Why Manufacturing Innovation Needs Brand

Josh Heaton, Head of Growth Strategy
May 12, 2026

In 1991, Intel did something so monumentally stupid, by the standards of conventional B2B marketing, that it should have ended several careers.

The company started spending enormous sums advertising to people who were not, and could never be, its direct customers.

Intel made microprocessors. It sold them in industrial quantities to Compaq, IBM, Dell, HP. A few dozen accounts mattered. The procurement teams inside those companies had engineers who could read a datasheet and knew exactly how an Intel 486 stacked up against whatever AMD was shipping. By the modern B2B marketing textbook, Intel should have been running technical webinars and golf days.

Instead, Intel put a small holographic sticker on the front of every PC and pumped billions of dollars into making ordinary computer buyers – people who had never read a datasheet in their lives, feel that an Intel chip was the safe, modern, technically superior choice.

It worked. PC manufacturers ended up competing to make their Intel stickers more prominent. Consumers began requesting Intel chips by name. A microprocessor brand. With full consumer pull-through. Intel’s brand value climbed into the global top ten. Its market dominance held for two decades. And it commanded a price premium over functional equivalents, year after year.

The lesson, if you want it, is this. The rational world is not where brand wars are won. Even in the most engineering-led, datasheet-saturated category on the planet, the brand built in the back of buyers’ mind decides what gets bought.

Industrial marketing, by and large, has still not internalised this.

The innovation-risk tension

We work with industrial and manufacturing brands every day. And in almost every one of them, the same quiet contradiction creates a real commercial problem.

The C-suite wants the brand seen as a technology leader. Innovation, transformation, AI, digital twinning, automation, ESG – every word that lands on a strategy slide each January. The buyer research backs up what we keep seeing in the field: most manufacturing buyers want their organisations to adopt new technology and be seen as leaders in innovation. But the majority say they cannot tell competing vendors apart – a figure that climbs even higher in smaller businesses.

That is the tension. Buyers under pressure to lead on innovation. Privately uncertain. Surrounded by suppliers who all sound the same. Personally accountable when the decision blows up.

So what they do?

They take the shortcut. They make the choice that is easiest to defend at a board meeting if it all goes wrong. They pick the brand they have heard of. They pick the brand that feels safe.

This is not rationality. It is emotion. The buyer is not optimising for the best product – they are optimising for the feeling of not being blamed. The more pressure they are under, the stronger that pull becomes.

When buyers cannot tell vendors apart on the merits, they fall back on signals. The polish of the website. The weight of the brochure. The fit and finish of the product in their hands. A brand that gets the visible details right signals it gets the invisible ones right – engineering, support, supply chain. Buyers might not say it. They feel it.

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM

The line was never an official IBM campaign. It emerged in IT procurement circles in the 1970s and 1980s as folk wisdom about how buying decisions actually get made.

IBM was not always the best. It was often more expensive. The technical case for choosing a competitor was frequently stronger. But the career case for choosing IBM was unanswerable. Buyers were buying insurance.

In industrial markets, safe and known are the same word. The brand that gets remembered gets shortlisted. The brand that doesn’t, doesn’t.

The 95% problem

The people doing the remembering are mostly not the 5% of buyers in market today. They are the 95% who will be in market over the next several years.

At any given moment, only about 5% of B2B buyers are actively shopping. The other 95% are not searching, not reading your whitepaper, not opening your nurture email. They are doing their jobs.

But they are still receiving signals. They notice who is at the trade show, who appears in the trade press, who their colleague mentioned, who has the famous campaign. They are building a mental model of the category – a list of brands that are “the kind of brand we use.” When the moment finally comes, that mental model is the shortlist. The decision is made years before the RFP is issued.

If your marketing budget is concentrated on the 5%, you are competing for whatever falls out of someone else’s pre-built shortlist.

Brand decay is memory decay

When brand reinforcement stops, memory structures wither. The brand becomes unfamiliar. And in complex industrial decisions, unfamiliar equals unsafe.

This is the bit that catches marketers off guard. It is not that buyers stopped liking you. It is that buyers stopped thinking of you. And once a brand slips out of the mental shortlist, it becomes the risky choice – not because anyone decided it was, but because no one defaulted to it anymore.

We have seen this happen, repeatedly, to category leaders. NPS still rising. Customers still loyal. Products still excellent. Aided awareness down fifteen points. Consideration down twelve. Purchase intent quietly bleeding out.

