Why Strategy Matters More, Not Less, in the AI Era

 

Artificial Intelligence Is a Transforming Technology

It's now clear that artificial intelligence (AI) will transform how business is conducted in virtually every sector of the economy. While many AI concepts have existed for decades, OpenAI's public release of ChatGPT in November 2022 was a tipping point that triggered an arms race among technology companies to develop AI capabilities.

Spending on AI exploded in 2023 and has continued at a blistering pace since. In August of this year, Goldman Sachs projected that AI-driven capital spending in the U.S. will total $581 billion in 2026.

Spending in the U.S. for AI-related infrastructure is projected to total $10.3 trillion from 2025 to 2032 according to a September 2026 article in The Wall Street Journal. On average, that's a staggering 3.6% of U.S. GDP each year, and it dwarfs earlier infrastructure investments, including those for the railroads, the highway system, and the communications infrastructure for the internet.

Meanwhile, the functionality of AI technologies is increasing at a breathtaking pace, and the number of AI models, applications, and other tools is growing exponentially.

By one measure, the performance of the leading "frontier" large language models is doubling every seven months. BenchLM is currently ranking the performance of 228 models and tracking an additional 764 models. And, the Hugging Face repository now contains over 3 million AI models, datasets, and other tools. 

Most major business software providers - including Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Adobe, Hubspot, and a host of others - have already added AI capabilities to their platforms and applications, and more of this is almost certainly on the way.

AI is still far from perfect in many ways, and there are growing concerns about the dangers it could pose to our society if development continues to be unregulated. But, there is no longer any doubt that AI is quickly becoming pervasive and that it is already reshaping the landscape of business.

AI Won't Produce a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that many business leaders view AI as a strategic resource that can be a potent source of competitive advantage.

This belief is understandable, but it's flawed.

AI is rapidly becoming a competitive necessity for companies of most types and sizes, but core AI functions and basic "off-the-shelf" AI applications and tools won't produce a sustainable competitive advantage for most individual companies for two reasons.

AI Isn't Proprietary for Most Companies

First, the attribute that enables a resource to provide the basis for a sustainable competitive advantage is scarcity. When a resource is available to (and affordable by) all or most of the competitors in an industry or market, that resource won't produce a competitive advantage for any of the competitors.

As Nicholas Carr pointedly wrote more than two decades ago, "You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something they can't have or do." ("IT Doesn't Matter," Harvard Business Review May 2003)

Most significant technologies follow this rule. When a technology is widely available and broadly affordable, that technology isn't likely to provide  a competitive advantage to any individual company.

For a technology to provide a competitive advantage for an individual company, the technology must be proprietary. By proprietary, I mean the company must own or control access to the technology.

Most AI technologies are not proprietary to the end users of those technologies. For example, Anthropic owns Claude Opus 5.5, the company's flagship large language model. Therefore, Claude Opus 5.5 is a proprietary technology for Anthropic, and this enables the company to control access to the model and charge individuals and companies fees for the right to access and use the model.

Claude Opus 5.5 is not, however, proprietary to the end users of the model because all individuals and companies that license or "subscribe" to the model gain access to the same model features and functions.

Improvements in Operational Effectiveness Don't Produce Durable Advantage

The second reason AI won't usually produce a sustainable competitive advantage for an individual company is that many uses of AI are designed to improve operational effectiveness. For example, AI can be used to streamline business processes and increase worker productivity.

AI-driven improvements in operational effectiveness can enable a company to generate higher profits than competitors, but such superior performance is usually short-lived.

Improvements in operational effectiveness achieved through the use of AI rarely produce a durable competitive advantage for two reasons.

First, information about how to achieve such improvements tends to be disseminated broadly and quickly. It becomes a favored topic for blog articles and articles published at media outlets, and for webinars and conference presentations.

And second, projects involving the use of AI to improve operational effectiveness can usually be implemented relatively easily and quickly. Therefore, when such improvements are achieved by a company, they can be easily imitated by its competitors.

Michael Porter explained why improvements in operational effectiveness don't usually result in durable competitive advantage in these terms:

"Companies only gain advantages if they are able to achieve and sustain higher levels of operational effectiveness than competitors . . . Once a company establishes a new best practice, its rivals tend to copy it quickly. Best practice competition eventually leads to competitive convergence with many companies doing the same things in the same ways." ("Strategy and the Internet," Harvard Business Review, March 2001)

Judge AI Initiatives By Their Impact on Strategy

For the reasons just discussed, AI on its own is unlikely to provide the basis for a sustainable competitive advantage for most companies. That doesn't mean, however, that AI can't make a significant contribution to competitive advantage.

