Gossip Rant Chat Wa gwan Breaking Scandal Hot off the press Bulletin Dispatches Nachrichten
Success (through) stories
There is a war for attention being fought across the B2B landscape, driven by an increasingly crowded market, tighter budgets, and digital fatigue. Can storytelling, in ways that align with how our lives work today, help brands cut through the noise and differentiate?
Stories sell. They excite, move, and engage audiences. That’s not news. It’s probably the oldest piece of advice floating around the marketing space. But there’s a reason it still resonates today. From the nursery rhymes and fairy tales that inform our early development, to obsessions with soap operas and true crime documentaries, we use stories to shape and guide our understanding of the world—and our place in it. As Steve Jobs once said: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”
We’re wired to respond and react to stories. As we covered in an earlier blog, certain neurotransmitters that govern our empathy, emotions, and even our ability to retain information are elevated when we’re told a story. It’s part of our biology—to crave not only the understanding of what we’re being told, but the context. That’s what a good story does for us; it provides information and helps us relate that information to our lives.
THE B2B CHALLENGE
This is why, perhaps, storytelling is even more important to B2B audiences than B2C ones. It’s not just that the solutions, services, or products we’re selling are more complex in a B2B arena (although, often, they are), it’s that the contextual framework in which we’re trying to place them in is more intricate and nuanced. Consider two examples. In the first, a device manufacturer is trying to sell a mobile phone to a consumer audience. That’s a simple, direct conversation. Then contrast that to a technology company, who wants to place their biometric authentication hardware in a mobile device. That company must paint a picture to the device manufacturer that encompasses not only the impact on the end user, but also of the efficiencies, value, and benefits that their component can bring to the device manufacturer’s business. In the first example, the marketer only needs to convince a single person to make a purchase. In our B2B example, the buying journey usually involves multiple people, each of whom need to be persuaded, and who potentially value different things.
The target audiences in both examples are human, and so respond to stories in similar ways, but the stories that the B2B marketer must tell are more complex and challenging in different ways than B2C marketing. Lessons can (and should!) be learned from either side of the divide, but the fundamental differences still apply. As Colin Gray of Aon puts so well, the job of B2B marketing “isn't a case of convincing somebody that they need something. It's a case of helping them overcome the inertia that prevents them from doing what they know they should be doing.”
NOW WHAT?
So far, so obvious. Nothing new here. What is new, and changing, is how we tell these stories in the framework of our modern world—where audiences are fragmented, competition for customer attention has never been more fierce, and our usual channels are being flooded with Gen-AI created output that feeds itself in a cycle of content that results in meaninglessness.
In short, the fundamental brand marketing question still applies: how do I make my business stand out?
Unfortunately, there’s no one right answer. Each business, each market, and each audience will require testing, experimentation, and investigation to understand how they buy, what they value, and what resonates with them. It’s not a challenge that this humble blog can solve in one sitting, but here are a few pointers on how the art of storytelling can be applied to the modern B2B ecosystem and potentially set your business on the path of standing out:
"The stories that the B2B marketer must tell are more complex and challenging in different ways than B2C marketing. Lessons can (and should!) be learned from either side of the divide, but the fundamental differences still apply. "
CONCRETE HUMAN STORIES
You may know your products' features, and (to coin a phrase) your ACBs (Audience. Challenge. Benefits.), but those alone won’t help your solution, or your brand, stand out. What will, is creativity. We’re attracted to difference, to uniqueness. Creative storytelling piques our interest, boosts engagement, and provides a fresh vehicle for delivering the concrete benefits that a business’ solutions might bring. It’s also a fairly unexploited space in the B2B arena. A recent survey by LinkedIn showed that 75% of B2B advertising scored one star or less (out of five) for creativity. Frame your offering through an unexpected, well-crafted lens and your story will shine.
DON’T MISTAKE NON-LINEARITY FOR INCONSISTENCY
We expect a story to have structure—a beginning, middle, and end, alongside characters we can empathise with as the tale unfolds. That’s great in a book or movie, but when it comes to marketing, we all know that’s not how people experience your content or your brand. They dip in and out—a blog post here, a social video there, and their buying journey becomes ever-more complex, and harder to map. Add to that the influence of AI, summarising and recontextualising your output, sometimes in ways you didn’t intend. To counter this, a fundamental shift is needed in the way we create and distribute content.
Repetition, clarity and consistency of message, and unity of narrative across multiple channels become the key to success. Create an eBook or a whitepaper, sure, but use that eBook as the foundation for multiple, shorter reiterations of your message, dressed in different applications of your creative wrapper. The algorithms that govern how your content gets in front of your customer (in an inbound marketing sense) reward consistent and clear messaging. Take your fundamental, emotive message, and ensure that it’s findable in as many places as possible. Offer different perspectives, but always ensure your core story remains solid, and the same across each iteration.
YOUR BRAND: THE HERO IN YOUR STORY
We have to remember that, when we market, we’re often telling two stories at once. The product or solution that we’re trying to sell, and the story of our business as a trusted, credible partner. The B2B ecosystem trends toward conservatism, as buyers want reassurance that the decision to work with someone new won’t reflect badly on them. There’s a reason why people still trot out that old cliché: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
The level of trust that your brand engenders is vital to close that gap, to overcome the inertia inherent in the B2B buying journey. So, whether it’s something new, or a new provider for an existing need, your audience needs to understand who you are and why you’re a safe bet for them. Conventional wisdom points to case studies as vital proof points, which is certainly true but isn’t the be-all and end-all. If you infuse every story, every ad, and every piece of content you create with your brand’s voice, its principles, and its values, then each encounter your customers have with your brand reinforces that sense of trust, connection, and understanding. Conversely, every story you choose to tell builds a picture of your brand in your customers’ minds.
Intentional or not, brand marketing isn’t a separate discipline from content marketing, they’re bound up with one another. Create content that aligns with the way you want to be perceived, use creative vehicles that scream “your brand” at 1000 paces, and reinforce that messaging for a consistent and effective brand narrative.
DATA + EMOTION = B2B STORIES THAT MATTER
Facts matter. They’re one of the crucial components of B2B storytelling. But the way many businesses use them is 100% wrong. Fact. They’re used as “proof points”, in a dry {BENEFIT STATEMENT} + {DATA POINT} kind of way, like a stamp of authenticity. And that misses out on that concept we were talking about earlier: context. B2B marketing absolutely should rely on data, but we should use it as a framework to tell our stories, rather than as a defence of them—as if they were evidence in a trial.
Smarter businesses use data points as part of their narrative arc, turning insights into calls to action and embedding them into the overall conclusion. Use statistics to illustrate the challenge that you’re trying to solve, painting a picture of an urgent, compelling need. Then show the barriers through data, relating them to frustrations that you can alleviate. Finally, demonstrate what the world looks like once your solution is deployed through data. Interweave an emotive journey with actionable insight for a stronger story overall.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
We’re convinced that storytelling, in both a content and a visual sense, is critical for B2B brands to succeed. That’s why we’ve created a free workbook for marketers to use to help shape their stories, drawing on our years of expertise from strategic level down to tactical execution—this blog is just a teaser of things to come.
WANT THE WORKBOOK?
We’ll be sharing the link to receive the workbook soon, but if you’re keen to get your hands on it, we’ll be giving away exclusive preview hard copies at MWC 2026 in Barcelona. Book a meeting with us to be sure to receive your copy.