The B2B Buyer Has Changed. Have You?

Something fundamental has shifted in how businesses buy from other businesses, and most marketing departments haven't caught up.

Shawn Low, Regional Director for Asia at Green Hat and Elevate B2B conference speaker, sees it every day. The familiar pain points are still there: buying committees of eight, ten, twelve people; sales cycles stretching twelve to twenty-four months. But in the past year, he has watched buyer behaviour change in a way that upends one of B2B marketing's oldest assumptions.

"Traditionally, buyers would go away as a committee, define their requirements, build their shortlist, and only reach out to vendors roughly two-thirds of the way through the cycle," he explains. "But now they are reaching out much earlier, and a big reason for that is AI.

Your brand, your content and your credibility are being judged long before your sales team knows the deal exists,” concludes Shawn Low.

Human, emotional content builds trust, AI destroys it 

If buyers are researching earlier and deciding before they ever speak to you, one question towers above all others: do they trust you? Does creative, brave advertising undermine trust?

Joel Harrison, co-founder of B2B Marketing, Propolis and the B2B Marketing Awards, opens the conference with exactly this theme. In B2B, buyers rarely choose vendors on features, price or presentations alone. They choose companies they believe in, people they trust, and brands that reduce perceived risk — because in B2B, the person signing off on a vendor is often putting their own reputation on the line.

Harrison brings evidence this discussion. Drawing on analysis of shortlisted entries in the 2025 B2B Marketing Awards — judged by more than 100 independent, client-side judges — he has been making a provocative case on stages and podcasts around the world: consumer-grade entertainment is no longer a "nice to have" in B2B. It builds distinctive brands, engages buyers and improves commercial performance. And crucially, his research challenges the assumption that braver creative demands bigger budgets. Entertainment-led marketing, he argues, outperforms traditional approaches without a cost premium.

His view on AI is equally contrarian. As AI drives the cost of producing content towards zero, the market drowns in sameness, and differentiation shifts to the things AI cannot easily replicate: distinctive positioning, memorable creative ideas, genuine customer insight and long-term brand investment. In other words, AI doesn't weaken the case for entertaining, brand-led work, it strengthens it. Consumer-grade entertainment, Harrison argues, is how B2B brands cut through the AI flood and move today's buyers as never before.

Bravery, he has long argued, is now one of the most valuable qualities a B2B marketer can have.

“Consumer- grade entertainment lets us cut through the AI flood of content - and engage and move B2B’s new buyers as never before,” claims Joel Harrison

The research of award-winning B2B marketing case studies found that entertaining creative work is 21% more likely to beat their own objectives.

Cannes Lions and Spikes Creative B2B  jury chair Wendy Walker offers her formula for the work that wins — at Cannes and in the boardroom: "The best B2B work really happens when commercial depth meets creative bravery, and that takes both the client and the agency coming together to achieve it."

"Strong B2B brands are not built on rational messaging alone. They are built through ideas that connect, stay with people, and ultimately influence commercial outcomes. Not every B2B company needs a Super Bowl ad, but every B2B company needs to manage perception." Reputation, she notes, "is still marketing. It may be informal, but it is shaping demand. I think the real question is not whether you need marketing, but whether you are being intentional about it."

The stakes are rising fast. Millennials now make up 73% of B2B buyers, procurement is more sophisticated, and boards are more risk-aware. "Marketing today is all about shaping discovery, building trust, and enabling decision-making in a world where buyers are doing most of their research independently."

At heart, though, "it is still marketing to human beings. That's why we constantly emphasise the importance of emotion in marketing, regardless of whether it's B2B or B2C, because we know that emotion drives connection, recall and familiarity," adds Wendy Walker

But not everyone can be edgy

Not everyone at Elevate will tell you to be edgy — at least, not right away.

Jade Choong, Global Marketing Communications Manager at Shell, who joins the Day One panel on trust, risk, and the long sale, offers a bracing counterweight. Before you get edgy, get honest:

“Creative, yes, but we must first be very honest with ourselves. Are you an involved product or an uninvolved product?”

For Shell Marine, that question shapes how we approach marketing. Marine lubricants play a critical role in helping vessels operate safely, efficiently and reliably, yet they are products that often work behind the scenes. The challenge is not a lack of relevance—it is making that value visible.

Customers may not interact with marine lubricants in the same way they engage with consumer brands, so marketers must work harder to bridge the gap between technical performance and customer understanding. The answer is not louder marketing; it is more meaningful marketing.

Rather than relying on attention-grabbing stunts, we focus on making our value tangible. At maritime events, we put our oil-condition sensor into visitors’ hands through live demonstrations, allowing them to see the technology at work firsthand. We invest in thought leadership that educates, informs and helps solve real industry challenges. The key question every B2B marketer must answer is: how do you bring your value proposition to life for customers? Get that right, and creativity has a clear purpose—and a powerful role to play.

Don’t just build an audience, build a community

Bob Low, the Malaysian consultant behind Bob Low Marketing, will unpack the reality of B2B marketing in Malaysia — how local companies actually buy, and why relationships and credibility still matter deeply. He argues that while building the audience on LinkedIn is important, it cannot replace real-life interactions.