To maximize that contribution, company leaders should identify the uses of AI that will enhance the effectiveness of their company's overall business strategy. Put another way, leaders should focus on those AI applications that will boost their ability to win in their chosen target market.

This approach makes strategy enhancement the main criterion for evaluating prospective AI initiatives, and it enables company leaders to choose the AI initiatives that will have the biggest impact on their company's competitive advantage.

Image courtesy of Deepak Pal (www.iqlect.com) via Flicker (CC).

[Research Round-Up] New Insights on Blog Performance and Blogging Practices

Source:  Orbit Media Studios

(This month's Research Round-Up discusses some of the major findings in Orbit Media's 2026 survey regarding blog performance and blogging practices. The 2026 survey reveals that marketers' confidence in the performance of their blogs has declined substantially compared to last year. Orbit Media's discussion of the 2026 survey results provides one explanation for the sharp decrease in marketer confidence.)

Last month, Andy Crestodina and the team at Orbit Media Studios released the findings of their 2026 blogger research study. The findings were published in this post at the Orbit Media blog. 

The 2026 study consisted of a survey of 1,042 "content marketers." The blog post did not provide detailed information regarding the demographics of the survey respondents or indicate when the survey was conducted.

Orbit Media has been conducting this research since 2014, so they can provide a valuable perspective on how blog performance and blogging practices have evolved over the past 12 years.

Confidence in Blog Performance Declines

The chart at the beginning of this post shows the "headline" findings of the 2026 Orbit Media survey.

• Only 13.9% of the survey respondents said their blog "delivers strong results." That was six percentage points below the previous 12-year low.

• Meanwhile, 18.9% of the respondents said, "I don't know if the blog delivers results." The percentage of respondents expressing this view was at an all-time 12-year high.

In his post describing the survey results, Andy Crestodina, the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media noted that for the preceding ten years, between 20% and 30% of Orbit's survey respondents had said their blog delivers strong results, while only 9% to 14% of the respondents had indicated they didn't know how well their blog was working.

So, the 2026 survey results represent a significant change. As Crestodina observed, "Clearly, something happened."

What Explains the Decline in Confidence

The Orbit Media survey asked participants several questions about their blogging strategies and practices. The researchers then identified which strategies and practices were correlated with strong performance and which were correlated with weak performance.

For example, they found that the following strategies and practices were correlated with strong blog performance.

• Collaborating with influencers
• Using paid content promotion
• Frequent use of analytics
• Keyword research
• Publishing original research
• Using a formal editing process

Conversely, the following strategies and practices were correlated with poor blog performance.

• Publishing less visual content (visuals per post)
• Never researching keywords
• Publishing monthly or less
• Replacing human editors with AI

The Orbit Media research team then examined how the use of these strategies and practices by survey respondents had changed since 2016. Their analysis revealed that the use of all of the strategies and practices correlated with strong performance had declined, while the use of all the strategies and practices correlated with poor blog performance had increased. The following chart shows the results of this analysis.

Source:  Orbit Media Studios

This analysis led the Orbit Media researchers to conclude that the decline in marketer confidence about blog performance has occurred because the surveyed content marketers are using the most effective blog strategies less frequently and the least effective strategies and practices more frequently.

The Use and Impact of AI

Nearly every research study relating to marketing that I've reviewed over the past three years has addressed artificial intelligence in some way, and Orbit Media's 2026 blogging research is no exception.

The Orbit Media research team asked survey participants about nine blogging-related use cases for AI, and the survey produced four significant findings.

• Ninety-two percent (92%) of the survey respondents reported using AI in their blogging process.

• The surveyed content marketers reported using AI for fewer types of tasks. The percentage of survey respondents who said they are using AI declined for eight of the nine AI use cases identified in the survey, compared to the 2025 survey data.

• None of the AI use cases identified in the 2026 survey were correlated with blog performance.

• Users and non-users of AI were equally likely to say their blog produced strong results. However, non-users of AI were much more likely than AI users to say their blog produced disappointing results. As Andy Crestodina wrote in his blog post, "Using AI doesn't make you more likely to outperform. But not using AI appears to make you more likely to underperform."

