"Buyability" Isn't Really New, But It Is Really Important

For the past several months, I've been following developments relating to a research and thought leadership initiative launched by LinkedIn in collaboration with Bain & Company. The goal of the initiative is to identify what causes a B2B buying group to purchase a particular company's offering.

This initiative has been led primarily by Jann Schwarz, the Senior Director, Marketplace Innovation & Strategy at LinkedIn, Mimi Turner, the Head of Marketplace Innovation at LinkedIn, and Jamie Cleghorn and colleagues at Bain & Company.

The researchers at LinkedIn and Bain have coined the term Buyability to describe what business buyers need to believe to have the confidence to make or recommend a purchase.

A survey of 750 B2B buyers conducted by the initiative's researchers identified five main factors that business buyers need to feel confident about. When the researchers analyzed the survey results, they found that the most important factor buyers identified is to feel confident they can defend their decision if the purchase goes wrong. This was slightly more important to buyers than feeling confident the product or service they recommended could do the job.

These research findings strongly suggest that an essential element of Buyability is that business buyers must perceive a prospective vendor's product or service to be a "safe" choice.

Buyer Risk Aversion Isn't New

The bias of business buyers toward "safe" purchases is not new. It has been discussed frequently in the B2B marketing literature for many years.

For example, in his 2009 book, The BuyerSphere Project, Gord Hotchkiss emphasized the importance of buyer risk aversion in the B2B buying process. He wrote:

"B2B buying decisions are usually driven by one emotion - fear. Specifically, B2B buying is all about minimizing fear by eliminating risk . . . The importance of risk aversion on the part of the buyer cannot be overstated. It's the essence of B2B buying. To state it in plainer terms, '99% of B2B buying is about covering your butt.' "

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) (now part of Gartner) and Google also pointed to the importance of buyer risk aversion in their popular 2013 white paper, "From Promotion to Emotion:  Connecting B2B Customers to Brands." CEB and Google observed that B2B buying often exhibited greater emotionality that B2C buying and offered this explanation.

"B2B purchases entail personal risk - far more than most B2C purchases. B2B purchase stakeholders fear:

• Losing time and effort if a purchase decision goes poorly
• Losing credibility if they make a recommendation for an unsuccessful purchase
• Losing their job if they are responsible for a failed purchase" (Emphasis in original)

Unbalanced Incentives Cause Buyer Risk Aversion

Most business buyers are predisposed to favor "safe" purchases because of unbalanced incentives. Most buyers perceive that they will receive only minimal rewards (tangible or emotional) if they recommend buying something that works well, but they also believe they can significantly damage their career if they recommend a purchase that goes badly.

As a result, most buyers are inclined to choose what they perceive to be the safest solution that meets basic performance requirements, rather than one that appears to be "better," but more risky.

Buyability Has Great Potential

So, the buyer risk aversion component of the Buyability model isn't really new, but that doesn't diminish the importance or the potential value of the LinkedIn/Bain initiative.

The initiative has already generated a significant amount of interest in the B2B marketing community, and several industry organizations - including, among others, WARC, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and the International Advertising Association (IAA) - are supporting the initiative, which should further increase interest among B2B marketers.

In addition, during a recent presentation, Jann Schwarz and Mimi Turner stated that they are now beginning the work needed to operationalize the Buyability model. This probably means they will soon be providing examples of actions that B2B companies can take to nurture a perception of safety in the minds of their potential buyers.

While we await these examples, the research already done by the initiative's leaders makes three things abundantly clear.

• The most influential factor for building a B2B buyer's confidence in purchasing from a prospective vendor is having previous personal experience with the vendor.

• The second most powerful confidence-building factor is recommendations from colleagues or from similar customers with similar needs and use cases.

• Negative feedback from a buyer's colleagues or peers in the buyer's network, or from other similar customers will usually stop a deal in its tracks.

These research findings suggest that, when performance and cost factors are generally equal, what influential third parties say about you becomes critical for making potential buyers feel confident enough to do business with you.

