There is a line of thinking in business that sounds reasonable, looks sensible and fits beautifully into a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, it often leads companies in the completely wrong direction.
It is the idea that the main job of a business is to become more efficient. Whether through cutting costs, reducing friction, removing waste or automating more, efficiency is treated as the master metric.
It often produces a culture where staff need to prove where every pound is spent, tying every activity to a measurable output. That pressure falls hardest on marketing teams, who end up defending every decision through a lens of efficiency.
When aiming for efficiency goes too far.
On the surface, striving for efficiency sounds rational. In practice, it often strips away the very things that create value in the first place.
That is why a recent talk by Rory Sutherland at The Drum Predictions 2026 struck such a chord with me. Not because every word should be accepted uncritically, but because it surfaces something many B2B businesses still fail to grasp: marketing is not there to decorate a product, nor to sit on the sidelines waiting to justify spend after finance has had its say.
It is one of the few functions in a business that can actively help discover new demand, new buying situations, new sources of trust and, ultimately, new revenue.
→ An often overlooked aspect of marketing
This aspect of marketing matters even more now because the B2B buyer journey has changed beyond recognition over the past few years.
Buyers are no longer moving through neat funnels. They are researching with the latest AI tools and large language models alongside classic platforms like Google, Bing and LinkedIn. Other routes — review platforms, communities, referrals, dark social and peer conversations — are all part of the modern journey.
As a result, buyers are forming opinions long before they ever fill in a form or speak to sales. Yet many businesses are still trying to manage growth using attribution models and channel reports that capture only the final sliver of what is actually going on.
That is the gap. And it is exactly why B2B companies need to think differently about marketing, brand and the role agencies like Munro can play.
The core mistake B2B businesses keep making.
Too many businesses still think about marketing as a downstream function. Whether viewed as a form of support, an execution layer or a department that exists to make the sales team's life easier, it creates a very narrow view of what marketing can actually do.
Even with a more optimistic outlook, where you view marketing as a way to capture existing demand, you still aren't giving it enough credit. When rolled out effectively, marketing lets you create demand, shape how the market sees you, and increase the moments where your brand is chosen over another.
→ The risk of measuring for immediate impact
Many B2B firms fall short when it comes to measuring marketing intelligently. They focus solely on what they can measure immediately, which simply isn't how marketing works. The pattern is most pronounced in SaaS, professional services and specialist B2B categories.
It's understandable. Reporting on paid campaigns is easier than reporting on brand-building. Hard metrics like last-click attribution or form fills are easier to count than long-term trust or brand preference.
For many B2B firms, it's easier to circulate a CRM report than to have a conversation about salience, positioning or buyer confidence. Easy to measure does not mean most important — and that is where so many B2B firms are going wrong.
In fact, some of the most commercially valuable parts of marketing are the hardest to measure cleanly in the short term.
Why Sutherland's point matters so much in B2B.
One of the most useful ideas in Sutherland's talk is the distinction between efficiency and discovery. In one view of business, a company exists to optimise. In another, it exists to discover. There is a profound difference between these two outlooks.
Optimise
Every function gets judged on efficiency. Marketing becomes a cost. Human interaction becomes expensive. Brand becomes fluffy. Long-term activity is hard to defend. AI is attractive only as headcount reduction.
Discover
Marketing becomes central. It is one of the main ways a company explores adjacent value, identifies unmet demand, uncovers new audiences and creates relevance in places competitors have not yet noticed.
The best B2B companies aren't looking at marketing through a lens of optimisation. They are looking at it through a lens of discovery. It moves beyond reporting lines and service departments to become a discovery engine for the business.
→ Marketing helps businesses learn where growth actually lies
Most B2B firms don't find their biggest growth opportunities by looking for low-hanging fruit. They typically aren't presented in a neat package within a performance dashboard, nor do they grow from high-intent search terms. They are unlikely to appear in attribution software that soothes the finance team.
More often than not, growth begins with weak signals: a niche audience that engages with a point of view, a new pain point that surfaces in discovery calls, a founder-led perspective that resonates more strongly than a polished brand message.
That is discovery. And it is incredibly powerful.
Marketing, when carried out through the lens of discovery, is the mechanism that allows businesses to spot weak signals and patterns early — and act on them before they're obvious to anyone else.
The obsession with attribution is holding B2B firms back.
Before going further: attribution has its place. This is not an argument against measurement. Demand-capture activity benefits from attribution. Testing campaigns, optimising spend, improving funnel performance — useful, all of it.