These brands are not losing because they got worse. They lose because nobody thinks of them in a buying situation.

What it looks like when an industrial brand actually behaves like one

Two cases. Both documented in the IPA Effectiveness Databank. Both in categories the orthodoxy says are too “rational” for emotion.

Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, 2013–2015. The light commercial vehicle market is the picture of B2B rationality – tradespeople and fleet managers buying functional machinery, every competitor talking cargo volume and fuel economy. VW did something unhinged by industry standards. They stopped talking to drivers about vans. They started talking to small business owners about the loneliness and emotional weight of running a company. The campaign was called Working With You. Awareness rose 30%. UK sales hit the highest level in the brand’s sixty-year history. The campaign returned £11 for every £1 spent.

BT Business, 2015–2017. The brand was perceived as corporate, distant, uninterested in its customers. Consideration was at all-time lows. So BT ran emotional creative – videos of public sector professionals expressing gratitude to one another through BT’s networks. Soft. Sentimental. Decidedly not technical. Econometric modelling later attributed 23% of all media-driven sales to that brand campaign. Cost per acquisition fell 17%. Campaign profit ROI hit 316%.

These are not vanity metrics. They are hard, modelled, commercial outcomes – in categories the rulebook said had no business being emotional.

What actually works

The evidence on B2B growth has been sitting in plain sight for years. Briefly:

One. Set share of voice above share of market. Ten extra points of share of voice produce roughly 0.7 points of market share growth a year – virtually identical to B2C. You cannot shrink your way to growth (no matter how much the CFO wants you to cut budget).

Two. Balance brand and activation roughly 60:40 (my personal view dialled up from the original Field & Binet B2B recommendation). Most industrial brands run the inverse, then wonder why the top of the funnel is empty.

Three. Pursue penetration, not loyalty. Brands grow by acquiring new customers, full stop. Customer loyalty-led B2B campaigns produced a zero hit rate on very-large business effects in the IPA data. Zero.

Four. Build mental availability through distinctive brand assets. Colour, logo, typography, character, sonic cue. Used consistently, they become mental shortcuts. Used inconsistently, they are decoration.

Five. Leverage emotion, or at the very least, don’t be not dull. B2B fame campaigns outperform rational ones by roughly 10x on very-large business effects. Whilst dull rational advertising is 6.1 times more expensive in media cost. There is a tax on being boring, and most industrial brands are paying it.

The point

Rory Sutherland is fond of pointing out that the opposite of a good idea is usually another good idea. The opposite of “build a more efficient product” is “build a more famous product” – and the second one tends to be cheaper, faster, and more effective than the first.

If you are a manufacturing marketer reading this, you almost certainly have a better product than you have a brand. You almost certainly have more latent demand than you have remembered presence. And you are almost certainly under quarterly pressure to do more activation when what you actually need is more brand.

Innovation, however transformative, only gets adopted by people who already trust the company shipping it. That trust is built years in advance, through the evidence-based, distinctive, emotional work that most of your competitors are too rational (or afraid) to do.

Which is, of course, my entire point.

The shortlist test

The 95% of buyers who are not in market today are quietly building tomorrow’s shortlist. Most industrial brands have no idea where they sit in it.

We run a private, 60-minute Shortlist Diagnostic for industrial marketing teams. You leave with:

• A read on your mental availability against your category
• An honest assessment of your distinctive brand assets (what is working, what is decoration)
• Two or three high-level strategic recommendations specific to your brand and market

Your category, your challenge, our hours.

Email  josh.heaton@armstrongb2b.com to book.

Sources

• Binet, L. & Field, P. (2020). The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing. The B2B Institute / LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn & GWI (2025). The Innovation Imperative for Manufacturing Marketers.
• Sharp, B. How Brands Grow. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
• Dawes, J. (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute) — the 95:5 rule.
• Sutherland, R. (2019). Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense. WH Allen.
• Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow — availability and affect heuristics.
• IPA Effectiveness Databank cases: Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Working With You (Adam & Eve DDB); BT Business (AMV BBDO).
• Intel Inside campaign history, 1991 onward.
• Field, P. — analysis of dullness in IPA advertising effectiveness data.
• ArmstrongB2B^® (2026). Protecting Brand in Industrial Markets: Why Innovation Needs Brand.