Stop marketing to logos: the CFO-approved blueprint for B2Human marketing

B2Human marketing is an enterprise B2B strategy that prioritises emotional resonance, personal career risk, and stakeholder dynamics, over purely rational technical specifications. By addressing human pain points and aligning marketing outcomes with corporate finance metrics, B2Human drives higher win rates, reduces customer acquisition costs, and builds long-term brand equity.

Seventy-seven percent of B2B creative is terrible. It completely fails to move the needle because it’s too rational, product-focused, generic and lacks the human connection. Open any industry website, strip away the brand name, and you will find the same safe, dry corporate jargon. Playing it safe in a saturated market is no longer a protective shield. It is a direct route to commercial, algorithmic and brand invisibility.

Brands need to be brave - not reckless - and invest in standing out. But when everyone is worried about making a mistake, how do you make the leap and do things differently from the way they have always been done?

I sat down with Sarah Roberts, a HotTopics Top 100 CMO and former Global CMO at Boldyn Networks, on the Back2Brave podcast to tackle this exact crisis.

Here is the brutal reality. If your customers cannot distinguish your brand from the competition based on emotional resonance, your business effectively does not exist. So, how can marketing leaders push past safe boardroom choices, build internal credibility, and drive actual commercial pipeline?

Stop marketing to logos and start marketing to people

Traditional marketing operates on a flawed assumption that corporate buyers are purely rational machines making decisions based on technical specifications and product sheets. The reality is far more human. Behind every purchasing group is a collection of individual people navigating intense professional pressures, stakeholder dynamics, personal career ambitions, and fears.

As Sarah Roberts highlights:

"Whether that's a billion-dollar infrastructure contract or whether it's buying toothpaste at the supermarket, there's a human. And that individual is thinking, especially in the billion-dollar infrastructure piece, about their ambitions, their pressures, their fears, the stakeholders they have to manage, the risks they need to navigate alongside a potential big RFP and all the product specs and technical language and corporate jargon. But they will be thinking about where their career is going and what they're doing."

Rather than B2B, Sarah advocates for B2Human, an approach that considers buyers as humans first and professionals second. They respond to connection and empathise with emotion.

The old adage that you do not get fired for buying IBM is an acknowledgement of human fear, not rational decision making. Buyers want to protect their livelihoods and avoid making catastrophic mistakes. To build campaigns that cut through the noise, marketers must tap into these emotional pain points. This does not mean ignoring technical specifications. It means wrapping those specs in a narrative that addresses the whole deal, connecting your product with the real-world outcomes your buyer is trying to achieve.

Let’s be honest, relying on cautious, product-obsessed marketing is a one-way ticket to blending in. If you’re not brave, you’re exactly the same as your competitor. And Marketing 101 dictates that you have to differentiate yourself.

Actionable takeaways:

1. Conduct Dual-Track Customer Research: When speaking to customers, do not just ask about product requirements. Uncover their broader business goals and the personal stakes involved, such as managing board pressures or seeking career advancement.
2. Iterate the Customer Narrative: Treat customer alignment as a continuous loop. Present your messaging, listen to their feedback, adapt, and refine the narrative rather than relying on static, one-time desktop research.

Reframe "Brand Campaigns" into continuous commercial drivers

Describing brand initiatives as "campaigns" creates a false expectation of short-term ROI, alienating CFOs. Marketing leaders must position brand building as a continuous commercial driver that accelerates pipeline velocity, increases closing win rates, and enhances enterprise value.

This was a big learning for me. Having been brought up in the agency world and leading a brand engagement agency in Australia that focused on spike campaigns, I overly use the word campaign - even when referring to a multi-year activity.

But the word campaign has connotations associated with it. It implies a short-term return on investment window. But brand is not a temporary marketing activity. It is the cumulative reputation, credibility and trust of the business. 

Roberts is unequivocal on this point:

"I would stop talking about brand campaigns. As soon as you say brand campaign, everyone thinks short term. Because campaign has a timeframe, and campaign has an ROI. Brand is so much bigger than that. Brand is around your reputation, it's around credibility, it's around business value. You're talking trust, you're talking consideration, which obviously drives sales, and you're talking the internal piece."

To secure long-term investment, you must shift the internal conversation from vanity metrics to value metrics. Sit down directly with the finance and strategy teams to align marketing goals with the overarching corporate strategy.

Do not overwhelm the board with bloated dashboards tracking every minor metric. Instead, tie brand activity directly to hard business outcomes. Track pipeline velocity to measure how a trusted brand accelerates the sales cycle. Document how a strong reputation improves closing win rates and facilitates new market entry. Monitor marketing-influenced revenue rather than treating sales and marketing as separate, hostile entities.

Actionable takeaways:

• Reframe the Internal Language: Purge the term brand campaign from your boardroom vocabulary. Present brand building as a continuous commercial driver that reduces client acquisition costs and increases deal velocity.
• Establish a Shared Revenue Goal: Align sales and marketing under a single revenue target. Instead of arguing over lead definitions, commit to a specific marketing contribution to the pipeline to foster deep cross-departmental collaboration.

