We know what works. So what's holding B2B back?

B2B Ignite returned to London on 1 July, and the industry is in better shape than it sometimes gives itself credit for. The rooms were full and the conversations were sharp, and credit to the B2B Marketing team for building the programme around exactly the right ambition, marketers taking more control of growth.

Richard O'Connor opened by urging us to trade vanity metrics for the language of the CFO. He's right. He was also right when the industry first started saying this, the best part of a decade ago. And that, unexpectedly, became my theme for the day, because the striking thing about Ignite 2026 was how little of it needed to be new.

The C-suite panel that followed (a CEO, a CCO and a CFO telling marketers what they actually expect) carried the same message the C-suite has been sending for years: bring us growth, and speak its language. A particular shoutout to Brian Macreadie of Addleshaw Goddard, one of the sharpest effectiveness minds in B2B, who held the marketer's corner with typical clarity and wit.

So here's the question that followed me around all day, on the Lime bike and then again at home: if we all know the theory, that brand, creativity, emotion and reach drive effectiveness, why is so much of B2B still obsessed with product features, rational messaging, short-term activation and narrow targeting?

Exhibit A: The buying group we still haven't cracked

For my money the keynote of the day was Nick Mason of Turtl on "the glass slipper", his take on crafting buying group consensus. His core point, that B2B purchases are made by large, messy, political groups whose members each need something different, isn't new. Which is precisely the point. We've known about the complexity of the DMU for decades. We've even renamed it several times, from decision-making unit to buying committee to buying group, as though fresh terminology might do the work for us.

And there's a dimension that still gets underweighted: time. The buying group won't stand still while you court it. Our own research found that 88% of the DMU changes within five years, and 94% within seven. We call it the Seven-Year Switch. The champion you've spent eighteen months nurturing moves on; the quiet analyst quietly inherits the budget. Map the group in January and it's part fiction by October.

Which is why I don't believe the ABM platforms are the answer, a view I accept would not have been popular in the exhibition hall. They've given us account-level intent and much better plumbing, and that's useful. But consensus is a persuasion problem, not a data problem. You cannot retarget your way to agreement between a CFO, a CISO and a head of procurement, least of all when the cast keeps changing mid-performance. The resilient strategy is the one we already know: stop chasing the individual and start building for the collective. That means fame, and it means feeling, delivered at a reach broad enough that whoever walks into the room already knows you and already likes you. And the evidence keeps stacking up. Bain and LinkedIn's latest research finds around 90% of B2B purchases go to a vendor on the buyer's day-one list, and that you're more than twenty times more likely to be chosen when the entire buying group knows you before the process begins.

In other words, the theory we all claim to believe.

Exhibit B: Brand's twenty-year detour

Wayne Deakin of Bray Leino argued that brand is now B2B's real competitive edge. He's right, and the fact that this still needs saying in 2026 is itself the story. Binet & Field and the LinkedIn B2B Institute made this case, comprehensively and with evidence, years ago.

I'm glad it's now mainstream. But the more interesting question, which nobody on stage asked, is why we ever lost brand in the first place. For the best part of twenty years, B2B chased short-term leads: first through the marketing automation wave (Eloqua, Marketo et al), then through the ABM platforms (Demandbase, 6sense et al). Each promised measurable pipeline. Each quietly pulled budget and belief away from the thing that makes pipeline easier in the first place: being known, and liked, before the buying starts. If we don't diagnose why we made that trade, we'll make it again the very next time a platform sells us certainty.

Exhibit C: The show of hands that said everything

One moment stayed with me. Ryan Almond's session on Henkel, brand meeting ABM inside a 150-year-old manufacturing powerhouse, was among the strongest of the day, and the work is sophisticated, smartly architected around the vertical solutions where the budgets and the buyers live. Then Ryan asked the room who knew Henkel. A modest show of hands. Who knew what Henkel actually does? Fewer still.