Why Strategy Should Always Come Before Planning

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:"

Ecclesiastes 3:1 (King James Version)

The fourth quarter of 2026 will begin in four days, which means that many business leaders are already engaged or will soon be engaged in planning for 2027. Over the next several weeks, they will be evaluating how well their business performed this year and looking for ways to improve performance next year.

This annual ritual is usually called strategic planning, and the output of the process (in larger companies at least) is often a lengthy document that describes what company leaders want to accomplish in the coming year and what actions they intend to take.

Unfortunately, many business leaders confuse planning with strategy. They assume that the development of a "strategic" plan is equivalent to the formulation of a strategy.

In reality, formulating a strategy and developing plans are fundamentally different tasks. They require leaders to address different issues and, more importantly, they demand different types of thinking.

The Differences Between Strategy and Plans

In June 2022, Harvard Business Review published the following video featuring Roger L. Martin, the co-author of Playing to Win:  How Strategy Really Works, and one of today's leading authorities on strategy:

In this video, Martin discusses several important differences between strategy and plans.

As of a couple of days ago, the video had been viewed more than 6.7 million times, which almost certainly makes it one of the most widely viewed videos about business strategy ever published. If you haven't already seen the video, I strongly recommend you watch it, particularly if you're about to start your planning for next year.

Strategy and Planning Are Both Needed

While it's important to understand how strategy and planning differ, it's equally important to recognize that both are critical to business success.

A strategy is the result of making several closely-related choices that are intended to enable a company to establish competitive advantage.

To create a strategy, business leaders must choose where their company will compete (in what product or service categories, for what type(s) of customers, in what geographies, etc.), and they must describe how they believe their company can create value for their target customers that is superior to the value offered by competitors. Then, they need to identify the capabilities their company will need to be successful with their "where to compete" and "how to win" choices.

The strategy development process will usually reveal that a company needs to develop new capabilities or improve existing ones to enhance their odds of achieving success with their chosen strategy. This realization will cause business leaders to launch a set of initiatives or projects to develop or improve the necessary capabilities.

It's at this point that planning becomes critically important. Thorough planning enables company leaders and managers to effectively manage initiatives and projects by establishing clear objectives, timelines, and responsibilities for each initiative and by committing adequate resources (people, budget, etc.) to each project.

So, business success requires both a sound, market-informed strategy and thorough planning, but these management techniques must be used in the right sequence. Strategy formulation should always precede planning because every plan developed should be based on, and designed to support, the choices that define the company's strategy.

For example, a company's strategy will embody choices about what types of customers the company will seek to serve and how the company will create value for its target customers. It's impossible to develop a sensible marketing plan until those strategic choices have been made.

Having a strategy in place makes planning easier because the strategy provides guidance and "guardrails" for the planning process. The content of the strategy enables company leaders to identify the initiatives or projects that are necessary for the strategy to work and therefore are most likely to produce the desired outcomes.

To riff on a quotation usually attributed (probably incorrectly) to Sun Tzu:  "Strategy without planning is the slowest route to victory. Planning without strategy is the noise before defeat."

[Research Round-Up] Thought-Provoking Insights on the State of the CMO

Source:  Lippincott and Bloomberg Media

(This month's Research Round-Up features the CMO Outlook 2026 survey by Lippincott and Bloomberg Media. This research examines several important marketing issues from a unique perspective, and this approach makes the 100-page report well worth reading.)

Lippincott and Bloomberg Media recently published the results of their "CMO Outlook 2026" survey. The objectives of this study were to identify the major challenges today's CMOs are facing, and to "help marketers see their challenges differently."

The researchers contend that, while most CMOs face similar high-level challenges, the shape of the challenges faced by an individual CMO and how he or she responds to those challenges are largely determined by the organizational context in which the CMO is working.

About the Survey

The CMO Outlook 2026 survey produced 541 responses from CMOs or equivalent senior marketing leaders. Seventy-one percent (71%) of the respondents identified themselves as the "primary and senior-most marketing decision-maker" in their organization, while 29% said they were "amongst the senior-most marketing decision-makers" in their organization.

Thirty-three percent (33%) of the survey respondents were from the United States and Canada, and the balance were from Europe (22%), Asia-Pacific (22%), Latin America (20%), and the Middle East (2%).

The survey was conducted by NewtonX, an independent B2B market research firm.

Four Types of CMOs

What separates the Lippincott/Bloomberg study from others on similar topics is its focus on how the organizational context in which a CMO works affects the particular challenges they face and the actions they take to respond to those challenges.

