Updated July 2026. By Remy Beaumont, co-founder, Ignita.
The rational B2B buyer, the spreadsheet-wielding committee member who scores vendors on features and picks the highest number, does not exist. Two decades of research from CEB, Gartner, Forrester, Ehrenberg-Bass and Binet and Field shows business buying is driven by fear, identity and social proof far more than by ROI models. If your launch strategy still assumes a rational B2B buyer, you are marketing to a persona the data cannot find.
Key takeaways
B2B buyers who see personal value in a purchase are almost 50% more likely to buy, and personal value carries 2x the impact of business value, according to CEB and Google's From Promotion to Emotion study of more than 3,000 B2B buyers.
60% of technology buyers involved in renewal decisions regret nearly every purchase they make, per a 2023 Gartner survey. Rational processes do not produce that much remorse.
Emotional B2B campaigns outperform rational ones over the long term, per Binet and Field's analysis for the LinkedIn B2B Institute.
Millennials and Gen Z now make up 71% of B2B buyers, per Forrester's Buyers' Journey Survey, and they carry consumer psychology straight into procurement.
Only about 5% of your category is in market at any moment, per the Ehrenberg-Bass 95:5 rule, so launches must build memory and feeling, not just transmit features.
Why does this matter now?
Because the people doing the buying have changed and the numbers have caught up with the theory. Forrester reports that millennials and Gen Z now comprise 71% of B2B buyers, and over two thirds of buyers on transactions above $1 million are from these generations. These are people who research everything the way they shop, in feeds, communities and group chats. Gartner's 2025 sales survey found 61% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, which means your brand does the persuading long before a human does. We covered the generational half of this shift in depth in Gen Z B2B buyers now run the deal.
Meanwhile the supposed rationality of business buying keeps failing its own audit. If B2B purchases were the output of a dispassionate scoring exercise, buyers would be satisfied. Instead, Gartner finds 60% of technology buyers involved in renewals regret nearly every purchase they make. That is not a rational system with occasional errors. That is an emotional system wearing a rational costume.
What the research shows
The foundational study is CEB and Google's From Promotion to Emotion, which surveyed more than 3,000 B2B buyers across 7 industries. Three findings matter most. First, B2B buyers are more emotionally connected to the brands they buy than consumers are, not less. Second, buyers who perceive personal value, such as career advancement or pride in the choice, are almost 50% more likely to purchase. Third, personal value has 2x the impact of business value on the decision. The same study found 86% of buyers see no meaningful difference between vendors, which means the tiebreaker is rarely the feature grid.
Binet and Field's work for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, the first B2B cut of the IPA effectiveness dataset, found emotional campaigns beat rational ones on long-term growth, and recommended roughly a 50/50 split between brand building and sales activation. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's 95:5 rule completes the picture: about 95% of category buyers are out of market at any given time, so most of your marketing is consumed by people who cannot act on it yet, and what survives until they can act is memory and feeling, not specification detail.
Why do B2B buyers feel more, not less, than consumers?
Because the stakes are personal even when the money is corporate. A consumer who buys the wrong trainers loses money. A manager who champions the wrong platform loses standing, and sometimes a job. CEB's researchers concluded this is exactly why emotional attachment runs higher in B2B: the purchase is entangled with career risk, reputation and identity. Fear of blame, not love of features, is the dominant emotion in the buying committee. The old line that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM was never a joke about rationality. It was an accurate description of how risk psychology decides deals.
If emotion wins, why do B2B decks still lead with ROI slides?
Three reasons. First, measurement bias: rational activation is easy to attribute, emotional brand building is not, so budgets follow the dashboard rather than the buyer. Second, the rational framing flatters everyone involved. Procurement gets to look objective and vendors get to look scientific, so both sides maintain the costume. Third, most marketers are still optimising for the 5% who are in market this quarter, where rational comparison content does help, while ignoring the 95% whose eventual shortlist is being formed emotionally right now. The ROI slide is not wrong. It is just the receipt, not the reason. Buyers decide with feeling, then collect rational evidence to justify the decision internally.