I don't raise it to knock the work. I raise it because that show of hands is the brief for the next piece of work. Henkel is a company whose product brands, Loctite and Pritt among them, are more famous than the company itself, and all the excellence at solutions level can't fully compensate for a masterbrand that hasn't been given a job of its own. If a room full of professional B2B marketers can't place you, imagine the buying group, especially one that will be 88% different people within five years. Far from being a vanity project, a logo-level fame campaign would multiply everything else Henkel is doing. I suspect Ryan knows this better than anyone, and I'd back him to build the internal case.

Exhibit D: AI, the next great displacement activity?

AI was everywhere at Ignite, as you'd expect. Gravity Global made a case I agree with, that the more buyers use AI, the more brands need human-created distinctiveness. But across the day, the AI conversation kept landing in the same two places: production efficiency and media optimisation. Doing what we already do, faster and for less.

All of which is fine, and necessary. But if everyone uses AI to do the same things faster, nobody gains an edge; the advantage simply gets competed away. And there's a worse risk, which is that AI becomes the next great displacement activity, one more brilliant and measurable reason to avoid the harder strategic and creative work. The real prize is AI for effectiveness rather than efficiency alone: sharper buying-group insight, braver strategy, pre-tested creative, better decisions. That's a conversation B2B could lead for once, instead of arriving at it years late, again.

So what's actually holding us back?

The honest answer is that I don't fully know, and I noticed that nobody at Ignite claimed to either. The question barely came up, which may itself be the point. But I have working hypotheses.

Incentives and governance: we measure marketers in quarters, and brand pays back over years. The folk wisdom says CMOs get fired before the payoff lands. Spencer Stuart's tenure data says something sharper: around two-thirds of departing CMOs are promoted or move to equal-or-better roles. Quick pipeline wins are precisely what get you promoted, so the system isn't punishing long-termism so much as rewarding its absence. And research published in the Journal of Marketing found just 2.6% of board members have any marketing experience, against boards near-universally fluent in finance. The people setting marketing's horizon have rarely done the job.

Measurement bias: what's easy to count gets managed. Clicks are countable; fame is harder. So we optimised for the countable and called it rigour.

Career safety: a lead-gen campaign that underperforms is a line in a dashboard, quietly re-optimised the following week. A brand campaign that underperforms is a conversation with the CFO. We keep choosing the failure that's easier to hide.

The rational-buyer myth: B2B still half-believes its own origin story, the one where buyers are spreadsheet-wielding rational actors, despite decades of evidence and despite every real buying group any of us has ever sat in.

And an ecosystem with skin in the game: an entire industry exists to sell B2B marketers short-term certainty, and its business model depends on activation being the answer.

These are working hypotheses rather than verdicts, though we've begun putting them through formal research at True and the early evidence is already sharpening them. The promotion twist above came straight out of that work. Full findings in a follow-up piece. In the meantime I'd value your input, especially where your experience contradicts them.

The best news of the day

Creativity kept forcing its way onto the agenda, most enjoyably in Joel Harrison's session on the rise of consumer-grade entertainment in B2B. More of this, please. Because if brand is back and distinctiveness is our best defence against AI-generated sameness, then creative effectiveness becomes the industry's core competence. The uncomfortable part is that most B2B organisations don't share a language for judging creative work, which means most creative decisions get settled by opinion, hierarchy or fear.

That's exactly why we built, and are giving away, the True B2B Creative Scale: eight levels, from Damaging at the bottom to Iconic at the top, giving teams a shared standard for judging creativity and raising ambition. When creativity has a common language, it stops being a matter of taste and starts being a driver of growth. Steal it and argue with it. Better still, bring it to your next creative review.

One last thought on that slipper

Cinderella didn't win because the slipper fitted. She won because she was unforgettable at the ball. Fit matters, of course: the right message to the right member of the buying group at the right moment. But fame is what gets you considered at all.

B2B Ignite 2026 showed an industry that has, at last, learned the theory. Which means B2B no longer has a knowledge problem. It has a doing problem. The winners from here will be the ones who finally act on the principles rather than reciting them.

We intend to be among them. Care to join us?

Richard Parsons is Head of Strategy and Co-founder of True, the UK's only IPA Effectiveness Accredited B2B agency. If you'd like to disagree with any of the above, he'd enjoy that. Get in touch.