Jason M. Lemkin says 80% of B2B buyers decide based on brand, not product features. Word-of-mouth drives most leads. As search shifts from Google to ChatGPT, old marketing playbooks won't work anymore.
80% (speaker claim).
Approximately 95% (speaker claim).
You know, brand again, 80% of buyers buy based on brand.
I'm kind of curious from a marketing perspective, specifically brand, where, you know, how you think about the importance of brand in this new reality and any insights you might have about how AI and humans kind of fit into that, you.
Know, brand again, 80% of buyers buy based on brand. Maybe actually, you know, 95% are influenced by brand and 80% by the market leader, the one or two choice. And most of my generation, when Aaron and I started together and David Sacks and people, we thought brand was stupid. We're like, this is what old fogies say, right? This is like Mad Men. It's like, we do plg, we close customers, we build great. Brand is what losers talk. Like, brand doesn't work on the Internet. Like when we were starting in SaaS, David and me and others. But then you hit 10 million and 20 million and then they all come because of your brand, right? And so you learn that, wow, I was wrong. Brand is like most of the gaming marketing. And you're like, now I kind of get why the big companies like Adobe, everyone does brand, right? Because everyone's heard of Adobe. So your job is that when you're top of mind, you buy Adobe and not somebody else. But they've already heard of you, right? So super important. That's not going to change what I am, what I'll break on. And this is my caveat and my advice is it doesn't mean you can run the 2021 playbook. And what I've already seen happen. And it worries me. And when I tell people it worries me, they get mad at me. A lot of people, no one here got mad at me. But I worry when marketers, brand marketers just want to keep doing the crap they did before. And some of it works. Like, these booths are going to work. We'll be objective. We'll tell you how these booths perform. I bet they perform better than last year. Okay. And so do the ads. But that alone is not demand gen. That alone is not turning every interaction into a highly personal and personalized interaction like Yamini said. So brand is the ultimate answer. But you got to earn the brand, right? You got to earn the brand. And ultimately. And a different way of looking at it in B2B. And then we'll break a different way of looking at brand. Is that whatever data you look at in B2B? And HubSpot used to publish this. I put it on Saster. Everyone gets most of their leads from word of mouth at scale. Okay? I didn't. When I was a founder at first and back in the days of Aaron and David, I went to a founder event at Intuit in Mountain View, and the founder came out and he said, you know, when I founded into it, we had CD ROMs and floppy disks in CompUSA and then we sold software in the stores. And it was. But he said, and then it was then that we learned how to use dial up. And then he went on and on and it sounded like a kind of a silly story. And he said, everything's changed. Intuit. Except one thing. Since I found it, Intuit, 80% of our customers have come from word of mouth. Now, how that word of mouth, that flywheel has been accelerated, whether it's virality, whether it's whatever, but still, at the end of day, it's 80% word of mouth. And brand's gonna reinforce that. But the way you reinforce that word of mouth is gonna continue to evolve in this age. And the most stressful example is SEO going to ChatGPT. People are still searching for brands, right? But what that means is so different than a Google search, right? So if you meet a marketer and I listen, I am getting tired and I know this is a really tough ask of a marketer in May, but if they don't understand what they're gonna do about the fact that search is going from SEO to ChatGPT, and I don't know the answer, but I know the issues, probably can't hire them, right? Because brand still matters. But the way you get it is it's changing. So those are my best thoughts. And we'll do more on brand. We'll do more on brand and the way it matters over the coming year because it's a good topic. So thank you.
