Mhari Coxon

Strategic Marketing

Recent posts

About Mhari

  • Metamorphosis of Marketing

    Marketing used to be about awareness first, revenue second. Now it’s about revenue. You need to be across the full funnel and connected to the functions that own each next best action.


    The biggest shift I’ve seen as a marketing leader is how digital, data, and brand strategy sit at the core of commercial success. Covid 19 accelerated us, AI is enabling and we are moving forward with customer insight at full speed.


    When I first joined Philips back in 2011, marketing’s primary goal was to make people aware of a brand: ads, billboards, slogans. And I still love and admire a good piece of crafted and tested creative. Philips were pioneering in breaking the mould, using six sigma to push us to deliver the right message at the right time and be customer insight led.


    Today, my marketing practice is deeply entwined with growth levers—customer acquisition, retention, revenue models, lifetime value.
    Digital acceleration and big data have flipped the equation: rather than utilising marketing to “get people to know us,” it’s “use marketing insights to grow the business.” McKinsey saw the acceleration if full funnel when COVID sped our digital marketing capability through a decade of change in just 2 years.

    Meanwhile, brand strategy no longer sits in a silo of fluff or “nice-to-haves.” It’s recognised as an economic asset “brand strategy has shifted. Shifted to the domain of real market and tangible financial performance.” Our brand equity tracking as a marketing function is used across the business and is central to funding when scaling.  


    So what does this mean in practice?
    Data & analytics are no longer optional: you need unified platforms, real-time dashboards, integrations across sales/marketing/product. As an article by Ted Moser states: “The digital ripple effect … means marketing needs new and better customer evolution sensing systems.”


    Brand strategy must connect to business outcomes: It’s not just about identity or perception, but about shifting demand—creating more volume, commanding better price, improving margins. Win on quality, not price.


    Digital and agile marketing mean you can test, iterate, measure. The days of big campaigns with six-month lead times and vanity metrics are largely gone—leadership now demands tight alignment between marketing activities and commercial KPIs. Test, fail, learn, scale is the Mantra and failure needs to be there for innovation to happen.


    Cross-functional leadership is essential: marketing must collaborate with sales, product, finance and data teams. A leader must speak the language of brand, but also of ROI, customer lifetime value, and business model growth.


    My leadership philosophy is to question. I lead with the hypothesis: “What will drive growth?” “How might we? Then we build strategic marketing programs around that—channel mix, brand positioning, digital activation, measurement.


    I prioritise customer-centricity: leveraging data to segment, personalise, engage. In one sense, marketing is now about lifecycle orchestration rather than just campaign execution.


    I ensure brand strategy is embedded early—not tacked on. A strong brand can amplify performance marketing; performance tactics validly deployed strengthen the brand. The synergy matters.


    I drive accountability and transparency: we set up KPIs around revenue, cost of acquisition, retention, brand lift, not just impressions or clicks.


    I build and nurture teams with dual competence: creative and strategic, brand thinkers and data interpreters. Because today’s marketing leader must bridge these worlds.


    At JnJ, working in Nicorette RX and pharmacy channel, we shifted from a focus on top-of-funnel awareness campaigns to a model where marketing owned the full funnel: from lead to conversion to repeat purchase. We used data-driven insights to identify high-value customer segments, refined our brand messaging accordingly, tested activation across digital channels, and tracked revenue per customer cohort. Over 12 months we saw a around a 25 % growth per marketing invested dollar. We also won our tenders on quality and differentiation, not price.


    The role of marketing has morphed: we are growth drivers, not solely brand custodians.


    If you’re still operating with marketing as mostly awareness-first, consider this:
    Are you integrating brand and performance in your strategy?
    Is your data infrastructure enabling you to make timely decisions?
    Do your KPIs reflect business outcomes (revenue, margin, retention), not just vanity traffic or awareness?
    Are you developing your team’s mindset for this new era? Do you work agile?


    As research shows, marketing’s role is changing at its core: digitalisation, data-lead strategies, omni-channel customer journeys. They all demand a new level of commercial engagement. Of deep data driven insights. It’s where the good stuff happens. 