But there is a growing problem of B2B businesses using attribution as the primary lens to judge marketing effectiveness. That is where things go wrong.
Attribution is not the same as understanding trust. It is not the same as understanding how buyers move from awareness to active intent. It is certainly not the same as understanding the cumulative effect of encountering your company in multiple places over time.
→ How things really play out
It's impossible to predict exactly how someone will discover your brand. A senior B2B buyer may hear your name through a podcast, read a post from your founder on LinkedIn, hear about you from a peer, find a blog on Google or get summarised about you straight from an AI platform.
When credit gets attributed, it usually goes to the last visible touchpoint. Is that fair? What actually did the work?
A fragmented, invisible, trust-led buyer journey.
The old funnel was never perfect. Today it is particularly inadequate as a framework. The modern B2B buyer exists in an environment shaped by an abundance of information — alongside lower attention spans, decision-support tools and increased caution. The buyer journey has become more extensive, not less.
Prospective buyers are doing a lot more than finding information online. They're actively comparing competitors, validating features, shortlisting and building confidence in brands. All of this is happening across multiple touchpoints, with no obvious order.
- Search engines still matter, especially for problem-aware and solution-aware searches.
- AI tools and LLMs are increasingly used to gather summaries, compare suppliers, evaluate positioning and reduce time spent on first-pass research.
- Social platforms, especially LinkedIn, play a big role in trust formation, reputation and repeated exposure.
- Peer and community validation still carries enormous weight — colleagues, peers, WhatsApp groups, Slack communities, industry networks.
- Direct brand interaction still matters: website visits, email engagement, founder content, webinars, case studies.
One channel hasn't replaced another. The buyer journey has become distributed. That makes brand more important than ever — it is what builds recognition, trust and confidence across all those different contexts.
Brand is commercial infrastructure, not fluff.
Brand is, unfortunately, another area where too many B2B companies don't quite hit the mark. They treat brand as an optional extra, or something to focus on when performance activity starts to stall. In many cases, brand is framed as a luxury sitting above the hard reality of lead generation.
That framing is completely backwards.
→ Why brand is so powerful
Brand doesn't sit opposite performance — it's what makes performance work better. Strong brands command more clicks, enjoy better response rates and are more resilient in competitive markets. They benefit from lower friction in sales conversations and stronger referrals.
More importantly, strong brands make buyers feel safer. In B2B, that matters because most purchases come with risk — career, commercial, operational, reputational. Buyers want assurances:
- Does this solution work
- Is this company trustworthy
- Will they deliver on time and to the brief
- Are they credible, or will I regret choosing them
A strong brand can answer all of these questions before a sales call even starts. Neglect your brand and you end up on a permanent performance treadmill — every click takes a little more work, every lead is a harder fight. Why? Because you haven't built the trust architecture that reduces friction upstream.
AI makes discovery more important than ever.
The rise of AI has already changed how people discover, vet and grow trust with companies. Content can now be surfaced, summarised and compared with a few clicks. Shortlists and early-stage research are increasingly generated with AI support.
And yet many companies are responding to AI in a predictable, limited way: treating it purely as a way to cut costs. This is the exact problem Sutherland warns about. When new technology arrives, businesses often begin by using it to do the same thing, only cheaper. That is rarely where the real value lies.
→ Deriving real value with AI
To draw out real value, businesses need to rethink the processes around the technology. For marketing, that means asking better questions:
- How do we become more discoverable in AI-assisted search environments
- How do we produce content that earns trust and survives summarisation
- How do we build a brand that buyers recognise across fragmented channels
- How do we combine automation with a genuinely human point of view
- How do we use AI to scale relevance without flattening differentiation
These questions point towards strategy, not efficiency. Which is why companies need marketing thinkers in the room — to answer the difficult questions with strategy front of mind.
Marketing's true value isn't what it does, but how it thinks.
One of the more important things to consider here is that marketing isn't solely focused on creating outputs. It provides a way of seeing the business.
A good marketer will do much more than ask how to sell more of an existing product or service. They'll ask how buyers perceive the category, what barriers to action exist, where trust is leaking. They'll ask what assumptions the company is making, what competitors are failing to notice, how value could be framed in a way the market actually cares about.
Do not sell what marketers do. Sell how marketers think.
This applies directly to agencies too. The real value of a good agency is not the deliverables in isolation but the lens it brings — the ability to recognise that what feels internally rational can be externally invisible, or worse, commercially self-defeating. That is the role agencies like Munro should be playing for B2B clients. Not order takers or channel mechanics, but strategic partners in discovery and growth.