The researchers identified four distinct cohorts of CMOs. Two of those cohorts consist of CMOs who are "organizationally empowered," and the other two cohorts include CMOs who are "organizationally constrained."

Organizationally empowered CMOs are those working in organizations where the value of marketing  is understood and recognized by the CEO and other senior leaders, and where the CMO can influence the strategic direction of the organization.

Organizationally constrained CMOs are those working in organizations where the strategic value of marketing is not widely recognized, and where marketing is generally viewed as a support function.

The researchers identified two types of organizationally empowered CMOs - Transformation Leaders and Revenue Drivers.

• Transformation Leaders - "Transformation Leaders are future-oriented marketers focused on transformation at scale, AI adoption, and long-term capability building . . . these CMOs tend to hold significant strategic authority within their companies and see marketing as a driver of broader business direction."

• Revenue Drivers - "Revenue Drivers are commercially oriented operators focused on measurable growth, demand generation, and business accountability . . . these CMOs have earned organizational trust by speaking the language of performance:  Revenue, pipeline, and attributable impact. They . . . excel at balancing immediate business pressures with longer-term growth mandates."

The researchers also identified two types of organizationally constrained CMOs - Credibility Builders and Institutional Navigators.

• Credibility Builders - "Credibility Builders are marketers fighting to establish credibility and strategic standing within their organizations. More likely to be . . . in organizations where marketing is viewed primarily as sales enablement, these CMOs spend a disproportionate amount of time proving marketing's value internally."

• Institutional Navigators - "These CMOs often hold respected positions within the business, yet operate in environments slowed by fragmented decision-making, excessive approvals, and rigid structures . . . they are not fighting to earn a seat at the table; they are fighting to make the table move."

Unfortunately, the study report does not indicate the percentage of survey respondents who fall into each of these four CMO cohorts or what criteria were used to place each respondent in the appropriate cohort.

Other Findings

The Lippincott/Bloomberg study also addresses a range of other important issues. For example, the study report identifies five primary challenges today's CMOs are facing.

• Driving growth
• Navigating bureaucracy
• Measuring impact
• Technological enablement in the age of AI
• Culture-based marketing

The study report does not discuss how these challenges were identified, nor does it provide any data supporting their selection. It does include a thoughtful discussion of how CMOs are addressing these five challenges.

*****

The Lippincott/Bloomberg survey report provides several important insights about the "state of the CMO." While the report does not include some data points that I think should have been included, the views expressed in the report are well-reasoned and thought-provoking. For that reason, I recommend that you take the time to review the full report.

Strategy Has Assimilated Many Aspects of Marketing, and That's Not Necessarily Bad

"We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."

Over the past half century, strategy has become the primary mechanism senior company leaders use to make decisions about the future of their business and design their gameplan for success. During that period, the strategy discipline has assimilated many marketing principles, methods, and tools into the strategy development process. 

This post discusses why the assimilation occurred and why it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Just over five years ago, Roger L. Martin, the co-author of Playing to Win:  How Strategy Really Works, wrote that marketing and strategy have become one discipline. He reiterated his position earlier this year. 

Martin argued that, during its formative years, the marketing discipline was primarily focused on the interactions between a company and customers. Competitors weren't completely absent from marketing, but they weren't a primary focus.

Meanwhile, during its early years, the business strategy discipline was primarily focused on the interactions between a company and its competitors, with little attention being given to customers.

Martin gives Michael Porter credit for triggering the intellectual convergence of marketing and strategy. In his two seminal books, Competitive Strategy (1980) and Competitive Advantage (1985), Porter identified differentiation as one of his three generic strategies. 

To successfully implement a differentiation strategy, company leaders must deeply understand their customers, and that requirement, Martin wrote, "brought customers formally into the strategy equation."

Martin argued that the evolution of both disciplines has made marketing and strategy virtually "indistinguishable." He wrote:

"The full addition of competitors to the marketer's focus and of customers to the strategist's focus has caused the jobs of marketers and strategists to converge on the same thing . . . They now have the same job - just with different titles."

Overlapping Issues, Principles, Tools, and Processes

I don't think marketing and strategy have converged quite as much as Martin suggests - at least not yet. But, there is no doubt that both disciplines now deal with many of the same issues and use many of the same principles, tools, and processes, as the following diagram illustrates.

This diagram shows that several consequential business issues, decisions, and actions now reside in both disciplines. But, the diagram doesn't tell the whole story.