    In short: Marketing isn’t just a function of telling people you exist anymore. It’s about driving business results, anchored in insights, powered by technology, and accelerated by brand. The future of marketing, and the companies who win it, will be those where marketing strategy is fully integrated into commercial strategy.

    Happy to connect if you’d like to dive deeper into how I approached digital transformation over the last 10 years.

  • Charities Need Business Acumen To Survive In 2026

    I have been a non executive director for a not for profit charity for 11 years. In that time I have seen the challenges charities face, the regulations expectations, and the number of charities that collapsed, increase year on year.

    It has never been more important to be business process led when executing the purpose of the charity.

    The Guardian leader column shared their less than cheery festive view just at the end of 2025, talking of scale back in some of our best known and established charities across the UK, with closures of centres, reduction of staff, and many smaller charities having to chip away at their reserves just to stay afloat.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/31/the-guardian-view-on-hard-times-for-britains-charities-struggling-to-do-more-with-less

    Here I share my perspective on what the watch outs are and how charities will need to be running to survive the turbulence.

    In 2026 all charities will need to be agile

    Charities that don’t change how they fundraise will see a decline. That decline for some will be damaging beyond return. Running the same campaign, because we have done it for decades, will not produce more. In fact, if reviewed it would in most cases show a flattened income from the campaign year on year over the last 4 to 5. This year in the UK corporate belts will tighten to take the hit of cost of headcount increase, cost of living pinches almost all harder, and youth is less engaged with the heritage models of charitable fundraising.

    If you keep rolling out the same, without changes, you will recieve less.

    Your management need commercial experience. Doing good is not good enough.

    Smaller Charities that are founder led are often set up as a edge of the table project alongside a professional interest. They then develop in to a larger entity, and a full time job. It is important to say that until just over 8 ears ago, these Charities could survive quite well. The first major shake up to charity governance happened then and rigor for running a charity came in to place. As a trustee at that point, the governance and quality of this increased and being strategic and budget focused became more important. Post COVID any charity not workjng as a business, and not being agile, started to see a sharper decline in their annual report of income. The regulation body realised it was building process that was restrictive and has over these last eight years worked to reduce some of the complexity with the latest code and regulatory guidance https://www.charitygovernancecode.org/ https://www.gov.uk/government/news/regulator-updates-guidance-after-legislative-changes-on-moral-payments

    One thing is clear, to keep a charity afloat, and aim for growth, you need to run it like any other business. That means evaluating and analysing focusing on growth, decline and retirement of products services or campaigns through portfolio management, tracking and reporting, and agile experimentation.

    Focusing on a good audit result at end of year from a regulatory viewpoint is not enough.

    Giving is down so you need to be clear on the value you bring to gain your share

    The biggest mindshift for established Charities is the approach to raising funds. The UK Giving 2025 Report tells the story of giving in 2024: Charities are now relying on donations from only 50% of people, down from 58% in 2019 — equivalent to approximately four million fewer donors.

    wp-1768449740692Download

    The next generation are not engaged with what you are doing

    From that same.report, we see that only 36% of 16- to- 24-year-olds say they donated or sponsored in the past 12 months. This is a decline of around a third since 2017, when 55% had done so.

    The percentage of young people who give to charity has been in steady decline since that time, with an acceleration seen during the pandemic and then again during 2024.

    Reasons given to those surveyed were themed around not interested, aware or clear on why giving to that charity was important.

    Charities that don’t market and communicate in a business way, audience insight and behaviour led, will be drowned out and be the hardest hit be the decline in donors.

    There is a way to survive and thrive

    It is not all doom and gloom. The next generation care passionately about things but have a very different view on transparency, authenticity and connection.

    Here are my top recommendations for any Charity reviewing the budget again to try to tighten and make the year with minimum deficit.