The power of “Grit Work” and small pilots

"Grit work" refers to foundational, unglamorous execution that establishes internal trust across business units. Marketers can overcome boardroom skepticism by running controlled, low-stakes pilot programs that generate undeniable revenue data before requesting large-scale budget approvals. 

You do not build a category-defining brand by pitching massive, multi-million-dollar ideas and hoping for immediate approval. You build it block by block through what Roberts calls grit work: the unglamorous, foundational execution that builds trust before anyone asks for it.

As Roberts explains:

"Grit work is all the stuff that doesn't maybe make you famous in a business, and probably takes up a large chunk of your time. And for me, and over my career, I've always thought about it as really the hard yards in a business that builds you the trust, proves the value, and does it before anyone else asks."

When facing internal scepticism, run a pilot. A pilot is a controlled, low-stakes experiment designed to prove a concept and build momentum. When Roberts faced sales representatives who doubted a new strategic campaign, she did not force a global rollout. Instead, her team targeted a tiny, highly focused subset of customers within that vertical. The pilot delivered undeniable results, and that previous sceptic became the campaign's biggest champion, paving the way for a successful wider rollout.

Actionable takeaways:

• Identify your sceptics: Map out the most sceptical sales representatives or business unit leaders in your organisation. Target their specific territories with small marketing experiments to secure easy, undeniable wins.
• Co-Opt the Sceptic: Once a pilot delivers revenue results, empower your former critic to present the success to the rest of the business. Peer-to-peer sales advocacy is infinitely more persuasive than marketing self-promotion.

Unifying acquired businesses under a shared emotional narrative

Consolidating multiple acquired companies requires a unifying narrative centered on human outcomes rather than product specifications. Leveraging modern technology, such as AI-assisted visual design, earns immediate credibility with technical stakeholders.

Unifying acquired businesses under one brand is incredibly difficult. During the merger of nine businesses under Boldyn Networks, Roberts proved that a shared, emotional purpose is the ultimate unifying force. By focusing on the end goal of helping citizens connect, move, and learn, rather than just the physical technology, Boldyn built a narrative that resonated deeply with employees and the market.

Defying conventional processes, the team leveraged artificial intelligence to build the visual brand identity. This earned immediate credibility with analytical engineering teams who saw marketing using cutting-edge technology to showcase a technology brand, sparking immense internal pride.

Roberts shares this key learning:

"We were using technology in a way in marketing to showcase a technology brand. So in some respects for them, they went, 'This is really cool, and you're speaking my language. And this isn't about colors and shapes You've used something I understand to create this new brand that I now need to get behind and be excited about.'"

One year post-launch, 91% of employees reported pride in the new brand. Furthermore, aided brand awareness reached 50%, more than double the industry benchmark for new telecommunications brands.

Actionable takeaways:

• Build the Brand from Within: Do not impose a new brand identity top-down. Involve board members, executives, employees, and customers in extensive feedback loops and workshops over an extended period to foster genuine co-ownership.
• Translate Marketing into Stakeholder Language: When pitching creative ideas to highly technical or analytical stakeholders, frame the execution in a medium they respect, whether that is data science, engineering tools, or AI platforms.

AI is an enabler, not a shortcut for originality

While artificial intelligence accelerates content generation, it cannot manufacture original strategic insight or emotional resonance. Generative AI models synthesise existing web data; therefore, human oversight is mandatory to maintain distinctiveness and trust.

Because language models only synthesise existing web data, over-relying on them risks producing generic AI slop that dilutes your brand. True brand distinctiveness requires the human layer to inject bravery, emotional resonance, and unique perspective.

Roberts warns of the pitfalls of complete automation:

"AI makes content creation easier. I think we all know that you can do things faster. But I don't think it's making originality easier in any way, shape, or form. So then our superpower becomes how we add that level of thinking and how we can be distinctive and how we can cut through, how we're adding unique perspectives to what we're doing, the insights, the bravery, the emotional resonance."

When deploying AI, start with the specific problem you need to solve rather than chasing a shiny tool. Avoid an overstacked martech pile of disconnected software. Roll out tools gradually using a crawl, walk, run model alongside your technology team to ensure your staff can absorb the change.

Actionable takeaways:

• Adopt a Problem-First AI Strategy: Put your marketing team in a room and list their operational bottlenecks before evaluating software. Never buy an AI tool simply because it is marketed as a revolutionary time-saver.
• Enforce a Human-in-the-Loop Standard: Treat AI as a foundational starting point, not the finished product. Mandate that every piece of outward-facing content undergoes creative restructuring to maintain your brand voice and build long-term trust.

Your action plan for tomorrow

Do not wait for permission to create value. When you open your laptop tomorrow morning, do not hesitate. Send the email, make the phone call, or share the daring idea you have been holding back.

"Stop acting like a support function and start behaving like a strategic business partner". Find a critical business problem, design a small pilot to solve it, and prove that brave, human-centric marketing is the single greatest engine for commercial growth.

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