I saw a LinkedIn post this morning from Dale W. Harrison calling out “bothism” as intellectual laziness. And I agree with the premise of this callout but I want to push it even further. Because “it’s both” has become the marketing industry’s favourite way to say sweet f*ck all.
Brand vs. performance? Both.
Distinctiveness vs. differentiation? Both.
Long-term vs. short-term? Both.
Brilliant. Thanks. Hugely helpful marketers. No wonder we’re the least trusted board position. No wonder marketing budgets are shrinking.
In B2B marketing, the answer isn’t a fence-sitting “both”. It’s disproportionate and massively skewed. And pretending otherwise is exactly why most B2B marketing doesn’t work.
Ritson himself says Bothism is “purposefully vague” and “isn’t about a mandatory 50/50 split. It’s about finding the right balance for your specific challenge.” but my view is that the very act of calling it Bothism and allowing marketers to sit in this camp of “We’ll they’re both important” is exactly what the industry didn’t need.
The realities of B2B marketing show some very one-sided necessities which many fence-sitters are overlooking.
Brand is doing most of the heavy lifting in B2B
86% of B2B buyers already have a shortlist in mind at the Category Entry Point (CEP)
93% of those buyers go on to buy from that original shortlist
That means about 80% of B2B buyers purchase from a brand that popped into their mind at the CEP.
Read that again. Now read it again, again.
By the time a buyer actively enters the market, the game is basically already decided.
I don’t care that you’ve directly attributed the purchase to a Google Ad. I don’t care that you think your clever sales deck was the reason it closed. It’s all bullsh*t. Four in five B2B buyers buy based on brand. End of. Only 20% of B2B buyers are contestable demand.
They mostly buy because of what was already in their head.
That’s brand.
Empirical evidence that brand is more important than sales activation.
And emotion plays a huge part in this. B2B buyers default to the known brands because B2B decisions are career-ending if they go wrong. If a B2B buyer recommends a product and it goes wrong or blows up or doesn’t delivery what they thought it would deliver – they could lose their job. It’s not like consumer marketing whereby consumers are choosing a product or brand for themselves. B2B buyers choose on behalf of someone else and put their job on the line.
So it’s unsurprising that most B2B buyers default to the known brands. It’s in our native psychology. It’s basic social proofing theory. We don’t eat the red berries if everyone is eating the blue berries. We just go and eat the blue berries. Because why take a risk when there is an easy option. We don’t weigh up predictive sweetness or pie-readiness metrics. We just eat the blue ones. B2B buyers do the same – because it’s the safe option.
We love to tell ourselves that buyers rationally evaluate options. That they compare features, or that they rationally weigh up vendors with deep analysis.
Most of that work has already been done – subconsciously – long before they enter a buying journey. And if they’re still not sure, they’ll just Copilot/ChatGPT the best options in the category they want to buy, and default to the brand that appears which they already know.
98% of human decision-making is fast, intuitive, and subconscious. Buyers default to what feels familiar, safe, and low-risk. So when the moment of need hits, they don’t explore. They recall. And if you’re not recalled, you’re not considered.
This ‘consideration phase’ that many marketers talk about it a complete myth. Buyers are either in-market or not in-market. Your brand is either top of mind with your buyers or its not. You either own a category entry point or you don’t. Buyers don’t consider brands. They choose them – subconsciously – well before they choose them.
This is why “bothism” becomes dangerous. Because saying “it’s both brand and performance” implies balance. But the evidence doesn’t show balance. It shows a huge asymmetry. Yes – performance marketing can sometimes be effective but only after you’ve earned the right to be in the consideration set, and only when you’re doing it to people who already know who you are. All you’re doing is accelerating the act of you being chosen by someone who was likely to already choose you. You’re spending money to front-load revenue which takes away from future revenue.
The data is brutally clear; if you’re not mentally available at the CEP, you don’t exist in a buyer’s mind. You’re screwed. So called performance marketing doesn’t change that.
Distinctiveness vs. differentiation: not equal jobs
This is another area where “bothism” completely muddies the water.
Yes, you need both, but they do very different jobs at very different moments:
Distinctiveness gets you on the list
- Makes you noticeable
- Makes you memorable
- Links you to buying situations (CEPs)
- Builds mental availability
Differentiation helps you get chosen
- Justifies the decision
- Supports rational comparison at the last minute
- Reduces buyer anxiety post-selection
To be blunt – Distinctiveness gets you shortlisted. Differentiation helps make you the easy choice.