Strategy Has Assimilated Many Aspects of Marketing

As I noted earlier, the seminal work of Michael Porter in the early 1980's made customer-related issues an integral part of the strategy discipline. Over the ensuing four decades, the strategy discipline has assimilated many marketing principles and methods and incorporated them into the strategy development process. Think of the Borg in "Star Trek."

As a result, many core marketing concepts and practices, such as market segmentation, targeting, and customer needs analysis, are now widely seen as essential elements of the strategy development/strategic management process. In essence, the evolution of the strategy discipline over the past 40-plus years has transformed  numerous important marketing concepts and actions into strategy concepts and actions.

Several marketing scholars have expressed views about the relationship between strategy and marketing that aren't too dissimilar from Roger Martin's.

For example, in an article appearing in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, George S. Day, now the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote:

"Paradoxically, the deeper marketing is embedded within an organization and becomes the defining theme for shaping competitive strategy, the more likely is the role of marketing as a distinct function to be diminished . . . Perhaps marketing and strategic planning will merge into a single core function responsible for keeping the firm focused on the changing marketplace . . . In this scenario, the responsibility for understanding customers and making sure the firm delivers superior value to them will become part of everyone's job description."

Ironically, this is close to the outcome Peter Drucker had in mind in 1973 when he wrote:

"Marketing is so basic that it cannot be considered a separate function . . . it is, first, a central dimension of the entire business . . . Concern and responsibility for marketing must, therefore, permeate all areas of the enterprise."[1]

Assimilation Isn't Necessarily Bad

The assimilation of marketing principles and methods into the strategy discipline isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can, in fact, be a net positive for a  company if the "assimilated" marketing concepts and methods are used correctly. Here's why.

First, when a company's strategy-makers incorporate marketing principles and methods into their strategy development process, the resulting business strategy is more likely to embody a sound market and customer orientation.

And second, business strategy is usually formulated by the CEO and other members of a company's top management team, and these senior executives will typically make a concerted effort to ensure their chosen strategy is instilled in all parts of their organization. Therefore, when a market and customer orientation is embedded in a company's business strategy, there is a greater likelihood such an orientation will, in Drucker's words, "permeate all areas of the enterprise."

Top image courtesy of JamesinOregon via Flickr (CC).

[1] Drucker, Peter F., Management Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1973).

Why You Shouldn't Rely Too Much on Best Practices

Many marketing leaders and frontline marketers have a "thing" for marketing best practices. And, it's easy to understand why.

Marketing success is difficult to achieve and even harder to sustain because the marketing environment is always changing and because it's incredibly hard to predict what marketing methods and messages will resonate with potential buyers.

Under these circumstances, it can feel immanently reasonable to identify the marketing tactics successful, high-performing companies are using and then emulate those practices. So, it shouldn't be surprising that many marketers are enamored with "proven" best practices.

Marketers often see best practices as effective and reliable tools for achieving marketing success, but the reality is more complicated.

Best practices can be helpful when they're understood correctly and used appropriately, but it's easy for marketers to become enthralled by their benefits and forget about their limitations. Two of those limitations are particularly important.

They Don't Tell the Whole Story 

Most marketing best practices come with an explicit or implicit promise:  Use this practice and your marketing performance will improve significantly. However, the reality is rarely that simple.

A marketing best practice typically describes a single aspect of marketing or a small set of related marketing activities. But, marketing success usually results from the combined effects of numerous factors, many of which the best practice doesn't address. Therefore, a best practice rarely provides a complete "formula" that will guarantee a large-scale improvement in marketing performance.

Francois Bazini discussed this issue in a column published last month in Marketing Week. Bazini wrote:

"One of marketing's most persistent habits is to turn successful outcomes into portable principles. We see a company win, a brand grow or a challenger break through, and immediately begin asking what others can learn from it . . .

More often, the useful question is not whether the example is impressive, but what exactly made it work.

This is how many best practices are born. We look at successful companies, list what they did, and start connecting the winning dots . . . Each observation may be true. The mistake is to assume that each one explains the success or think it will produce the same results somewhere else."

Our tendency to treat best practices as "portable principles" and all-inclusive formulas for success is what Phil Rosenzweig called "The Delusion of Single Explanations" in The Halo Effect . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. 

These days, many of the products we buy come with warning labels highlighting the bad things that can happen if we don't use the product correctly. Most marketing best practices should come with this warning label:

WARNING:  Marketing success results from the interplay of numerous activities and conditions, not all of which are addressed in this practice. Therefore, the use of this practice may produce less-than-expected results if other factors required for success are absent.