    1️⃣ Revisit your why

    Step back and look at your vision misson and values and check the world hasn’t shifted. If the purpose is still true, revisit all campaign work in the last year. Is it clearly purpose led. Are you trying to be everything to everyone and therfore drowned out.

    2️⃣ Show them the money

    Can people clearly see where their donation goes. Not just in the annual report. But daily in your communications. In our dopamine rich digital world, instant gratification is important to people, as is transparency. If they can’t see where their money goes, and if it seems not to be aligned to the purpose, then the engagement will not come.

    3️⃣ Test and learn

    Spend time testing. Test communication. Test campaigns. Test new areas of funding. If you work with a growth mindset, in an agile way, you will innovate. And those that innovate have a better chance of survival.

    4️⃣ Don’t hold on to tradition

    Unless it is working, don’t hold on to ‘but we always do’ campaigns. Tradition is good for building trust, but only if modernised to mean something to an audience who thinks and feels in a different way. Doing the same thing ,and expecting a different result, year on year, is going to accelerate decline in this difficult year.

    Instead, think of starting new traditions, as often happens when generations age, and consider what matters to each generation and how your why fits with their why.

    5️⃣ Hire for business experience not subject matter expertise

    It will be a tough year yes, and the next 10 will be bumpy and fast too. Hire management that is focused on the business health versus the subject matter. Yes, they need purpose and passion. But that alone will not keep you afloat. The blind spots caused by deep knowledge in a core area can even be a hindrance. Hire people who problem solve, analyse, course correct and see the path through. Who know when a campaign or product has reached the end of its lifecycle. Let them be guided by the subject matter experts, supported by a diverse board, but be focused, in a commercial way, on the health of your charitable business.

    2026 will be a challenging year, so step out, reset, and remember your why.

  • Stop, Listen, Look. Change the View Not the Person.

    I have worked in behaviour change since 1996. My first career was in healthcare, dental, in clinic most days providing treatment. I am still in contact with some of my patients some 11 years since I stopped clinical practice and remain registered in my profession.

    I had a very successful career, a thriving practice, lecturing across the world on my work, on my full mouth disruption model, and even achieved an outstanding award as recognition for my commitment to improving oral health outcomes.

    And yet I knew that my own physical actions, the bit people paid for, were less than 10% of the solution.

    I succeeded, and my patients improved, by tapping in to what motivated the person to change, and then working to utilise motivational interviewing to gain a commitment to change.

    Helping people see the world differently and therefore behaving differently. Hence a different outcome. I was marketing on a one to one basis a solution that they desired that was within their control. The outcomes of improved health was the same for all. The reason they wanted it differed.

    Applying behaviour change and motivational interviewing to mass marketing

    Fast forward to 2026, 30 years on and 15 years of large scale marketing and driving consumer or professional behaviour change under my belt. I have been fortunate to be asked to speak on my insight driven marketing models and case studies across the globe, and have talked and written about emotional benefit attached to a product or service being one of our most powerful drivers.

    Nicorette case study

    While heading up the Healthcare and Prescribing business across Northern Europe for Nicorette, we unlocked a deep human insight that drove us in a different direction and grew our market share, already cateogry leading, by a further 26%.

    As is often the case with healthcare, you have two audiences you need to influence behaviour change in to achieve uptake. The healthcare professionals and the patients.

    And, as is also often the case in healthcare, the differentiation of products or services is little.

    For this audience their emotional blockers, their beliefs were different but there was a common feeling. Shame. Shame of failure. For the healthcare professionals it was shame at not being able to change the patients behaviour, for the patient it was the shame of the failed attempt to quit.

    So we invested time in normalising failure on the path to quit, added in more emotional messaging about the why for the patient, and supported the clinicians in seeing that their actions and support were part of the quit journey.

    While doing this repositioning, we uncovered another deep insight that was able to drive a significant change. 1in 3 smokers had a mental health condition. And that grew to 1 in 2 for those medicated for that condition. Quit rates were lower in these groups. But here is the thing. Utilising insight studies we could see that these folks wanted to quit just as much, if not more, than the smokers living without a mental health condition.