If you fail at distinctiveness, differentiation never even gets a chance to do its job.
Sure – differentiation can act as a form of distinctiveness occasionally – if your USP itself it something memorable and exciting or totally ground-breaking. But the reality is that most of the time you need to be distinctive because you are kinda the same as your competitors.
Most B2B brands are invisible
That’s ultimately the biggest problem.
It is estimated that 89–98% of marketing is ignored or forgotten.
85% of digital ads (where the majority of B2B marketing investment is spent) don’t even pass the 2.5-second memory threshold. I would say that they’ve fallen at the first hurdle but they haven’t even really joined the race.
All that marketing budget down the drain. And then marketers complain that they don’t have enough budget. Not only are most brands failing to build mental availability. They’re not even being seen in the first place.
They’re optimising for immediate clicks so they can directly attribute revenue growth to their activity. They’re humouring the media platforms with constant creative refresh despite there being empirical evidence that wear-out is bollocks and actually wear-in exists.
Meanwhile, the stuff that actually works gets deprioritised. The evidence isn’t ambiguous here either. Emotional advertising is 7x more effective at driving long-term growth AND short-term action. Creative consistency compounds brand effects over time.
Strong brand building delivers greater profit impact than short-term activation.
And yet the industry keeps defaulting to short-term, rational, forgettable marketing. Because it’s easier to measure. Because it’s easier to justify. Because it’s what the media platforms told them to do. Because no one gets fired for running another lead gen campaign.
As an industry, we must reject “bothism” and replace it with something braver. I for one am sitting uncomfortably on this fence. Surely you are too?
Brand is the priority
For most B2B companies 60–80% of effort should skew towards brand building (depending on maturity). The remaining % supports activation and demand capture for those buyers who are in-market. That’s not “both equally”. Brand is the priority. These are my suggestions based on the thinking from Field, Binet, IPA & Ehrenberg Bass.
| Brand situation | Typical effective split |
| New entrant / category creator | 70-80% brand focus |
| Challenger brand (low category share) | 60-70% brand focus |
| Established growth brand | ~60% brand focus |
| Market leader / mature | 50-60% brand focus |
Distinctiveness is the entry ticket
Before you obsess over messaging frameworks and value props – ask whether key buyers can recognise you instantly? Will they remember you tomorrow? Do you show up consistently at key CEPs? If not, nothing else matters. Be distinctive.
Differentiation is still critical – but later
Differentiation is a necessity at product-level. Your actual offering must have some reasonable differentiation. When buyers do compare you at the final moment, or even build an internal use case, you need a clear, defendable, compelling proposition and you need to reduce perceived risk. Be differentiated.
Brand salience is the whole game
Everything ladders up to one outcome. Being the brand that comes to mind when the need arises. Because when that happens, you’re on the shortlist, you’re trusted by default, you dramatically increase your odds of winning.
I used to have a friend who wanted to be a sports pundit. Whenever we’d speak about football, he’d say things like “Let’s see what the manager does.” and “The match could go either way.” Spoiler alert: he didn’t end up being a sports pundit. He ended up not having a job and going to raves twice a week. Maybe he’s an anomaly but the point of the story is simple; sitting on the fence gets you nowhere.
Sitting on the fence is the opposite of being strategic. The entire purpose of strategy is to define the playing field, work out how you’re going to win, and then win. You need an objective, direction, understanding of your environment, and enough skill to bring your vision to life.
“Bothism” avoids being wrong. But that’s not strategic. I think its directionless.
It avoids being wrong by avoiding being directional. And in B2B, that’s a problem. It’s slowly decaying trust in our industry – and the marketing function. The latest research shows boards are losing more faith in the marketing function, and CMOs feel like they have less credibility and authority.
The B2B brands that win are the ones that invest heavily in brand, show up consistently building association with a few key CEPs – building memory over time. They earn their place on buyers’ mental shortlists and do whatever they can to stay there.
It’s never 50/50. Almost never.
Commit to the right thing and stop sitting on the fence. Because it’s much more comfortable doing the right thing. In fact – just commit to something and you’ll notice the difference. Whether that be committing to the wrong thing and failing fast or committing to the right things and sticking it out. Just whatever you do, don’t be a fence-sitter.