Widespread Use Reduces Effectiveness

One of the most paradoxical characteristics of marketing best practices is that the more widely they are used, the less effective they tend to become.

Marketing best practices can derive their effectiveness from several sources. A practice can be effective because it is based on sound business principles, or because it resonates with how potential customers make decisions, or because it leverages the capabilities of a particular medium of communication.

But, best practices are also often effective because they are exceptional. When a best practice is new, it tends to be used by only a few companies. Therefore, the practice stands out in the marketplace and more effectively captures the attention of potential customers. The distinctiveness also serves to differentiate the company using the practice from its competitors.

Unfortunately, though, as more and more companies adopt and use a best practice, it will lose some of the distinctiveness that made it highly effective.

Image courtesy of James Whatley via Flickr (CC).

Why Your Marketing Tactics May Be Out-of-Sync with How Your Customers Actually Buy

Marketing WITHOUT Market Research

The results of several recent surveys of business buyers suggest that many of the marketing tactics currently used by B2B companies are based on an inaccurate picture of how business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

Here are four of the most noteworthy surveys:

• The 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Study by 6sense

• The "buyability" research by LinkedIn and Bain & Company[1]

• A 2022 survey by Bain & Company and Google

• A 2021 survey by WSJ Intelligence and B2B International

Taken together, these surveys paint a picture of B2B buyer behavior that differs significantly from the model used by most B2B marketers. For example, they suggest that:

• Most of a company's potential customers are not actively evaluating the kinds of products or services the company offers at any given time. A trigger of some kind is usually required to motivate a potential customer to begin an active buying process, and marketing programs alone are rarely sufficient to cause a potential customer to initiate a buying process.

• At or near the beginning of a buying process, most buying groups create a list of potential vendors they believe are worth considering, i.e. an initial consideration set. The initial consideration set is created before most members of the buying group have conducted any research and is based on the mental impressions they've formed from a variety of touchpoints such as their prior first-hand experiences, marketing messages, news reports, and conversations with colleagues and peers.

• When a buying process begins, most members of the buying group are likely to be familiar with the product or service category involved in the prospective purchase. Many will have already been involved in several buying processes involving the same category.

• Many buying groups not only create an initial consideration set, they also rank the potential vendors in their consideration set in order of preference before they engage with any of the potential vendors.

• Most buying groups make almost all of their purchases from vendors in their initial consideration set, and most buy from the vendor they ranked at the top of their shortlist.

These survey results indicate that many of the marketing tactics used by B2B companies are out-of-sync with real-world B2B buyer behaviors. For example:

• B2B marketers frequently run marketing programs designed to persuade potential buyers to begin a buying process, but the research suggests that such programs are largely ineffective.

• Most B2B marketers assume that most members of the buying group are not familiar with potential solutions when the buying process begins, and therefore they create a significant amount of "educational" content. However, the research suggests that most buyers are already familiar with most potential solutions at the beginning of the buying process.

• Most B2B marketing efforts are focused on buyers who are engaged in an active buying process. But, the research suggests that most business buyers identify a shortlist of preferred vendors at the beginning of their buying process and almost always purchase from one of those vendors. Therefore, most B2B marketers are largely ignoring potential future buyers when they are forming their opinions about vendors.

If these survey results are accurate, it's clear that many B2B marketers need to make significant changes in their strategies and tactics. But, there's a catch.

None of the surveys described above claimed to use a representative sample of all B2B buyers. Therefore, the findings of these surveys cannot legitimately be "projected" to all business buyers. This explains why market research is vital for all B2B companies.

To develop effective marketing programs, a marketing leader must have an accurate view of how their company's potential customers make purchase decisions, and primary research is usually the only way to obtain this critical information. While data on this issue is scarce, it appears that most B2B companies are not investing sufficiently in this type of research.

In a column for Marketing Week, Mark Ritson made a compelling argument that companies should invest 5% of their marketing budget on market research.

Ritson argued that spending 5% of the budget on research is essential to ensure that the remaining 95% of the budget is invested appropriately. He wrote, "If you cannot invest 5% of your marketing budget on research you do not know what you are doing and you will not be able to make the right moves."

Image courtesy of Jeff via Flickr (CC).

[1]  The LinkedIn/Bain & Company research is described in two LinkedIn articles by Mimi Turner, the Head of Marketplace Innovation at LinkedIn. Those articles can be found here and here.