    By helping healthcare professionals and their patients look at their addiction differently, by easing the shame and normalising the upward cycle of failure that comes before success, we were able to get more people back in to quit programms than before. Driving accelerated growth for our product yes, alongside impacting patient outcomes, and peoples lives in a meaningful way.

    We also set up a partnership, with Mental Health UK, that still runs to this day.

    How to build insight in to your marketing

    1️⃣ Be curious

    Look deeper and ask why. Use big data mining to find actionable insight. Know your audience.

    2️⃣ Map the customer journey.

    Not with the steps to purchase or uptake of service, but with what they are feeling and thinking at key moments they are making decisions and evaluating. What are they currently thinking and what would you like them to be thinking? How will that help them?

    3️⃣ Keep a focus.

    Don’t spread too wide in trying to drive the changes. Choose a few key moments that matter and focus on these. Tap in to the emotional motivation and clearly share the problem you empathise with and how you are part of that solution.

    4️⃣ Be consistent.

    Find creative ways to show the same messaging and keep a familiarity to the look and feel. It is vanity to think that those who don’t work in marketing notice your work and admire it. But they do notice something that links to their emotion, shows an understanding and helps them see a solution to something they desire.

    5️⃣ Test and learn.

    Try out many different ways to show the benefit through emotion. Researching ahead of sharing is almost gone now in our fast paced market. So test out in the market. Test safely, fail fast and scale when you gain traction.

    Remember, the product or service is the same for all. The reason they want it is different.

    Happy marketing.

  • Why Building an In-House Marketing Team Isn’t Just Smart. It’s Strategic Brilliance

    In the age of rapid innovation and fickle consumer attention, the classic agency-outsourced model is being challenged -not by arrogance, but by the hard economics of agility, brand coherence and cost discipline.

    Savvy organisations are discovering that in-house marketing teams aren’t a fad – they’re a competitive advantage.

    Let’s break down why in-house marketing works – and why the most progressive brands aren’t just talking about it.

    1. Cost Savings That Extend Beyond the Balance Sheet

    At first blush, salaries and overheads might look higher than an agency retainer – but here’s the twist: external agency fees are often a hidden line item that grow as campaigns evolve and briefs expand.

    According to industry data, many brands are now expanding their in-house teams rather than outsourcing work, precisely because the internal cost per output is significantly lower over time. https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/three-five-brands-in-house-expanded-teams-year/1845225

    Real outcomes from internal teams include:

    🏠Reduced dependency on external billings for ongoing content production.

    🏠Elimination of duplicated briefing time and re-work cycles.

    🏠Budget predictability unlike quarterly agency surcharges. Rather than paying premiums for every revision, an integrated internal team becomes part of the engine – not an on-call expense item.

    2. Deep Brand Heart Integration

    Culture Isn’t a Brief, It’s the Job

    The brands that captivate culture don’t do so from the outside in, they do it from the inside out. One illustrative example is Oatly.

    What began as a traditional Swedish oat-milk maker evolved into a global cultural brand by leaning into its own tribe – its Oat Punks – with marketing that feels authentic, provocative and born from within the organisation itself, not a detached agency. Oatly’s audacious branding – like packaging that amplifies its bold identity and playful community content – wouldn’t land with the same resonance if it were manufactured externally. In house creative unlocked all the potential https://youtu.be/DQ4WBfnLrCk?si=TG0TonSlv0BPafQL

    🔗 Learn more: Oatly marketing case study learnings https://newsletter.ftrs-studio.com/p/oatly-marketing-case-study-top-5-learnings

    This level of brand-heart integration comes not from one of clever creatives, but from people who live and breathe the brand every day.

    3. Creative Consistency That Never Sleeps

    Ever seen a campaign that starts strong and then fades into fragmentation?

    Agencies are creative but they often rotate talent, pitches, and priorities.

    A fully embedded team, on the other hand:

    🏠Maintains a single creative language across every touchpoint.

    🏠Ensures brand values aren’t diluted through reinterpretation.

