Blog Archives
Protecting Creativity
The B2B Reset is built around the idea of “buyability,” which is described as a brand’s lasting ability to stay top of mind and be selected when a buyer’s need eventually emerges. What inspired you to write this book?
Over the last few years, I have been incredibly fortunate to be part of a global community of people focused on progressing the thinking behind what best-in-class B2B marketing looks like today. I found myself in conversations with some of the smartest minds in the discipline, exploring ideas around brand, creativity, effectiveness, buying behaviour and, increasingly, Buyability.
What struck me was what a privilege it was to have access to those conversations, and how fragmented much of that thinking still was for the broader marketing community. I wanted to bring those ideas together into one simple, practical handbook that a CMO could read, but equally the most junior marketer in her team could pick up and use to understand what world-class B2B marketing looks like now.
At the centre of the book is Buyability because it fundamentally reframes how we think about the job of B2B marketing. A buyer may encounter your marketing months or even years before a genuine category need emerges. When that moment eventually comes, the question is whether your brand is already present in their consideration set and feels credible, familiar, and easy to choose.
That is really what inspired the book: a desire to make the best current thinking in B2B more accessible, practical and useful to the people doing the work every day.
What misconceptions do companies often have about how their customers actually make buying decisions?
One of the ideas I challenge in the book is the myth of rational consensus. B2B buying processes look incredibly rational on paper. There are committees, procurement processes, evidence, validation, and business cases. But underneath all of that are human beings navigating risk, emotion, identity and accountability.
Buyers don’t arrive at a decision carrying only the information presented to them at that moment. They bring everything they have seen, heard, felt and inferred about a brand over time. Eventually, something gives them enough confidence to act. That means every interaction before the buying moment matters because it is either making that future decision easier or harder.
That is why confidence is such an important idea throughout the book. In complex B2B decisions, where buying committees are larger, and the consequences of a poor decision can be significant, the challenge is not simply persuading one buyer. It is building enough accumulated confidence for multiple people to believe this is a choice they can support.
What does a B2B brand need to do differently to remain memorable during long, complex buying cycles?
The first thing is to accept that memory is part of the commercial strategy.
Buyability is built through the long, patient work of becoming mentally available to people who may not be in-market today. A buying decision might ultimately happen quite quickly, but it can draw on years of accumulated impressions about a brand.
That places a premium on consistency, distinctiveness and meaning. Every interaction should leave something behind. It might strengthen familiarity, reinforce trust, express a point of view or create a little more confidence. Over a long buying cycle, those effects accumulate. Brand creates preference, familiarity and confidence, while demand converts that accumulated confidence into action when the buyer is ready.
For me, this is also why creativity matters so much in B2B. Buyers cannot choose a brand they don’t remember. In markets where several organisations may be perfectly credible and capable, being understood, trusted and easy to choose becomes a genuine commercial advantage.
What advice would you give to teams trying to protect creativity while operating under increasing pressure for short-term performance?
I would start by looking very carefully at what your measurement system is rewarding. Measurement is one of the most powerful forces shaping behaviour inside a marketing organisation. If we reward only immediate response and clean attribution, we shouldn’t be surprised when the work becomes narrower, experimentation becomes harder to defend, and longer-term brand building starts to look indulgent.
Protecting creativity doesn’t mean protecting it from commercial accountability. It means being much more rigorous about what different parts of the marketing system are designed to achieve, over what timeframe, and therefore how they should be measured. Some work exists to convert demand today. Other work is creating preference and confidence that will make future demand easier and less expensive to convert. A mature marketing organisation needs to be capable of valuing both.
The line from the book I would come back to is that good measurement should make it easier to defend the right bets, not harder. Creativity and commercial discipline belong together. When performance loses creative ambition, it becomes indistinguishable, and when creativity loses commercial pressure, it can become self-referential. The strongest work holds both at once.
Author Links: GoodReads | LinkedIn | Amazon
The B2B Reset is a practical handbook for the modern marketer navigating that gap.
It explores the real questions B2B marketers face every day, from brand and demand to creativity, measurement, AI, and the complexity of buying groups. It strips away jargon and outdated thinking to offer a clearer, more coherent way to approach the discipline as it exists now.
Written for marketers at every stage of their career, from those building their foundations to those leading entire teams, this is a book designed to be used; picked up, applied, and returned to when the work gets harder.
The B2B Reset: Building Brands That Get Bought
Wendy Walker’s The B2B Reset: Building Brands That Get Bought is a strategic argument for treating business-to-business marketing with the creative ambition, commercial rigor, and human understanding its economic importance warrants. Walker organizes the book around “buyability,” which she defines as a brand’s durable readiness to be recalled and chosen when a buyer’s need finally arises. That concept gives coherence to the book’s wide-ranging discussion of positioning, category design, demand generation, measurement, team structure, artificial intelligence and privacy. Rather than presenting marketing as a sequence of isolated campaigns, Walker describes it as the sustained construction of confidence across long buying cycles and complex groups of decision-makers.
The book is particularly persuasive when it examines the psychology of B2B purchasing. Walker shows that corporate decisions may be supported by data, procurement procedures and financial models, but they’re still made by people managing professional risk, reputation and accountability. Her observation that “The decision may be shared, but the risk rarely is” neatly captures why reassurance, identity and emotional credibility matter alongside evidence. This human-centered perspective also strengthens her critique of generic product messaging. Buyers aren’t simply evaluating functionality. They’re considering whether a choice can be explained internally, defended under pressure and trusted when circumstances change.
