There’s a default assumption inside most B2B organisations that the brand is the main character in its own story. The campaigns, the messaging frameworks, the brand guidelines, the positioning decks. They all place the brand at the centre, with the customer orbiting around it, the market responding to it, and competitors measured against it.
It makes sense. If you’ve invested millions into building, codifying, and policing a brand system, you want the investment to pay off by having a brand that matters.
Here’s the thing: to your customer, it probably matters a lot less than you think.
The 90% problem
Your buyer is spending very little of their time thinking about you. They’re busy managing internal politics, responding to board pressure, handling operational fires, mentoring their team, sitting in procurement reviews, and trying to leave the office at a reasonable hour. Your brand occupies a sliver of their attention, and that sliver only opens when something in their environment triggers a need that you happen to be relevant to.
The 95/5 rule suggests that at any given time, roughly 95% of your addressable market is not actively buying. They’re in that mode where they’re living their professional lives and your brand is, at best, ambient.
That’s a humbling position to be in if you’re a brand marketer who’s spent the last 18 months refining a visual identity system and rolling out brand training across 40 countries. The system works. Everything is consistent. The colours are right, the fonts are right, the tone of voice guide is thorough. And none of that means the customer remembers you.
Consistency is infrastructure, not experience
This is where I think a lot of B2B brand thinking stalls. There’s a conflation between brand consistency and brand experience, as though they’re the same thing. They aren’t.
Brand consistency means your assets look and sound like they come from the same organisation. That’s important. It builds a baseline of recognition and it prevents the kind of fragmentation that confuses buyers and dilutes investment. But it’s infrastructure. It’s plumbing. It’s the thing that stops your house from falling down, but it’s not the reason anyone wants to visit.
Brand experience is what someone feels when they interact with you across multiple touchpoints over time. It’s the cumulative impression left by your content, your events, your sales process, your onboarding, your customer support, and your presence in the communities where your buyers spend their time. And here’s the critical distinction: brand experience can exist without brand consistency being perfect, but brand consistency can exist without brand experience being present at all.
I’ve seen this repeatedly with the large enterprise technology brands we work with. Incredibly well-defined brand systems. Meticulously policed. And when you move from the brand awareness layer down into demand generation and sales enablement, the experience evaporates. The visual identity carries through (because the system enforces it), but the feeling disappears. The work becomes product marketing. Spec sheets. Features and benefits. Rational information served up through consistent visual packaging.
That’s brand being present as a label. it’s identification, not experience.
The restaurant you’d never go back to
Our Creative Director, Mike Christodoulou, and I have been using a restaurant analogy that I think captures this well. Imagine two restaurants on the same street, both serving similar menus. You can read both menus from the pavement. The dishes are comparable. The prices are comparable. One restaurant has a beautifully looking logo on the door, consistent branding on the menu, matching napkins and a well designed website.
The other one has all of that too, but when you walk in, something feels different. The way the staff greet you. The way they read the room and adjust. The way the space is designed to make you feel a certain way. The small touches that communicate “we thought about what this would be like for you.” You leave with a gut feeling. When someone asks you for a recommendation three months later, that feeling is what you recall, not the logo.
B2B buyers operate in a version of this dynamic, only with much higher stakes. They’re choosing between vendors with similar capabilities, similar proof points, similar customer logos. The menu is roughly the same. The buying decision increasingly comes down to the experience that surrounded the evaluation: how the brand showed up across content, conversations, events, and interactions over the months (or years) before a purchase trigger occurred.
If your brand only exists as a system and never translates into a felt experience, you’re the restaurant with the nice logo and the forgettable meal.
The small window
So what does this mean practically? It means accepting that you have a very small window to be relevant, to resonate, and to be remembered. And using that window well requires a different kind of discipline than most B2B brand teams are currently equipped for.
- Relevance means your content and your presence align with the real priorities and pressures of the buyer’s world, not the priorities of your product marketing team.
- Resonance means the buyer feels something when they encounter you: recognition, reassurance, curiosity, and professional confidence.
- Salience means the impression you leave is distinctive enough that when the buying trigger does fire (which could be months or years later), your brand is one of the three or four that come to mind.
Painting everything the same colour achieves a version of salience through repetition, but it’s a thin version. If you see red, you might think of Coca-Cola, but you might also think of Liverpool, Manchester United, or Ferrari. Colour alone is a shared identifier, not a distinctive one. The distinctiveness comes from what’s layered on top: the accumulated experience of what interacting with that brand has felt like over time.
Honesty as a starting point
The most useful thing a B2B brand team can do is start with an honest assessment of how important they actually are in their buyer’s day. Not how important they’d like to be, or how important their brand investment justifies them being, but how important they genuinely are when measured against every other priority, pressure, and competitor fighting for the same sliver of attention.
That kind of honesty is uncomfortable. It means acknowledging that your brand awareness campaign, however well executed, is competing with a hundred other stimuli in your buyer’s Monday morning. It means accepting that the buyer doesn’t care about your brand story. They care about their own story, and whether you show up as a useful, credible, low-risk character at the right moment.
In our conversation, Mike described it as being ”about whether your brand is showing up like it’s talking to a singular customer.” The buyer doesn’t experience your brand as a system. They experience it as a series of moments. And if those moments don’t feel like they were designed with that specific person’s reality in mind, the brand is just wallpaper. Consistent, well-produced, entirely forgettable wallpaper.
The opportunity is to stop treating brand as the protagonist and start treating it as the environment. Design the experience. Invest in the feeling. Accept the small window. And make the most of it by being genuinely, specifically, demonstrably useful to the person on the other side of it.
Your brand might not be as important as you think it is. But that’s okay. It’s the starting point for making it matter more.
