases carry consequences that consumer purchases rarely do. If you buy the wrong pair of jeans, you’re out a hundred quid. If you procure the wrong enterprise platform, your business loses significant money, your team loses credibility, and you become the person everyone points to as the one who made the call. The emotional need here is reassurance, and it runs deeper than case studies and ROI calculators. It’s about whether your brand, across every touchpoint, communicates competence and reliability in a way that someone can feel, not just verify.
“Make me the hero.” This one is more interesting than it first appears. It applies both to our clients (the marketers we work with) and to their end customers (the buyers). Mike flagged it from the client side: “How do you make me look like a hero? How do I articulate this to the decision makers above me? How do I align an entire committee?” That’s a creative brief in itself. But it extends to the buyer too. When a buying group makes a strong procurement decision and the outcome delivers, that reflects on every person who advocated for it. The emotional payoff is professional validation. Your brand’s job is to make that payoff feel achievable and credible before the purchase, so that the decision to choose you feels like the smart, defensible, career-enhancing move.
Why “humanise the brand” is an empty instruction
Here’s where I get frustrated. The industry keeps circling around the word “human” as though it’s a strategy. “We need to humanise the brand.” Does that assume B2B is currently full of non-humans? It’s vague to the point of being useless, and it gives creative teams nothing to design around.
The same applies to “storytelling.” What story? A story about a princess? Because unless you can define what narrative structure, what emotional arc, and what specific audience truth you’re building from, you’re just using a buzzword to justify a video with a piano soundtrack.
The reframe that Mike and I keep returning to is this: start with what you want the audience to feel, then design everything backwards from there. Most B2B briefs use the classic hierarchy of Think, Feel, Do. Think sits at the top, which means rational messaging leads. Feel is secondary. Do is the desired outcome. But that hierarchy has a built-in bias toward rational information, and it produces rational work. When we flip it and lead with Feel, the questions change immediately. Instead of “what do we need them to understand about our platform,” the question becomes “what do we need them to feel about their own situation, their own risk, their own potential, in order to be open to hearing from us at all?”
That’s a fundamentally different starting point, and it produces fundamentally different creative.
The gap between brand altitude and sales enablement
One of the things that keeps this problem locked in place is structural. Brand teams in large enterprise organisations invest heavily in identity systems; the colours, the fonts, the guidelines, the training. That system does its job well. Everything looks consistent. But consistency of appearance is a different thing from consistency of experience.
When you drop from brand altitude (the awareness campaigns, the big creative ideas, the celebrity endorsements) down into the demand layer where sales enablement lives, the brand experience often evaporates. You’re left with product marketing, spec sheets, features and benefits. The visual identity carries through, but the emotional identity disappears. The feeling that the brand created at 40,000 feet doesn’t survive the descent.
Mike described this as a continuity problem: “How do you bring the brand experience through so that someone is still thinking and feeling and experiencing that brand in the demand space?” That’s the question most B2B organisations haven’t answered yet, and it’s the one worth spending time on, because the buyers sitting inside that 95% who aren’t currently in market are forming impressions right now. Those impressions are either building toward something memorable or they’re building toward nothing at all.
So what do we actually do about it?
The first step is defining emotion with precision instead of aspiration. Take “make it more human” off the brief and replace it with the specific emotional outcomes you’re designing for. Are you trying to reduce perceived risk? Build professional confidence? Create a sense of peer validation? Each of those leads to different creative, different channels, different formats, and different measures of success.
The second step is carrying that emotional definition through the entire journey, from brand work down into demand, into sales enablement, into the way your SDRs write emails and your account teams run workshops. If the feeling stops at the top of the funnel, you haven’t built a brand experience. You’ve built a brand label with a rational pipeline underneath it.
The third step is accepting something uncomfortable: your brand might not be as important to the buyer as you think it is. They’re not thinking about you for 90% of their day. You have a small window to be relevant, to resonate, and to be remembered. Making the most of that window requires emotional intelligence, not emotional volume.
That’s the work we’re focused on at MOI. We call it not-so-B2B, because the old definitions of what B2B “should” feel like are the reason most of it feels like nothing at all.
