There’s a stubborn reality in B2B: Brand building is somehow less essential than it is in consumer marketing. That it’s more a nice to have than a necessity. This myth is holding the entire B2B sector back.
Our inaugural 2025 ANA/Stein Brand-to-Demand Maturity Study, based on data from nearly one hundred B2B marketers, reveals a unique B2B contradiction: While 100 percent of marketers say integrating brand and demand is important, only 26 percent equally balance brand and demand investments. Moreover, 85 percent believe their companies underfund marketing.
This contradiction reflects a structural reality in B2B marketing, one shaped over decades by sales dominance, lead-generation obsession, and internal silos that never made sense but were never dismantled. The consequences of this reality are mounting.
Brand and Demand Silos: A B2B-Only Problem
In most B2C environments, campaigns are designed to build emotional connections anddrive sales. Not so in B2B. B2B teams are typically structured as parallel universes: one for brand, one for demand. Different teams, different budgets, different KPIs, and often different definitions of success. These organizational divisions are deeply entrenched and uniquely B2B. Brand is measured on awareness and consideration while demand is measured on MQLs. These metrics rarely align and often fail to convert to real growth.
The Cost of Disconnection
Let’s get specific:
- Companies that unify brand and demand generate 208 percent more marketing-sourced revenue, according to LinkedIn benchmarks included in our study.
- Only 3 percent of B2B companies report being “fully unified,” with integrated data, shared KPIs, full-funnel creative, and executive sponsorship.
- And yet, 46 percent of budgets are still skewed mostly toward demand, even though 72 percent of marketers want a balanced mix.
In other words: B2B knows what to do. It just isn’t doing it. Why? Because the structures we’ve built and the metrics we’ve institutionalized make it difficult -- also because it is hard.
Measurement: A Missed Opportunity
One challenge unique to B2B is the need to better demonstrate brand’s contribution using metrics that resonate as clearly as those tied to demand. Metrics that show brand’s full funnel contribution to growth
B2B marketing remains rooted in last-click attribution, siloed CRM systems, and dashboards that speak to campaign outputs, not business outcomes. In our survey, 90 percent of marketers identified measurement as a top priority, yet 65 percent called it one of their biggest challenges.
In the absence of strong measurement, demand gets the budget by default because it’s easier to defend, even when it’s less effective.
Are Marketing and the C-Suite on the Same Page?
Another uniquely B2B issue is the persistent gap between marketing and the C-suite. Only 36 percent of marketers believe their leadership sees brand-to-demand integration as strategically important. Yet in every single one of the “fully unified” companies we studied, C-suite sponsorship was 100 percent.
That correlation isn’t a coincidence.
This is where B2B marketing must level up: stop talking about “brand” in terms of emotion or storytelling and start talking about it in terms of contribution margin, future cash flow, and long-term growth efficiency. That’s the language of the boardroom and that’s how you secure real investment.
A Better B2B Model
Through Stein’s Brand-to-Demand Experience (BDX) Model, we’re working with B2B companies to solve these problems at the root. The model aligns creative, data, media, and measurement across the full funnel. It introduces a maturity scale and six capability pillars to help teams prioritize where to focus next.
We’re advocating for operational change that includes shared KPIs, connected tech stacks, cross-functional teams, and budgets that reflect the full buying journey. Companies like Juniper Networks, SAS, and CoreWeave are already doing this and they’re seeing real results: lower CAC, higher pipeline quality, better talent retention, and more scalable growth.
B2B Needs to Move Now
It’s time to break down how we approach growth. And it’s something B2B marketers are uniquely positioned to solve.
If we want marketing to drive business and not just support it, we need to rethink the structure. That means clearer roles, sharper metrics, and smarter investment. Brand and demand aren’t opposing forces in B2B. They’re interdependent. And if we keep treating brand as optional, we’ll keep getting less-than-optimal results.
To learn more, download the ANA/Stein Brand-to-Demand Maturity Study.
This article was written by Sonia David and Tom Stein
A collaboration between the Association of National Advertisers and Stein
About Tom Stein
Chairman and Chief Brand Officer / Stein
Tom Stein is a founding partner of Stein, where he is closely involved in the agency’s strategic relationships with clients. He also currently serves as president of ANA Business Marketing NYC and was one of the first inductees into the ANA B2B Hall of Fame.
Mr. Stein works with clients and the industry to achieve modern marketing mastery as the entry point into B2B marketing’s post-modern era, where iconic creative and content experiences are combined with transformative data- and technology-driven interactions — seamlessly connecting brand to demand to business results. His blog, Blog Post Modern, contributes thought leadership and views from the world’s top CMOs on the topics that comprise post-modern marketing.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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