This article explores how behavioural science in B2B marketing challenges traditional thinking and what marketers should do differently.
Let me start with something I’ve done dozens of times without ever really questioning it.
You need your sales team to change their behaviour – maybe it’s a new process, a new tool, or the perennial favourite of actually using the content that marketing spent three months creating. You know the message needs to land, so you do what any sensible marketer does: you get the CRO to deliver it.
It works. It always works. But here’s the question I never used to ask – why?
The answer has a name: the messenger effect. Behavioural science tells us that people don’t just evaluate the message. They evaluate who is delivering it. The same words, from a different mouth, land completely differently. Status, credibility and perceived expertise all shape whether we accept what we’re being told, often before we’ve consciously processed the content itself. Most of us have been using this instinctively for years. We just didn’t know we were doing it, which means we weren’t using it as well as we could.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem – and the opportunity – that behavioural science offers B2B marketing.
The model we've been working with is incomplete
B2B marketing has largely been built on a simple assumption: buyers are rational. Give them the right information, make the business case, prove the ROI, and logic will do the rest. It’s a reasonable assumption – B2B purchases are significant, complex, and involve multiple stakeholders, so surely that forces rigour?
It doesn’t. At least, not in the way we think.
Decades of behavioural science research tell us that people – including senior executives signing off six or seven-figure contracts – don’t make decisions through pure rational analysis.
We use mental shortcuts to navigate complexity, what psychologists call heuristics.
We are influenced by how options are framed, by what our peers are doing and by how something makes us feel before we can articulate why. There’s a reason we use the cliché “nobody ever got sacked for buying IBM”. It wasn’t necessarily always the best product. But it was the safe choice, the one that felt defensible, the one that meant if it went wrong you could point to the fact that everyone else was doing it too. That’s not rational decision-making. That’s loss aversion and social proof doing the heavy lifting while the business case sat in a slide deck.
We are not computers running cost-benefit calculations, we are people making pressured decisions, under uncertainty, often in committees, with our reputations on the line.
B2B marketing that ignores this is leaving value on the table - it's talking to a version of the buyer that doesn't exist.
What this looks like in practice
Take loss aversion – one of the most robust findings in behavioural science. We feel the pain of a loss around 2.5x more acutely than we feel the pleasure of an equivalent gain, which means your buyer isn’t just weighing up what they might gain from choosing you. They’re also calculating – often unconsciously – what they stand to lose. Their reputation if it goes wrong. The political capital spent on championing an untested vendor. The disruption and risk of change itself.
Most B2B marketing talks almost exclusively about the upside. But if your buyer is quietly running a loss calculation in the background – and they almost certainly are – you’re only addressing half of what’s going on in their head.
The good news is, the fix isn’t complicated for once. Customer stories that talk honestly about implementation challenges, and how they were overcome, do more psychological work than a polished case study that makes everything look effortless – because a case study that looks too good to be true might actually be working against you.
The question most marketing briefs never ask
Here is where it gets uncomfortable, and I say this as someone who spent years nodding along to concepts like the messenger effect and loss aversion while continuing to write marketing aimed at a perfectly rational, emotionally uninvolved buyer who simply doesn’t exist. Drinking your own champagne is harder than it sounds.
The shift that behavioural science asks of us isn’t really about tactics. It’s about starting from a different question – less “what do we want to say?” and more “what is this person trying to decide, and what might be getting in the way?” That second question is one most marketing briefs never ask. But it’s often where the most useful answers live, because the barrier is rarely just a lack of information. It’s trust, or risk, or the fact that the wrong person is delivering the message.
These aren’t complicated questions. They just require us to start with the human rather than the message.
Where to start
You don't need a Masters in behavioural science to apply this - though it does help you win arguments at the pub.
After your next campaign or piece of content that worked, ask yourself why. What was the person trying to decide? What might have been stopping them? What did you do – deliberately or accidentally – that made the decision feel safer or clearer? There’s almost certainly a behavioural principle underneath it. Name it, understand it, and use it on purpose next time.
The best B2B marketing has always understood people. Behavioural science just gives us the language and the evidence to do it more deliberately – and with a much clearer idea of why it works.
The same questions apply before a campaign launches. When you are planning the next piece of content or the next buying journey, ask: what is this person trying to decide, and what might be getting in the way? Is the barrier a lack of information, or is it trust, or friction, or the fact that the ask feels too large? The answer will usually change what you build.
This is the thinking that sits at the heart of how Challenge approaches engagement. If behaviour explains why marketing works or fails, then designing for behaviour rather than broadcast is not a nice-to-have. It is where the work starts.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ginny Follen is a GAABS-accredited behavioural scientist and B2B marketing specialist with almost 20 years' experience in tech marketing. She works with Challenge as its behavioural science lead.
