IAA Singapore B2B Brand Summit
Red pill | Blue pill: Reflections from the IAA B2B Summit in Singapore
Last week, IAA Singapore hosted its inaugural B2B summit with leaders from around the world gathering to share their insights on today’s evolving landscape. I’ll cut to the chase. There’s no silver bullet to solving the complex issues around B2B marketing, however it was clear we have to think very differently about how we approach it. Bravo to LinkedIn’s Mimi Turner who summarised it expertly using a Bengali wedding as a metaphor for the complexity of the B2B buying experience: The target buyer is the groom, passionate and convinced in his love. The real challenge lies with the bride’s sceptical family who care less about features and more about reputation aka the ‘hidden buyers’: Legal, Finance, HR and Procurement.
The B2B buying journey has never been linear, but arguably it would now be considered chaotic. The purchase decision journey is exceedingly complex, involving multiple stakeholders with different needs and objectives. Unlike B2C where marketing typically aims to influence one person making a single decision, success in B2B depends on achieving consensus on a decision that’s often complex, high-value, and high-stakes.
Vanity vs Sanity
For too long, B2B marketing has had a narrow focus on lead generation measured through MQLs, mistaking outreach for engagement – like assuming every guest is coming to your dinner party just because you’ve put an invite in the post.
As Jared Schwarz from LinkedIn rightly explained, we’re in our red pill blue pill moment. Traditional B2B funnels are outdated, so the industry must shift its focus to meaningful KPIs that measure real engagement and influence, not just volume.
[Anna to find a casestudy here]
Brand as the strategic multiplier ❤️
Craig Duxbury, Global President at Stein IAS, shared the insight that brand and demand are no longer separate – it’s not an either or argument like we have seen in the past; brand is future demand.
In a recent Stein IAS study, they found the most resilient companies blend the emotional power of brand with the precision of lead-gen, not just for awareness but to build boardroom credibility and relevance with key decision makers.
When looked after and invested in correctly, brand has the ability to be a strategic multiplier connecting short-term performance with long term equity to drive competitive edge. Brand creates recognition which builds trust, sets the tone of engagement and influences early consideration – hidden buyers (more on this group later) are 1.27x more likely to go with a company if they know them from Day One.
Creative provides measurable commercial edge
You aren’t at a marketing conference worth its salt if there isn’t debate and discussion about Creativity.
While B2B is often sidelined as B2Cs ugly cousin, it was highlighted that emotional B2B campaigns generate 7x more business effects and 2.3x more profit.
At the end of the day, B2B is still talking to a human. Humanising campaigns builds muscle memory and trust and can be used as a powerful commercial lever to drive long-term effectiveness and growth.
Devinder Kishore (DK) put it simply when he shared what his CFO said about brand investment - if you give me a story that differentiates our brand, I’ll give you the budget.
As markets commoditise, bold storytelling is the white space where competitive advantage lives. We saw this in the 2024 Airwallex campaign that CMO Jon Stoma shared called Shifted Perceptions demonstrating their bold approach to storytelling – wait until the end to see the surprise!
[Airwallex case here]
Looking beyond the usual suspects
Decision-making in B2B is inherently collaborative. While marketers focus on more obvious stakeholders in the marketing chain, non-obvious influencers such as Procurement, Legal and Finance can often have a decisive say.
These ‘hidden buyers’ have different approaches to their Marketing counterparts, along with different primary needs that need to be met. Given they’re rarely included in the pitch process, they fall back to evaluating vendors based on reputation.
Interestingly, 40% of deals fall through simply because the buying group can’t reach a consensus - a small shift in this dynamic could represent billions of dollars in additional opportunity and creates a new, non-traditional audience to include in the influencer ecosystem.
Welcome Mr Computer
Today, we also have a new stakeholder to consider, one that we can’t build a relationship with but who can make or break a deal. AI has now entered the equation with unprecedented influence; GenAI is already being used daily by up to 90% of B2B buyers under 35, according to NBCUniversal’s David Evans. It’s not just part of the process, it’s actively shaping it.
Tuomas Peltoniemi of Accenture Song share his plausible yet radical future where agentic AI tools shortlist vendors autonomously, meaning brands have to appeal to both human and machine decision-makers. Optimising for AI assistants as well as search engines is now critical and has to be built into future strategy.
The last couple of months has reminded everyone that there are two certainties moving forward: Uncertainty is a certainty and fragmentation is a certainty.These were some wise words shared by Howie Lau from NCS. In a world where this is now norm, B2B marketers are at a crossroads, not only in how they communicate but to whom.
The most successful brands won’t be the brands shouting the loudest into the atmosphere – or spraying and praying – but the ones who build influence through relevance, trust and adaptability.
The summit served as an important reminder for our craft – B2B isn’t about linear funnels or neat, sensical nurture tracks but about navigating a dynamic, rapid, multi-dimensional ecosystem. In this reality we aren’t just marketing to personas, we’re marketing to a complex group of people needing consensus, algorithms and even agents. The brands that will win will be able to address all three groups while keeping human connection at the core.
Written by Anna Lake, Vice President, Brand, Communications and Sustainability at dentsu APAC.
