Author: Simon Attard
The Spreadsheet Was Never the Real Reason
I have watched buyers choose the more expensive option, the slower supplier, the smaller firm, and then build a business case to explain a choice they had already made. The numbers were real. They were also
assembled after the fact, to defend a decision that came from somewhere else.
This is the part of B2B that people are reluctant to say out loud. We tell ourselves that business buying is rational, that procurement is cold, that professionals leave their feelings at the door. It is a
comforting story. It is also wrong. The purchase order is the last step, not the first. What happens before it is far more human than any tender document admits.
Nobody Wants to Be the Person Who Got It Wrong
To understand emotion in business buying, start with fear. Not fear in a dramatic sense, but the quiet, personal kind. A buyer is not only choosing a supplier. They are putting their judgement and their
reputation on the line in front of colleagues who will remember if it goes wrong.
Research from Google and the CEB Marketing Leadership Council found that business buyers are actually more emotionally connected to their vendors than ordinary consumers, not less. The reasoning is simple once you sit with it. The stakes are higher. A consumer who buys the wrong shoes loses an afternoon. A manager who signs off the wrong software or the wrong agency can lose credibility, budget, and in some cases their job. As the researchers put it, the business customer will not buy unless there is enough of an emotional connection to overcome that risk. Confidence, not information, is what closes the gap.
The Research Says Business Buyers Are More Emotional, Not Less
This is not a single study talking to itself. Look across the marketing literature and the same pattern keeps surfacing. Analysts at Fifty Five and Five argue that the logical brain and the emotional heart carry roughly equal weight in business buying, and that the real drivers are recognisably human: fear of getting it wrong, frustration with a problem that will not go away, desire for something better, and genuine excitement about what a change could unlock.
The brand consultancy DeSantis Breindel makes a related point. When a company is clear about why it exists, it becomes easier to trust, because the buyer is no longer weighing a faceless vendor but a set of people whose intentions they can read. Trust is not a soft extra in B2B. It is the mechanism that lets a
nervous buyer say yes.
But Emotion Alone Does Not Sign the Contract
Here is where I part ways with the more excitable version of this argument. There is a fashionable idea that B2B is simply emotional and marketers should stop worrying about the rational case. That goes too far, and the better thinkers in this space know it.
The LinkedIn B2B Institute, drawing on the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the analysis of Les Binet and
Peter Field, popularised a sobering observation: at any given moment only around five percent of business buyers are actually in the market. The other ninety five percent are not ready to buy anything
from anyone. Emotion and brand do their work on that ninety five percent, keeping you remembered and trusted until the day they need you. But for the five percent who are ready now, the rational case
still matters. They want proof: case studies, references, evidence that you have done this before and did not let anyone down. Binet and Field’s own guidance, that marketing works best when it balances long
term brand building with short term rational persuasion, exists precisely because neither one works alone.
Emotion gets you into the room. It does not, by itself, get you the signature.
Feeling Gets You Shortlisted, Proof Gets You Chosen
So the honest picture is a sequence, not a battle. Emotion decides who gets considered. A buyer gravitates toward the firm that feels safe, credible and human, often before a single spreadsheet is opened. Then, once you are on the shortlist, logic decides who wins, because the buyer needs a defensible reason to give the people around them.
Miss the first stage and you never get to compete on the second. This is why so much technically excellent marketing quietly fails. The capability is real, the pricing is fair, the deck is thorough, and
none of it lands, because the buyer never felt anything strong enough to shortlist you. You cannot logic your way onto a list you never emotionally qualified for.
What This Changes About How You Show Up
For a business owner, the practical shift is this. Stop treating trust as something that happens after the pitch and start building it long before the buyer is ready. That means a brand that signals
seriousness, a clear reason you exist, real evidence of past work, and a consistent presence, so that when the five percent moment arrives, you are already the name they reach for.
We saw this closely with Investate, a financial services brand where the entire buying decision rests on trust. In that world nobody signs with a firm that feels uncertain about itself. The work was not decoration. A considered identity, a brand video and a coherent presence existed to make a cautious buyer feel safe enough to commit. That feeling is not the opposite of a rational decision. It is what makes the rational decision possible.
None of this replaces substance. It earns you the chance to prove it.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Here is what I would leave you with. Think about the last significant supplier you chose for your own business. Be honest about the order things happened in. Did the evidence lead you to the feeling, or did
the feeling lead you to gather the evidence? Most owners, if they are truthful, recognise the second pattern in themselves. Your buyers are no different. Once you accept that, you stop marketing to a
spreadsheet and start marketing to a person who happens to be holding one.
How MYC Delivers This
At MYC we build the trust that earns the shortlist and the proof that wins the decision. For Mobil 1, through Lubricom, that meant a brand identity, website and expert content that turned into a genuine lead generation engine, credible to serious buyers and clear enough to act on. If you want your business to be the one that feels safe and stacks up under scrutiny, this is the work we do. Take a look at what that
looks like across our portfolio, and let us build the same for you.