What do Workday and Gong prove about emotional B2B?
Workday, an ERP vendor in one of the least glamorous categories in software, put rock stars in a Super Bowl ad. Trade coverage of the results reported brand consideration up 65%, global awareness up 14%, trust up 24% and leads up 50%. Gong took the same logic on a startup budget, buying regional Super Bowl spots in sales-heavy metros instead of a national slot, and generated its biggest inbound pipeline week to that point on a six-figure total spend. Both brands treated business buyers as humans watching television, not procurement functions reading datasheets, and both were rewarded in pipeline, the metric rational marketers claim to care about most.
The Ignita insight: emotion in B2B is blame insurance, and the insurer has changed
Here is what most coverage of this research misses. The dominant emotion in B2B buying is not excitement, it is fear of being blamed, so the practical job of B2B marketing is to make choosing you feel defensible. What has changed is where buyers source that defence. The previous generation bought blame insurance from analysts and incumbency: a Gartner quadrant, a big logo, a long RFP. The 71% of buyers who are now millennial or Gen Z buy it from visible social consensus: the founder they follow, the community thread, the fact that their feed already trusts you.
That reframes what a launch is for. A launch is not a feature disclosure event for the 5% in market. It is a cultural proof event for the 95% who will buy later, engineered so that when a future champion pitches you internally, the room has already heard of you and the choice feels safe. This is why we treat launches as cultural brand building first and announcements second, the thinking behind our guide to what a launch narrative is and why your startup needs one. Momentum people can point at is the modern quadrant.
What founders and marketers should do
Rewrite your core message around the champion's personal win, not the company's business case. Career safety, status and pride are the levers with 2x the impact.
Split investment roughly 50/50 between brand building and activation, per Binet and Field, rather than funnelling everything into bottom-of-funnel capture.
Market to the 95%. Plan launch moments that create memory and social proof for buyers who will not purchase this quarter.
Build blame insurance deliberately. Make customer voices, community presence and founder visibility easy for a champion to screenshot into an internal Slack. Founder-led trust is the strongest version of this, as we showed in our breakdown of B2B influencer marketing.
Sound like a person. Gong's rule that B2C simply talks like a human being is the cheapest competitive advantage in B2B copy.
Serve the rep-free majority. Since 61% prefer to buy without a rep, your public content must carry the emotional and rational load a salesperson used to.
Audit your brand for how it makes a 29-year-old buying lead feel about defending you. If the answer is nothing, start with positioning. Talk to us about your brand and launch narrative, or browse more research in our insights hub.
FAQ
Is the rational B2B buyer completely a myth?
Rational analysis exists, but the evidence shows it functions mostly as justification. CEB and Google found personal value has 2x the impact of business value, so emotion leads and logic follows.
What is the 95:5 rule in B2B marketing?
Ehrenberg-Bass research popularised by the LinkedIn B2B Institute showing about 95% of category buyers are not in market at any given time, so marketing must build memory for future buyers, not just capture current demand.
Does emotional marketing actually work in B2B?
Yes. Binet and Field's IPA dataset analysis found emotional campaigns outperform rational ones long term, and Workday's rock star campaign lifted consideration 65% and leads 50%.
Why do so many B2B buyers regret their purchases?
Gartner found 60% of technology buyers involved in renewals regret nearly every purchase, driven by distributed buying teams, unexpected costs and difficult implementations. Regret at that scale signals decisions made under social and emotional pressure rather than pure analysis.
How do younger B2B buyers decide differently?
Forrester data shows millennials and Gen Z, now 71% of buyers, research through digital and social channels, prefer rep-free buying and hold vendors to consumer-grade standards, with 90% reporting dissatisfaction with a vendor in at least one area.
What should a startup change first?
Message the champion's personal value, not just ROI, and design your launch to create visible social proof the 95% will remember when they enter the market.
If this reframed how you think about your buyers, we write one research-backed piece like this every week. Join Ignita's free Substack here.