Walker’s strongest practical contribution is her insistence that brand and demand, marketing and sales, and creativity and performance are interconnected parts of the same commercial system. She replaces the conventional linear funnel with a loop in which buyers repeatedly return, consult new stakeholders and test whether a brand’s claims remain coherent. Positioning, in this model, must be useful throughout the organization, not merely polished for an external campaign. Briefs must create space for judgment, measurement must recognize effects that develop over time, and performance creative must build memory as well as generate immediate activity. The book’s later chapters extend this reasoning thoughtfully into AI and data use, arguing that technology can accelerate production and analysis while leaving responsibility, restraint, and strategic choice firmly with people.
Written in direct, polished prose, The B2B Reset functions as both a leadership framework and a working standard for modern marketing organizations. Its chapters are concise and deliberately cumulative, repeatedly connecting creative quality to commercial outcomes such as pricing power, trust, preference and ease of selection. Walker’s statement that “Proof establishes parity but purpose creates preference” summarizes the book’s central conviction: evidence earns consideration, while meaning makes a brand worth choosing. For marketing leaders, strategists, creative teams and revenue executives, the book offers a disciplined vocabulary for building B2B brands that are distinctive, internally defensible and memorable long before a purchase is imminent.
Pages: 167 | ASIN : B0H4SGQXTT
The B2B Reset: Building Brands That Get Bought
Wendy Walker’s The B2B Reset is a focused, persuasive examination of how business-to-business marketing can better reflect the economic importance and human complexity of the decisions it influences. Its central concept is “buyability,” defined as a brand’s durable readiness to be recalled and chosen when a buyer’s need emerges, often long after the marketing encounter itself. Walker uses this idea to connect brand building, demand generation, positioning, creativity, measurement, sales, procurement and organisational design into one commercial system. Her governing argument is captured neatly in the line, “The category has powered the world behind the world for a very long time. This is the decade when the marketing catches up.”
The book is strongest when it describes B2B buying as an emotional and social process conducted under professional pressure. Walker shows that committees don’t simply compare features and prices. Their members weigh reputational exposure, internal politics, trust and the defensibility of a choice. This understanding gives substance to her discussions of positioning and creative strategy. She repeatedly asks marketers to replace exhaustive explanation with a clear point of view that buyers can remember, repeat and advocate for. Her formulation that “Story is structure, not embellishment” is especially effective because it explains storytelling as a practical aid to decision-making rather than a decorative communications technique.
Walker also succeeds in translating her strategic argument into organisational consequences. Chapters on briefs, performance creative, measurement, procurement and team design demonstrate how promising work is often weakened by fragmented responsibilities, narrow dashboards and approval systems that reward consensus. Her account of the modern funnel as a loop is particularly useful, since it recognises that buyers return, reconsider and introduce new stakeholders instead of progressing cleanly through fixed stages. The later chapters on artificial intelligence and privacy extend the book’s logic thoughtfully. AI can accelerate production and analysis, Walker argues, but judgement, trust, restraint and responsibility remain sources of meaningful differentiation.
The book’s direct, declarative style gives it authority and makes individual chapters easy to use in leadership discussions, although its core themes of clarity, conviction, coherence and human judgment recur frequently enough to create some repetition. That repetition also reinforces the book’s purpose as a shared operating standard rather than a collection of isolated observations. The practical tools at the end strengthen its value for teams that need to assess briefs, positioning, measurement and decision quality. Overall, The B2B Reset is a commercially grounded guide to building B2B brands that earn memory, trust and preference. It’s most valuable for marketers and business leaders seeking a common framework for producing distinctive work and defending its contribution inside the organisation.
Pages: 167 | ASIN : B0H4SGQXTT
Imposters on the Zoom!
Imposters on the Zoom! provides an incisive look into the pervasive imposter syndrome among marketing and sales professionals in business-to-business (B2B) environments. Authors John Buie and Jason Hagerman draw on their extensive experience to offer a clear and actionable blueprint for those looking to secure a steady stream of sales leads without succumbing to the crippling doubt that plagues many in the industry.
Buie and Hagerman skillfully address a common ailment in the business world with a mix of empathy and pragmatism. Most professionals struggle with feelings of inadequacy, and acknowledging this can be liberating. This idea paves the way for the book’s evergreen lead generation strategies, which are presented with the promise of practicality and long-term applicability.
The segmentation into three personas—Claire the Creator, Charles the Conductor, and Chris the Curator—helps tailor the strategies to individuals at different stages of their careers and with varying levels of responsibility. I think this personalization makes the dense information more digestible and relatable. The book thoroughly explores the detailed explanations of each role, ensuring that readers fully grasp the strategies and their applications. This comprehensive approach reinforces understanding and aids in the effective implementation of the concepts presented.
What I liked about this book is its robust, detailed, and highly specific advice on practical implementation, from leveraging AI to create detailed buyer personas to handling the intricate dynamics of B2B sales. The strategies are laid out in a step-by-step format that is easy to follow. The authors claim that following their advice could exponentially increase a reader’s influence and effectiveness in their company, which is compelling and backed by clear examples and a straightforward action plan.
I think Imposters on the Zoom! is an essential read for marketing managers, sales leaders, and business owners in the B2B sector who feel overwhelmed or underconfident in their roles. It offers a psychological boost and a practical pathway to enhancing their influence and efficacy. This book will particularly benefit people new to leadership positions or those looking to refresh their approach to sales lead generation.
Pages: 253 | ASIN : B0CW1BF2KL
