Lab-Grown Marketing: The AI-Powered Playbook for Research, Strategy & Tactics

How does B2B marketing work? That’s a fun question, but here’s an even more fun question: How do B2B marketers think marketing works? What if we were to tell you that: (1) many B2B marketers have a wildly inaccurate understanding of how marketing works, and (2) as a result of that fundamental misunderstanding, many B2B marketers are setting themselves up to fail? Spoiler alert: that’s what we’re about to tell you!

Brands – both B2B and B2C – should focus less on keywords and more on making themselves memorable at the point of the buying decision. “The most important search engine is still the one in our minds.” That quote – from Jon Bradshaw, founder of the consultancy Brand Traction – is the most profoundly pithy idea we’ve heard in a long time.

Lead generation marketers have dominated the B2B marketing landscape over the last decade, in large part, by focusing on generating short-term results – sales leads —and positioning marketing as a precise science where all waste can be eliminated and all actions can be tied to a dollar outcome. By positioning brand marketers as wasteful, lead generation marketers have wrestled away control of marketing budgets and wrestled away credit for sales growth. However, we’d argue that lead generation is much less the science it claims to be and, instead, is much more the art it claims to replace. In particular, we bristle at the idea that lead generation produces more sales for companies than brand marketing. The marketing science makes clear that lead generation captures demand but doesn’t really create demand.