    🏠Knows the playbook so instinctively that great work becomes the default rather than the exception.

    Take Specsavers, one of my favourite brands. I have nearly joined their in house team twice, timing was just off. It is still on my career wish list. Their in house agency style team are creators of the iconic “Should’ve gone to Specsavers” line, one of the longest-running, culturally ingrained campaigns in modern UK marketing history.

    That campaign’s longevity and consistency didn’t emerge from a revolving roster of external agencies – it was incubated and evolved within Specsavers’ own creative function for decades with a nested agency support.

    🔗 Read more: Specsavers on in-house life https://www.creativereview.co.uk/specsavers-and-the-in-house-life/

    4. Agility: Respond Faster Than the Market Changes

    Nothing kills momentum like waiting for a two-week turnaround.

    With in-house teams:

    🏠Reactive briefs become proactive opportunities.

    🏠Real-time cultural trends can be leveraged immediately.

    🏠Crisis communications are owned, not outsourced.

    Specsavers’ team, for example, talked about how proximity to the business means they react weekly to results not monthly or quarterly. That’s not semantics – that’s competitive agility.

    5. Leadership That Works With the Business – Not Beside It

    The most influential organisations are no longer just executing marketing campaigns – their marketing people are embedded in product, sales, strategy and innovation.

    In-house teams can:

    ▶️Advocate for brand decisions before they become tactical briefs.

    ▶️Understand product development timelines intimately.

    ▶️Influence pricing, positioning and experience – not just promotion.

    That’s not “marketing” — that’s strategic business leadership.

    My Experience: Moving From a Standing Start to Resetting a Brand In 9 Weeks

    At Sureserve, I built an in-house marketing capability from scratch after joining in May 2024, launching a full rebrand and brand heart strategy in just 9 weeks in the September of the same year by combining a core internal team with nested external expertise.

    This wasn’t a cosmetic refresh – it was a systematic repositioning rooted in audience insight, internal alignment and creative discipline, delivered fast and with full organisational buy-in.

    Here’s what it demonstrated:

    ▶️Speed of action beats slow perfection.

    ▶️Clarity in purpose drives clarity in execution.

    ▶️Internal talent, with the right leadership, outperforms expectation.

    More details on this work and my approach can be found on my website:🔗 https://mharicoxonmarketing.com

    Key Takeaways for Marketers (and Business Leaders)

    📍 Build brand muscle in-house, not just briefs.

    📍 Create creative frameworks – not just campaigns.

    📍 Measure effectiveness and adjust fast. Real-time insights win.

    📍 Retain external specialists for augmentation not ownership.

    📍 Invest in people first. The tools and outputs follow.

    In-house embedded marketing isn’t just about cost, it’s about control, creative, coherence and is a proven competitive advantage.

  • B2B & B2B2C Marketing in 2026: Why the Brave Will Win (and the Busy Will Be Ignored)

    By Mhari Coxon & her Co-Creator 😉

    I’ve worked in marketing long enough to see entire “next big things” come and go.

    Digital transformation. Big data. Social media. AI.

    Each arrived with noise, hype, and a flurry of poorly thought-through pilot projects.

    What separates 2026 from every cycle before it is this:

    There is no margin left for performative marketing.

    By 2026, B2B and B2B2C marketing will either drive measurable commercial growth — or be quietly sidelined by finance, sales, and operations teams who are tired of activity without impact.

    This isn’t pessimism.

    It’s progress.

    Below are the five shifts I believe will define successful marketing leadership in 2026 – not from theory, but from what I’ve seen working inside complex, regulated, growth-driven organisations.

    1️⃣ AI Stops Being “Exciting” — and Starts Being Accountable

    In 2026, AI will no longer be a differentiator.

    It will be infrastructure.

    The novelty phase is already ending. The benefits becoming more apparent.

    Generating more volume of blogs, ads, and emails with AI won’t impress anyone when everyone can do it.