[Research Round-Up] B2B Marketing Benchmarks, a CMO Outlook, and How Humans Decide

(This month's Research Round-Up features three reports that address a wide range of issues relevant to marketing. Two of the reports (by Benchmarkit and NielsenIQ) are based on surveys designed to capture the perspective and practices of marketers. The paper by WPP Media is based on an analysis of the firm's extensive database of purchase journeys.)

"2026 Brand vs Demand Benchmark Report" by Benchmarkit

Source:  Benchmarkit

• Based on a survey of individuals working at 168 B2B technology companies
• The job title or job role of respondents was not provided
• Respondents were affiliated with companies having annual revenue of less than $5 million to more than $500 million
• The survey was conducted throughout September and October, 2025

The primary objective of this research was to benchmark how marketing budgets and other resources are currently allocated and would ideally be allocated between demand generation marketing and brand and awareness marketing. The survey also addressed current measurement practices and respondents' views on several related issues.

Here are some of the major findings from this research.

• Respondents reported that they are currently allocating 70% (median) of their total marketing budget to demand generation and 25% (median) to brand marketing.

• Respondents said their ideal budget allocation would be 50% (median) to demand generation and 40% (median) to brand marketing.

• The two metrics most frequently used to measure demand generation performance are the dollar value of pipeline generated (79% of respondents) and the number of opportunities created (70%).

• 73% of the respondents said that brand building is a long-term investment that makes demand generation marketing more efficient, and 63% said brand investments directly fuel demand generation performance.

• But . . . only 28% of the respondents said their company can link brand investments and activity to pipeline generated.

"CMO Outlook:  Guide to 2026" by NielsenIQ (NIQ)

Source:  NielsenIQ

• Based on a survey of ". . . more than 250 CMOs and senior marketing decision-makers from influential companies across regions, industries, and organizational sizes . . ." 
• Also based on qualitative interviews of ". . . chief marketing officers (CMOs) across industries . . ."
• A detailed description of the research methodology is not provided
• The guide does not indicate when the survey and interviews were conducted

NielsenIQ (NIQ) (formerly known as AC Nielsen) is a market research firm that primarily focuses on consumer research. However, NIQ's "CMO Outlook:  Guide to 2026" describes several research findings that are relevant for B2B marketing leaders.

For example, NIQ's survey and interviews revealed a growing tension between the pursuit of long-term vs. short-term marketing goals.

• 69% of NIQ's survey respondents said their CEO and CFO believe in the value of long-term brand building, but this was down sharply from 80% in last year's NIQ research.

• 55% of the survey respondents said they were allocating 60% or more of their marketing budget to long-term brand building. That was down slightly from 59% in last year's research.

Other interesting findings from NIQ's 2026 guide include:

• When asked where their organization was performing well, 39% of the survey respondents said media planning and optimization, 37% said content/creative generation, 35% said understanding customers, and 35% said measuring ROI.

• 58% of the survey respondents said they are using up to 5 tools to measure media performance, and another 34% said they are using 6 to 15 tools.

• When asked what methods they use to measure marketing ROI, 81% of the survey respondents said marketing attribution, and 77% said marketing mix modeling.

"How Humans Decide:  What Drives Consumer Choice and How Brands Should Respond" by WPP Media (in association with the University of Oxford's Said Business School)

Source:  WPP Media

• Based on an analysis of WPP Media's database of 1.2 million purchase journeys
• The WPP Media database covers purchases in over 200 product categories in 47 countries
• The white paper provides a detailed description of the research and analysis methodology in the Appendix (page 9)
• The white paper was published in October 2025

The central argument of this white paper is that knowing how people make buying decisions is essential to understanding how brands grow. The researchers describe the essence of their study findings early in the white paper.

"When the complexities of human decision-making are understood, the missing pieces of the equation are revealed:  influence and receptivity. Once influence and receptivity are understood, any assumptions that consumers are equally influenceable, or that media channels are interchangeable tools for reaching them, no longer make sense." (Emphasis in original)

Here are a few of the study's major findings.

