There’s a poorly-written fictional character at the heart of our marketing in B2B. We call this character, “the buyer.”
This isn’t the real buyer — the one we each become when we’re part of important purchase processes for our companies. Instead, it’s an abstraction: the imagined “other” at the center of our messaging and campaign planning.
For nearly two decades, this figure has been cast as a lone individual who fills out forms, downloads white papers, and, after a steady drip of increasingly insistent emails, finally agrees to speak with a BDR. From there, the story goes, this buyer experiences such an epiphany that — once they’ve picked themselves up and dusted themselves off — they immediately launch their organization into a months-long, six-figure purchase process.
We’ve pictured this buyer as a seasoned executive in their forties who is somehow ignorant of the basic solutions their peers have long used. So we churn out reams of “educational” content to enlighten these supposedly naïve professionals.
We also imagine them stripped of the preferences and instincts we all bring to our own decisions. In our collective buyer fantasy, branding and design matter for getting their attention but have no bearing on their choices. When it’s time to choose, it’s “just the facts” for these fictional figures.
Lately, this caricature of a buyer has added a new, puzzling characteristic. In today’s version, when these buyers are “in-market,” they no longer visit vendor websites or consult the analysts and peers they’ve trusted for years. Instead, they now outsource the entire buying process to an AI agent, trusting without question that whatever ChatGPT or Claude spits out is true and complete.
Of course, no one we know in the real world behaves this way. We’ve all had firsthand experience with LLMs’ gaps and errors, and we rarely accept their output without supervision or correction. Yet we already imagine these buyers doing exactly that.
I exaggerate — but only slightly.
What’s happening here isn’t unique to marketing. It’s a cognitive shortcut: when we think about people who are not members of our particular group, we reduce them to abstractions. In our everyday lives, we construct “straw men” defined by a narrow essence. People are “virgos”, “Sox fans”, “foodies”, etc. “They” are flat, predictable, stripped of detail.
Categorization is not all bad, and every creature has to do it to some extent. My Whippet, for example, has put every small, furry creature into the category “thing to be chased.”
In our evolutionary past when we spent our entire lives with the same hundred or so people, othering outsiders was a survival skill. Whether due to disease, rivalry, or desperation, outsiders often were threats on some level. But the same instinct fuels prejudice and bigotry.
In B2B, categorization shows up in personas. Done well, it’s a useful shorthand. Done poorly, it’s corrosive — because when our picture of the buyer isn’t grounded in reality, it leads us astray.
The buyers we’ve imagined for the past two decades bear little resemblance to reality. They are credulous in ways we never are. They have no meaningful histories in their roles. They are swayed into mission-critical decisions by clever subject lines. They weigh options as if they were robots, not people.
The real individuals in buying groups carry ambitions, anxieties, histories of career triumphs and failures. They have allies and antagonists. They have long histories of using the standard solutions used by professionals in their line of work. They have likes and dislikes. The personas that shape our content and campaigns rarely reflect any of this. Our content and campaigns are not built for these real people.
We can do better. We should lean into the research that already exists (LinkedIn on Buyability, Buyers Are Not Blank Slates), and we should invest in more of our own. Above all, we should have more real conversations with buyers — where our real buyers do the talking.
When we plan for buyers who don’t exist, we’re building castles in the sand. And we shouldn’t be surprised when they are washed away.