    The organisations pulling ahead are using AI in far more commercially mature ways:

    ❇️ Forecasting churn risk at account and segment level

    ❇️ Predicting demand before sales pipelines stall

    ❇️ Dynamically optimising pricing, channel mix, and messaging

    ❇️ Accelerating insight, not just output

    According to McKinsey, companies embedding AI into core commercial decision-making are significantly more likely to outperform peers on revenue growth and operating margins.

    The key distinction is intent:

    AI as a growth engine, not a content factory.

    2️⃣ Performance Marketing Grows Up (And Loses the Training Wheels)

    For years, we’ve mistaken measurement for meaning.

    Clicks, impressions, engagement rates. All useful, none sufficient.

    By 2026, senior leadership teams will expect marketing to answer harder questions:

    ❔️What moved revenue — and why?

    ❔️Which investments compounded over time?

    ❔️Where did brand accelerate performance, not sit beside it?

    This aligns with a broader shift I see repeatedly: marketing is no longer funded on creativity alone.

    It is funded on commercial credibility.

    High-performing marketing teams will:

    💪Link brand metrics to pipeline velocity and deal size

    💪Model long-term demand creation, not short-term conversion spikes

    💪Speak the language of finance with confidence, not defensiveness

    💪The marketer who can’t connect strategy to P&L in 2026 won’t be “unlucky”. They’ll be unprepared.

    3️⃣ Trust Becomes the Only Scalable Growth Lever

    Data will tighten.

    Regulation will expand.

    Attention will fragment further.

    Trust, by contrast, will compound.

    The evidence is clear. Research from Edelman consistently shows that trust is now a primary driver of purchase, advocacy, and long-term loyalty – especially in high-risk B2B and B2B2C categories such as healthcare, infrastructure, finance, and services.

    In practical terms, this means:

    💠Evidence beats adjectives

    💠Consistency beats campaign spikes

    💠Transparency beats polish

    Brands that hide behind generic messaging will struggle. Brands that show their workings – data, decisions, trade-offs – will earn confidence.

    In 2026, trust won’t be built by brand guidelines alone. It will be built by leaders who are visible, accountable, and credible.

    4️⃣ Thought Leadership Finally Earns the Name

    By 2026, thought leadership that simply rephrases consensus thinking will disappear into the algorithmic void.

    Real thought leadership will do three things well:

    1. Take a position

    2. Share lived experience

    3. Accept that not everyone will agree

    The strongest B2B brands I see emerging are not louder – they are clearer. They are willing to say:

    Here’s what worked.

    and importantly

    Here’s what failed.

    and

    Here’s what we changed as a result.

    This isn’t personal branding for its own sake. It’s a signal in a noisy market.

    The future belongs to organisations whose leaders understand that credibility scales faster than promotion.

    5️⃣ The Best B2B Marketing Feels Human (Because It Always Was)

    After years of funnels, automation, and dashboards, the biggest competitive advantage in 2026 will be understanding the human on the other side of the decision.

    B2B buying has never been purely rational.

    It’s shaped by:

    ⚖️Career risk

    ⚖️Reputation

    ⚖️ Fear of failure

    ⚖️ Desire for confidence and control

    The marketers who win will blend:

    Data with empathy 📶❤️

    Technology with judgement 👨‍💻🤔

    Personalisation with respect 🫆🙏

    This is where B2B2C organisations, in particular, can outperform by applying consumer-grade experience thinking to complex, high-value decisions.

    Human insight isn’t a “nice to have”. It’s the multiplier.

    The Leadership Shift That Matters Most

    By 2026, marketing leaders won’t be hired for how well they communicate ideas. They’ll be hired for how well they shape decisions, influence growth, and lead through ambiguity.

    The future CMO looks less like a campaign owner and more like a commercial strategist with a deep understanding of customers, systems, and scale.

    That’s not marketing losing influence.

    That’s marketing finally owning it.

    Final Thoughts

    2026 won’t reward the loudest brands.

    It will reward the clearest thinkers, the bravest leaders, and the teams willing to trade comfort for progress.

    Marketing doesn’t need more hype.