• 84% of purchases involve people choosing brands they're already biased towards before they begin shopping.

• The proportion of purchases that are governed by this bias varies across product categories, but never falls below 70%

• Receptivity is a measure of how likely a person is to be influenced by marketing messages. On average, unreceptive consumers make up 23% of all category buyers.

• On average, owned, shared, and earned touchpoints (such as word-of-mouth recommendations and customer reviews) are nearly 3 times more powerful than paid media alone at converting a consumer from bias to purchase.

A Powerful (But Not Easy) Way to Boost the Influence of Marketing

In my latest three posts (here, here, and here), I've been discussing the widely-held perception among marketers that the marketing function in most companies has less influence than it should have - and less influence than it once had.

Some research studies (like this one) have shown that the influence of the marketing organization has declined over the past 2 - 3 decades.

In my previous posts, I've argued that the rise of business strategy has had a significant impact on the role of the marketing function. Over the past sixty years, strategy has become the primary mechanism senior business leaders use to make major decisions about the future of their business and create their gameplan for success.

This development has affected the marketing function for two reasons.

First, the formulation of a complete business strategy will require several decisions that most marketers would call "marketing" decisions. For example, strategy makers must decide how to segment their industry, what their target market will be, and how they will deliver compelling value to their target customers. Most marketers would say these are classic marketing decisions. Think Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning. 

Second, strategy development in most companies is the responsibility of the CEO and usually involves some or all of the company's C-level executives.

So, the bottom line is that the rise of strategy has transformed some "marketing" decisions into "strategy" decisions and changed who typically makes those decisions. This doesn't make the marketing function's loss of influence inevitable, but it does change what marketing leaders need to do to preserve - and even raise - that influence.

In essence, marketing leaders must recognize that how much influence they possess will be largely determined by how much they contribute to (a) the success of their company's strategy, and (b) the effectiveness of their company's strategy development process.

In my last post, I argued that marketing leaders must perform two core jobs well to raise their influence.

First, they must ensure that their teams are creating and running marketing communication programs and performing other marketing activities that support their company's business strategy. I discussed this task in detail in my last post.

Provide Strategy-Critical Intelligence

The second core job is equally important, but less frequently discussed, at least in a detailed way. To increase their level of influence, marketing leaders need to provide their company's strategy development team the information and insights they need to make sound strategic decisions.

The choices that senior business leaders make when developing a business strategy are high-stakes decisions that will have a major impact on their company's competitive success. Therefore, those choices should be made on the basis of detailed and reliable information about the company's capabilities and its competitive environment.

More specifically, strategy developers need detailed and reliable intelligence about their company's industry, its potential customers, and its competitors. I've use the term intelligence intentionally because what strategy developers need is not simply raw data, but data that's accompanied by a sound analysis of that data.

The following outline shows that major kinds of information marketing leaders need to provide to the senior business leaders who comprise their company's strategy development team. This outline is not exhaustive. It contains the types of information that apply to most companies, but additional or other information can be important based on a company's specific situation.

Providing the information shown in this outline, along with adequate supporting evidence, won't be a trivial undertaking for marketing leaders in many companies. The intelligence needed for strategy development differs from the data many marketers now routinely collect. Therefore, providing this intelligence will require a fairly significant amount of research.

The amount of work required to perform this job well can be substantial, but the payoff justifies the effort. When a company's strategy makers have access to relevant and accurate industry, customer, and competitor intelligence, they are more likely to make sound strategic choices, which will ultimately make the company more successful.

For marketing leaders, performing this job well will enhance their influence and, by extension, the influence and stature of the marketing organization. When the CEO and other company leaders view the senior marketing leader as a trusted source of the industry, customer, and competitor intelligence that will help them formulate better business strategy, they will place greater value on, and give greater weight to, the view and perspectives of the marketing leader.

Top image courtesy of Joshua Tree National Park via Flickr (Public Domain).