Why positioning (not performance) is the real long game in B2B marketing

In B2B marketing, we’re often dealing with a ‘sea of sameness’.

Everyone’s ‘innovative’.

Everyone’s a ‘trusted partner’.

Everyone’s a ‘market leader’.

These claims might true (of course, everyone can’t be the market leader), but the problem is that everyone is saying the same thing, or derivatives thereof.

If you’re saying the same things as everyone else, then your brand is wallpaper.

It might look nice, but has virtually no value in a commercial sense.

That’s why you really need to think about your positioning.

The positioning problem

B2B brands have a peculiar habit of mistaking information for persuasion.

They create spreadsheets and presentation decks outlining their value propositions.

Product features, benefits, proof points, case studies, credentials.

All useful stuff. If you can get anyone to actually read it.

But here’s an uncomfortable truth. Your competitors have similar products, similar proof points, similar credentials, similar data. The difference between value proposition #1 and value proposition #2 is usually pretty nuanced.

Difficult to tell apart without digging through the detail.

So, how do you win preference? How do you ensure your prospective customer chooses to approach you, and not someone else who might be offering (pretty much) the same thing?

Brand

A strong brand offers an additional emotional layer that gives buyers a reason to care about you before they actually need to buy from you – strong brands deliver long-term preference.

Yet most B2B marketing departments are optimised for the short term. They chase leads, not loyalty. They work hard to perfect the funnel, not the feeling.

This obsession with short-term gains is exactly what Les Binet and Peter Field warned against in their IPA study, ‘The Long and the Short of It’.

What Binet & Field really proved

Binet and Field analysed hundreds of campaigns across a range of categories and found something which seems obvious, but is often overlooked.

Marketing activity needs to consider both short-term activation and long-term brand building.

Activation is about generating an immediate action, essentially capturing demand that already exists.

Brand building on the other hand, is about creating future demand – making your brand famous, trusted, salient and desirable — so that when the next buying window opens, your brand has become the default choice.

The data showed that the most effective brands typically spend about 60% of their effort on brand building and 40% on activation.

But most B2B marketers have that ratio backwards, pouring as much as 80-90% of effort (and budget) into short-term lead generation activities like SEO, PPC, direct mail, social advertising and events, leaving relatively little for brand awareness activities.

Performance metrics like CTR, CPC, CPL and measures of engagement can be comforting because they’re immediate and measurable. But they can also be deceptive – they measure movement, but they don’t show whether you’re building preference for your brand.

Brand building activity is about building memory structures that pay dividends in the long term.

The research shows that the imbalance between short and long-term activity kills long-term growth. Brands that underinvest in the ‘long’ side will gradually lose pricing power, differentiation and future demand.

In other words, the more you chase short-term sales, the less you’ll have of them in the future – or the more you’ll have to pay to get them.

The importance of positioning

In B2C markets, ‘brand building’ often means emotionally resonant advertising.

In B2B, it’s positioning — the strategic act of deciding who you are, what you stand for, and what emotional space (or territory) you want to own.

Positioning isn’t simply about creating a strapline or a slogan.

It’s an organising thought that makes every piece of communication coherent and distinctive. It’s the story you want your audience to buy into.

It defines what you talk about and what you refuse to talk about.

It’s the line you draw between you and everyone else in your market.

That’s how you build a brand that stands out in a sea of sameness.

Without a clear positioning, everything else becomes noise: your thought leadership sounds like everyone else’s, your tone of voice drifts, and your creative becomes generic.

With it, everything sharpens. Your message cuts through. People start recognising your brand before they even see your logo.

Rational value propositions aren’t differentiating

Rational propositions are rarely differentiating because they’re about what you do, not why you matter.

As Binet and Field demonstrated, rational messages work best for audiences who are already ready to buy — they activate existing demand.

But emotional connection builds future demand. It’s what makes people remember you and prefer you before the buying process even begins.

People don’t stop being people just because they’re at work.

That’s why the most effective B2B brands are built on emotional foundations.

Emotion isn’t about sentimentality; it’s about relevance with resonance. It’s about expressing a human truth that aligns with your customer’s world view.

In B2B, that could mean helping people feel secure in complex decisions, confident in front of their peers, or inspired to move their business forward.

The point isn’t to make them cry. It’s to make them care.

Why emotional positioning is the delivery system for rational messaging

Emotion doesn’t come from creativity. It comes from clarity.

A clear positioning gives creativity something to express.

If you know exactly what your brand stands for (say, simplicity in a complex world), then every campaign, message and design choice can reinforce that idea.

On their own, features are forgettable – but if they ladder up to support a big idea, then even your rational messages (like case studies, sales decks, nurture emails etc) will carry an undercurrent of meaning and distinctiveness.

The myth of efficiency

Binet and Field also discovered that campaigns with broad reach deliver far greater long-term business impact than those with narrow, hyper-targeted audiences.

That insight flips normal B2B thinking on its head.

Most B2B marketers are obsessed with precision targeting of decision-makers or in-market buyers.

That may feel efficient, but it’s actually quite restrictive – because the people influencing a B2B buying decision rarely fit cleanly into a single persona. The operations manager who does the research, the IT Director who signs off, the CFO who approves budgets.

It’s a complex ecosystem – and positioning is how you achieve fame across that ecosystem.

When your brand stands for something distinctive and memorable, everyone in that network can understand your story — even if they’re not your direct target.

B2B brands grow by being talked about, remembered, and recommended long before the sales call.

The emotional dividend

Binet and Field’s most compelling finding is that emotional campaigns are roughly twice as effective at driving long-term growth as rational ones.

That’s not because emotion overrides reason.

It’s because emotion makes reason matter.

Emotion builds trust. And trust shortens the sales cycle, increases preference, and allows you to command premium pricing.]

Who wouldn’t want that?

A brand with strong positioning and emotional clarity doesn’t need to shout louder or discount harder.

It becomes the safe choice. The one people want to buy from.

That’s the real benefit of brand building. Every time someone encounters your brand and feels the same emotion — whether that’s reassurance, confidence or ambition — you’ve deposited another penny of goodwill into your mental equity account.

The cost of short-termism

Binet and Field also found that when brands underinvest in long-term brand building, their short-term results eventually decay.

Activation loses potency because the brand has no residual equity to convert.

When campaigns aren’t delivering enough leads, we run more campaigns.

We spend more money to optimise activation.

We change the messaging.

We tweak the targeting.

We change our pricing.

It’s marketing as maintenance, not growth.

Positioning is the only sustainable way out of that loop.

The strategic challenge

So here are the questions B2B leaders need to ask:

Can someone outside your business describe what makes you different in one sentence?

If your logo was hidden, would your message still sound like you?

What emotion does your brand consistently evoke — and is it intentional?

If you can’t answer those, you have a strategic problem.

Because if your positioning isn’t distinctive, you’re not really competing — you’re just participating.