The Brave B2B Gallery: Why Playing it Safe is the Biggest Risk You Can Take

Babel’s recent Brave B2B Gallery celebrated campaigns famed for creating buzz, igniting conversations, and in many cases - for making us laugh.

Most importantly, each of these campaigns proves that brave comms and marketing creativity drives real business results. But, how many “safe” B2B campaigns can you recall? Not many, right?

This is the curse of B2B marketing - a relentless fear of bucking the trend, of appearing flippant, or “too consumer” - or heaven forbid, too human. This results in tactical parity - a sterile sea of sameness that means no one truly wins.

But buyers aren’t robots, they’re humans who happen to be doing the job they do. They respond to connection, they remember stories. They feel when those stories resonate, and they empathise with emotion.

Together with an excellent panel (Sarah Roberts, Global CMO Boldyn Networks, Maria Colorge, Integrated Marketing & Brand Leader and Lee Climpson, Brand Video Specialist & Partner, Transmission) the Brave B2B Gallery shattered the myth that sticking to the rules makes for the safest commercial bet. 

The group consensus was clear: in a saturated market, playing it safe is actually the biggest risk you can take.

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The High Cost of Invisibility

Brands that continue to sail in a "sea of sameness" are committing commercial suicide. When every brand uses the same, safe tactics and corporate jargon, they become invisible, unremarkable and frankly, boring. As Sarah Roberts noted, if your customers can’t tell you apart from the competition, you don’t exist to them. "Safe" marketing might appease your internal stakeholders in the short term, but it leads to invisibility and wasted budget in the long run.

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Bravery is Strategy, Not a Gamble

Effective marketing demands an emotional response from an audience, meaning brands simply MUST appeal to humans rather than listing features for the robot. Panellists introduced System1’s "Three Fs" framework—Fame, Feeling, and Fluency - effectively illustrating why bold work wins over boring, every time. B2B buyers are humans first and buyers second, they inevitably use emotion in their decision-making. If a brand feels good and familiar, it becomes the safe choice.

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Turning Theory into Action

How can marketers break the cycle of sameness and build an applicable roadmap for the year ahead? 

The answer from the panellists: find your white space. Sourcing the gap, your differentiator, beats outspending your competitors every time. Panellist Maria Colorge, highlighted how Beats by Dre avoided expensive in-game sponsorships by owning the "pre-game" athlete moments instead - a strategy of finding influence where no one else is looking.

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The Key Takeaways

While there were plenty of applicable learnings for ambitious marketers and brands (more to come on these in due course), a topline summary of our key takeaways can be found below:

Forget B2B, it’s all about H2H (Human-to-Human) marketing. Stop marketing to businesses and start marketing to people. Understand your audience’s personal motivation, their career aspirations and fears are what drives them. 

Sell your plan internally, before anything else. Bravery becomes foolhardy and dies without buy-in. The panellists advised marketers to link their metrics and strategy plans directly to revenue and core business pillars, and to "pre-socialise" big ideas with key stakeholders before any formal pitching begins.

Create your own Playbook. The key takeaway from the Brave B2B Gallery? Brave marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution and there is no perfect, universal plan. You write the rules in your own playbook and bravery often looks like flexibility, confidence and creativity. To differentiate, marketers must be willing to stop what’s not working, to pivot to another solution and maintain confidence in building unique strategies that actually drive brand growth and memorability. 

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If you’re excited by the conversation started at the Brave B2B Gallery, why not become a part of it as it continues? Applications are now open to join Babel’s Brave Collective - a group of like-minded marketers and comms professionals ready to embrace change and back brave in 2026.  

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