Building brands for both humans and algorithms: Lessons from the latest Brave Collective Breakfast

It seems like just yesterday that we were excitedly waiting to welcome our first Brave Collective members to our first in-person breakfast event at Sushi Samba, back in February. Fast forward half a year, and we’ve just hosted our third 🤯

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We’ve squeezed a lot into these first few months, growing our Collective community to a whopping 125 members, having countless discussions about the dilemmas facing B2B tech comms and marketing professionals, and crucially, making braver and bolder steps each day. 

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The popularity of the Brave Collective has demonstrated that there’s a whole community out there who also believe that B2B tech PR and marketing needs to evolve and get braver. While our first two Brave Breakfasts focused on AI transformation and its impact on the modern B2B tech buying journey, our third session took a different stance. Instead of focusing on the problems, we decided to share some solutions. 

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In each discussion we’ve had, the same theme keeps cropping up. How do we build a brand that resonates with humans, and is also structured perfectly for the algorithms that are dominating the B2B discovery process? 

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So, we assembled an all-star panel to discuss that very question. Chaired by our very own Head of B2B Marketing, Ash Lockett and featuring Global Top 100 CMO Sarah Roberts, a fierce champion of the B2Human mindset and the importance of brand, and Founder & CEO of Demand Genius, Tom Rudnai, who works on the front lines figuring out how AI search is reshaping the B2B buying journey. 

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What followed was a fascinating conversation - filled with more synchronicity and common ground than we’d anticipated. We keep our Brave Breakfast deliberately intimate to encourage open, valuable conversation, but we’re always happy to share the key takeaways. 

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2027 should be the year of B2H 

You don’t need us to tell you that tech is changing at the speed of light. With AI in the picture, marketing teams are under immense pressure to push out content on the latest and greatest AI features and products. 

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But no matter how cool and genuinely innovative your AI product is, it’s still being bought by a human with their own personal career ambitions, peer pressures, and the fear of failure that we can all relate to. For buyers, tech features are a nice-to-have, but the need-to-have is trust. And they can’t build trust with a brand built around features. 

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As our own research has uncovered, 87% of large B2B tech buyers still purchase from familiar brands. And familiar is almost certainly the keyword here. It’s not necessarily that the big brands have the best solution; rather, B2B tech buyers trust them. Over time, they’ve built up relationships with these brands, so it’s not about competing with them on features; it's about competing with them using emotional storytelling. 

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Easier said than done, though. As marketers, we want to keep the human customer at the heart of our strategy, but you’ve also got to contend with product and sales teams banging on the door, brandishing features that they want you to push. 

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Well, as Sarah Roberts suggested on our panel, perhaps the answer is to get out there and ask customers what they’re looking for. As Sarah explained on the day, it all goes back to those basic principles of ‘Know Your Customer’, understanding their unique pressures and stresses. Armed with that information, you can push back, creating a business case for human storytelling, even in the face of tech demands. 

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But wait, do LLMs even care?
That’s the next question, right? Humans might care about emotional storytelling, but with LLMs playing an increasingly prominent role in the buying process, they often decide if your brand even makes it onto the shortlist. 

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And we’ve all seen the ‘LLM hacks’, those lists of workarounds you can use to ‘trick’ the algorithm into recommending your brand. But as Tom Rudnai explained, in his experience on the AI frontline, the reality is very different. 

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The LLMs that first came onto the scene a couple of years ago are worlds away from the models we use today. Over time, they’ve become far more responsive, acting increasingly like the humans that use them. Forget the old SEO-style hacks like keyword stuffing - they simply won’t work. Like humans, LLMs reward content with high information gain. Basically, original content that has a new opinion, compelling narratives, or, even better, original research content. 

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As Tom explained on the panel, 84% of AI-driven buying journeys produce zero brand citations during the awareness and consideration stages. At those points in the journey, AI is pulling almost exclusively from its own knowledge. It’s only at that final conversion stage that it starts going to search for information and begins to regularly cite brands. 

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So the key? Producing content with information gain. Giving AI access to knowledge it doesn’t already have  is the only surefire way to start exerting influence, even if brands aren’t always getting cited. 

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Brand consistency, ‘real’ Thought Leadership and ‘Content Debt’

We all know thought leadership. It’s basically the bread and butter of any B2B tech brand's PR and marketing strategy. But not all thought leadership is created equal. 

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There’s a fine line to walk between what the tech experts in your business want to be known for and speak about, and what your brand stands for. It’s all about balancing that spokesperson knowledge with customer needs to create a bold viewpoint. And crucially, one that can actually cut through in the market. Because as Sarah reminded us, there’s no point trying to wade into an area where a dozen brands are already competing for airtime. 

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Keeping that link through to customer problems is also crucial for LLM visibility. These models love brand consistency, and by centring your messaging on a communal customer issue, you’ve got a secure anchor to tie everything back to. 

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An anchor, Sarah explained, is crucial in the world of B2B brand pivots. Competing sales priorities, new product launches, and even the introduction of a new CEO can all spark a new pivot. And while they might all feel minor, over time they add up. As brands evolve in this manner, they inevitably leave behind a graveyard of messaging, which you might have already figured out, can throw a spanner in the works for consistency-loving LLMs. 

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Don’t get us wrong, these brand evolutions are inevitable, if not necessary. But each shift needs to be carefully monitored by PR and content teams. Not just at the start to ensure new messaging lands effectively, but at the end of the process to clean up any confusing signals.

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As Tom added, all of these little shifts have a direct impact on your digital footprint. So when the LLMs come a-knocking, they can often encounter mixed signals, echoes from previous brand pivots that muddy the waters. All of this directly impacts your brand's consistency with LLMs, and by extension, how your brand appears in response to prompts. 

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So, moving forward, Tom suggests that PR teams, and especially content teams, need to make a change. Each time a brand pivot is decided on and actioned, they need to essentially clean up after themselves. Audit historical content for anything that doesn’t align with the new direction so that LLMs don’t get confused and so that they can give a confident answer about your brand. 

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Use AI to help here; have agents read every piece of content and score it, perhaps in terms of originality and authority for example. Then, just go one small section at a time, perhaps even leaning on AI to make those smaller edits that can really elevate older pieces of content.

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Consistency is quite literally key 

In a nutshell, that’s the takeaway. For all the chatter about how to ‘hack’ LLMs and GEO optimisation, the most important part of the puzzle is still having strong, consistent, and emotional brand storytelling. As they say, ‘the old ways are the best ways’... 

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But as we all know, PR and marketing teams can build a fantastic brand on paper, with a perfect messaging house, packed with emotional and relevant storytelling. But disseminating that across a large company is another problem altogether. 

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Happily, Sarah and Tom delved into that issue too, along with a whole other host of advice around how to practically implement these braver B2B tactics in the world of AI. Check out our next blog for more. 

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In the meantime, if you want to hear more insights from our fantastic panel, check out their appearances on Babel’s BacktoBrave podcast - Sarah’s episode linked here, and Tom’s here. 

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And if you’re not already, sign up to join our Brave Collective - so that next time you can join in on the conversation in real time! 

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