“My takeaway for 2026 would be this: don’t just build an audience, build a community. If you have a real group of people around you – whether through events, media, dinners, or a professional circle – then your content has a much stronger foundation."

"Every month, when I host dinners, I am building real relationships. I meet people in person. We stay connected. So when I post something online, those people are already part of the wider circle around me. They engage because they know me, not because I hacked the platform.”

And then there is the AI layer: content needs to be visible not just to your prospects but to AI bots as well. If most of the B2B buyers say they are using AI during their buying journey – for research, shortlisting, vendor comparison, top, middle and lower funnel – then if your brand is not appearing there, you are not even in the conversation.

“So companies need to understand how AI starts to cite them, what channels AI crawls, what signals it looks for, what positive mentions exist across the web, and how to build an AI search optimisation strategy around that.

That is also one reason we need to rethink old habits like gating content. Traditional marketers love gating content because it captures a lead. But AI cannot get behind a gate. So if you want AI to read and surface your information, you need to make that content accessible and structured,” adds Bob Low

Your Brand Matters More Than Ever - and your org chart must respond

Tuomas Peltoniemi leads Accenture Song's design and digital products practice for Southeast Asia — "designing and building all of the services that your customers or clients would use" — after more than twenty years in agencies. From that vantage point, he sees B2B marketing, sales, commerce and service not as separate disciplines but as one connected journey.

Why do big companies still fail at answering simple customer questions online?

“The real enemy is the org chart. There's a siloed nature of organizations. Customer service is usually separate. Marketing is separate. Sales is separate... They're all separate organizations fighting for the same budget." His fix, proven in Singapore's government sector, is a feedback loop from the call centre to the content team: "There's no better way of getting insights on what your customers are looking for than your call center data."

Transformation needs the CEO. Cross-silo problems can't be solved by the CMO alone: "If you think about cross-company, cross-silo, cross-department issues, they're almost always a CEO... The most effective transformations happen when you have a CEO top-down mandate." And agencies rarely get that seat: "Very few CEOs would see a creative agency or a marketing agency as a transformation partner beyond marketing to begin with." 

With Google click-through rates to websites falling for the first time in over two decades, and AI answering questions directly, he sees the pendulum swinging back: "We're coming back to an old-school world of brand building and brand content... In a world where you can technically have access to almost any content, your brand matters more than ever." 

How Can a Malaysian Company Market Itself to the Top Executives of Tesla or Nvidia?

Swedish B2B marketing expert Christopher Strandell from InZynk has the solution:

“The short answer is ABM. Account-based marketing means that a company does not market to everyone at once. Instead, it selects a handful of its most important target customers and builds marketing specifically for them. Advertising and messaging are aimed exclusively at the employees of a single potential client — for example, a large corporation such as Tesla or Nvidia."

"It is not true that ABM only suits large companies. ABM does not have to be expensive — you do not need enormous, hugely costly ABM software or ABM technology to do it well.

Start small, and start with alignment. In Strandell’s view, the single most important success factor in implementing ABM is alignment between sales and marketing. A common mistake is to begin with long “dream client” lists containing dozens or hundreds of accounts. Instead, he recommends starting small and doing things manually: ask the sales team to nominate two, three or four genuinely important accounts, and pilot ABM on those first. This keeps the effort focused, affordable and easy to learn from before scaling up."

Strandell agrees that automated emails and LinkedIn messages often simply disappear into the noise. He advises against “blasting out mass emails” to important accounts. Instead, companies should combine several channels: direct sales activity, tailored messages, visibility on LinkedIn, and paid advertising — all coordinated around the same target accounts.

Strandell singles out advertising as an especially important — and often neglected — component of ABM: “Too many companies forget the advertising part. Five hundred dollars’ worth of advertising will carry your message to the right people even inside a giant global corporation. In this way, even a small Malaysian company can reach the top decision-makers at Microsoft or Nvidia.”

Is there a need for specialist B2B agencies?

Shawn Low from Green Hat Singapore thinks so. “I’ve worked on both B2C and B2B, so I’ve seen both sides. And you can see the big network agencies trying to get into B2B through acquisitions and specialist units. They clearly recognise that B2B needs different skills.

B2B buys differently. You need to understand the buying party, long buying cycles, the right technology, the right channels, the right attribution. You need people who can have the right conversations with stakeholders because you are not just delivering leads – you are often helping the client’s own internal team work through the entire journey as well.

You have to work with them on the messaging, the content, the channels, the tracking, the attribution, the value proposition. There are a lot of problems to solve, and you need people who know what questions to ask and how to build the right team around that, ” adds Shawn Low.

Wendy Walker, on the other hand, refuses the specialist-versus-generalist framing: "The bigger question is not whether an agency labels itself as B2B. The question is whether the agency understands complexity, because at grassroots level that's what B2B has in spades." Some traditional shops are "wired for mass reach," while "some niche B2B agencies can really lack breakthrough creative ambition."