What B2B brands can learn from vinyl records and sold-out cinemas

The bet we all made

For the best part of fifteen years, B2B marketing has been built on one big idea: efficiency. Map the journey, score the leads, template the emails, A/B test the hell out of everything, then let the system run away with it.

And to be fair, for some it really worked. Cost per lead went down, dashboards went green and stretched teams got some well needed breathing room.

The catch is that efficiency and distinctiveness are not the same thing. When everyone buys the same tools and follows the same playbook, everyone ends up sounding the same.

If you want to test this, open three competitor homepages side by side and cover the logos. It’s a slightly uncomfortable game.
Better yet, take a look at your LinkedIn InMails. 100% sales, 0% originality.

What buyers are telling us

B2B buyers aren’t rejecting vendors. They’re rejecting generic vendors. The research is fairly consistent on this.

They avoid irrelevant outreach

In Gartner’s 2025 survey of 632 B2B buyers, 73% said they actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach, and 61% preferred a rep-free buying experience overall. By the 2026 edition, that preference had risen to 67%.

But they still want people at the moments that matter

The same Gartner research found that for tasks needing context, such as working out whether a solution actually fits their business, buyers do want a seller’s input. They don’t want less human contact. They want less pointless human contact.

They judge you on your thinking

In the 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 73% of decision-makers said they use thought leadership to assess the thinking a company would bring to a project. And 95% of the “hidden” buyers who influence deals from outside your CRM said strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to outreach.

They can smell the machine

A Gartner survey from September 2026 found 65% of consumers think brands produce too much AI-generated marketing, and 57% said it has made them less trusting of brand messaging overall. That’s consumer-focused data, but your buyers are essentially consumers on their way home.

What visible effort looks like

Let’s rewind a bit. On Black Friday 2011, Patagonia ran a full-page ad in The New York Times with the headline “Don’t Buy This Jacket”. The copy underneath set out the environmental cost of making it and asked readers to think twice before buying anything.

No algorithm suggests that. It took people arguing for it, defending it in meetings and accepting that it wouldn’t please everyone. According to Casey Sheahan, Patagonia’s CEO at the time, the roughly $57,000 ad generated $40-50 million in free publicity.

Nobody is suggesting you tell prospects not to buy your software. The lesson is simpler: when a decision was clearly made by humans who cared, people notice. Effort is legible, and so is its absence.

Where craft pays off in B2B

Craft doesn’t mean doing everything by hand. It means putting human judgement where buyers will feel it. Three places stand out.

1. Events people actually remember

Events already carry exceptional weight: 78% of B2B event organisers say in-person conferences are their most impactful marketing channel. Yet only 23% of attendees said their most recent in-person event had plenty of interactive sessions, and 72% said ample unscheduled time is vital. Organisers are building agendas and attendees want room to talk.

That gap is where effort shows. A few ways to close it:

• Invite on purpose
  A smaller room of the right people beats a big room of badge scans.
• Design for conversation
  Fewer back-to-back sessions, more space for the talks that happen in between.
• Put your experts in the room
  Speakers and executives who stay and talk, rather than present and vanish faster than Houdini.
• Follow up like you were listening
  A note that references the actual conversation, not a thanks-for-attending blast.

When we worked with IGEL on Now & Next 2026 in Miami, much of the craft was invisible to attendees: speaker briefing and rehearsals, one visual identity across every space, months of pre-production. They felt the result rather than the effort, but without the effort there would never have been such a strong result.

2. Sales enablement built around real deals

Most enablement material is written about the product, then swiftly ignored by the people meant to use it. It also creates confusion: Gartner found 69% of buyers had noticed inconsistencies between a supplier’s website and what its sellers told them.

Better enablement starts with how deals actually happen:

1. Listen to recorded calls from deals you won and lost, and note where conversations stalled.
2. Map the real stages buyers go through, not just the stages in your CRM.
3. Build resources for the questions and objections that come up at each stage. Best case scenario through to worst case.
4. Revisit it every quarter with the sales team, because the objections change.
5. This is the thinking behind the sales tools we built for Dell: a monitor chooser that began life at a single event and grew into a suite used by thousands of sales reps worldwide, because it was designed, and evolved around how they actually sell.

3. Video with a real person thinking on camera

B2B buyers have seen every flavour of templated explainer. What still cuts through is someone who knows the subject explaining it properly.

• Start with a real problem, one worth watching even if your company didn’t exist.
• Put a genuine expert on camera. An engineer with real opinions beats a polished voiceover.
• Edit for clarity. Keep the natural pace that shows a real person is thinking.
• Measure what matters. Completion rates, shares and the conversations a video starts tell you more than views.

The honest trade-off

Let’s not pretend this is free. Putting more thought into fewer accounts means you’ll reach fewer people, your cost per lead will rise and your volume metrics will dip before anything else improves. That’s a hard sell in a quarterly review.

There’s also a balance to strike. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and LinkedIn’s B2B Institute suggests only around 5% of B2B buyers are in-market at any given time. So deep, crafted work with priority accounts should sit alongside staying visible to everyone else, not replace it entirely.

What makes the case internally is agreeing the right measures before you start:

• Conversion rate from engaged accounts, not raw lead volume
• Deal size and sales cycle length for those accounts
• Retention and expansion of the customers you win
• Quality conversations: meetings that went somewhere, introductions made, events people followed up on

Get sales leadership aligned early, too. Fewer, better opportunities only feel like progress if sales agrees they’re better. And measurement is already a known weak spot: 70% of event organisers report difficulty demonstrating ROI for in-person events. Decide upfront what success looks like, and you won’t be arguing about it afterwards.

Where AI fits into all of this

None of this is an argument against AI. It’s an argument about where it goes.

AI is genuinely useful for the slow, mechanical parts of craft: summarising earnings calls and news about a target account, spotting patterns across a market, producing a first draft for someone to rewrite. That frees up time for the parts only people can do, such as forming a point of view, making a judgement call and building a relationship.

Where it goes wrong is when AI becomes the visible face of the work. In Klaviyo’s survey of 8,000 consumers, people who noticed AI-generated content in marketing were four times more likely to trust the brand less than more (31% vs 7%).

Your buyers are using AI too: 45% of B2B buyers told Gartner they used it during a recent purchase. If machines are summarising your content before a person reads it, generic messaging gets flattened into nothing. Specific, opinionated work survives the brutal wrath of the summary.