    It needs more conviction.And that’s a future worth building.

    If you’re building B2B or B2B2C strategy for 2026, ask yourself:

    👉 Are we optimising for relevance or just reach?

    👉 Are we leading the conversation or copying it?

    👉 And do we sound like humans who know what they’re doing?

    Let’s make 2026 the year marketing earns its seat and keeps it.

    Further Reading:

    McKinsey: AI-driven growth and commercial analytics

    Edelman Trust Barometer (latest edition)

    B2B buying behaviour and decision psychology research (various industry studies)

  • Discovery Shift in Our Digital World: Winning Growth in an AI‑Search and Zero‑Click World

    Why this is one of the most topical B2B and B2B2C marketing issues in the UK right now

    Search behaviour has fundamentally changed. UK B2B, including B2B2C, buyers are no longer relying solely on traditional search engines to research suppliers.

    Instead, they are using AI‑powered tools to summarise options, compare vendors and form shortlists faster than ever before.

    For marketers, this creates a structural shift: visibility is increasingly decoupled from website traffic.

    https://www.ofcom.org.uk/internet-based-services/technology/the-era-of-answer-engines-generative-ais-impact-on-search-experiences-and-online-safety?

    Brands can influence decisions without earning a click.

    In this environment, credibility, clarity and proof now do more of the conversion work than volume of content. What has changed in B2B and B2B2C discovery

    There are three changes matter most.

    1️⃣ AI is becoming a default research assistant.

    Buyers use it to frame problems, assess options and pressure‑test claims. If your brand is not clearly represented in these summaries, you are absent from the earliest stages of consideration.

    2️⃣ Zero‑click behaviour is accelerating – lurking is a key part of the journey

    Even when brands rank highly, buyers may never reach the website. This means marketers must optimise content to be understood, trusted and cited without direct interaction.

    3️⃣Our buying groups continue to widen.

    In B2B2C sectors such as healthcare, utilities and regulated services, discovery and decision‑making are split across commercial, technical, procurement and end‑user audiences.

    AI summaries compress this complexity unless marketers design content deliberately for it and for all customer personas.

    https://www.linkedin.com/posts/immediate-future_ai-search-has-jumped-the-queue-on-b2b-discovery-activity-7391384011111153665-e8J2?

    The senior marketer’s growth framework

    After more than 15 years leading growth across B2B, B2B2C and regulated markets, one pattern is consistent:

    Growth comes from making it easy to understand what you do, easy to trust your claims, and easy to justify your selection internally.

    AI‑led discovery does not replace strategy. It amplifies it.

    The strongest teams are combining clear positioning, structured proof and disciplined distribution to stay commercially visible.

    https://www.edelman.com/insights/battle-b2b-influence?

    Here is my practical 90‑day implementation plan

    Days 1–30: Map AI discovery questions

    Identify the real questions buying groups ask at problem, option and justification stages. Prioritise those that influence shortlisting, not just awareness.

    Days 31–60: Build proof‑led, citation‑ready assets

    Create clear comparison pages, quantified case studies, implementation explanations and procurement FAQs. Structure content so that claims are supported by evidence.

    Days 61–90: Strengthen authority and distribution

    Ensure your expertise appears in trusted third‑party environments: industry bodies, partners, events, LinkedIn thought leadership and credible publications.

    Three takeaways senior marketers can implement immediately

    ❇️ Optimise for being cited, not clicked

    Your content must stand alone. Clear structure, definitions and evidence matter more than volume.

    ❇️Turn thought leadership into proof leadership

    Opinion opens doors, but proof wins budget approval. Quantified outcomes and third‑party validation are now commercial assets.

    ❇️ Build visibility across the buying ecosystem

    Your brand must be easy to find wherever buyers validate decisions, not only on your own website.

    https://www.gartner.com/en/topics/generative-ai?

    Closing thought

    This shift is not a trend. It is a structural change in how B2B, and B2B2C demand is formed. The organisations that adapt now will protect pipeline quality, shorten sales cycles and strengthen trust at scale.