In this op-ed, Prophet marketing executive Lia Carruthers draws on her switch from FMCG to B2B tech to argue that the psychology driving supermarket decisions and six-figure software purchases is not as different as the industry would have you believe.
What supermarket shelves taught me about SaaS
When I switched from consumer marketing in New Zealand’s FMCG landscape to B2B tech in Australia, I expected drastic differences.
Consumer marketing is supposed to be emotional. B2B marketing is supposed to be rational and information-heavy. At least, that’s the narrative that industry norms teach marketers early on.
But the more I observe B2B buying behaviour, the more it reminds me of something familiar – the same psychology that drives decisions in supermarket aisles.
B2B Buyers Don’t Leave Their Psychology at the Door
It’s a truth many marketers seem to neglect. B2B buyers aren’t fundamentally different from any other human making a decision.
The same psychological shortcuts show up everywhere. Loss aversion, social proof, familiarity bias, the pull toward the known over the unknown. They don’t switch off when someone puts on their work hat. We make sense-making stories out of decisions that already feel right. The deliberate reasoning comes later.
In my last B2C role, I watched time-poor parents reach for the same food brands week after week. Not because they were actively reconsidering every option, but because the decision had already been made. Familiarity was doing the work before they even reached the shelf.
In B2B, the same dynamic plays out. Teams often select the vendor that feels safest or most familiar, not necessarily the one that’s best on paper.
The context changes, the brain doesn’t.
Buyers Aren’t Just Optimising for ROI, They’re Optimising for Career Safety
What is different in B2B is the stakes.
A shopper picking the wrong yoghurt might waste a few dollars. A marketing leader choosing the wrong software platform might cost hundreds of thousands, along with their internal credibility.
It’s no surprise, then, that B2B decisions come wrapped in layers of rational justification – business cases, ROI models, technical specs, comparison matrices. These artefacts matter,
but they also do something subtler; they help buyers defend a choice they already feel is ‘safe’.
Think about what’s actually at stake for the person making the call. If the platform succeeds, the business wins. If it doesn’t, they own it personally. The upside flows to the organisation but all the risk stays with them. That gap explains a lot. Most B2B deals don’t stall because the status quo is working brilliantly; they stall because someone in the room is more afraid of being blamed than excited about getting it right. There’s a reason “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” became a cliché. The safe choice is both logical and self-preserving.
In B2C, the underlying emotions might centre around identity or convenience. In B2B, they’re far more tied to reputation, risk and accountability.
Different pressures, same underlying psychology.
What Supermarket Shelves Taught Me About SaaS
In FMCG, you learn quickly that attention is brutally scarce.
On a supermarket shelf, your brand might have seconds (if that) to be noticed. But visibility alone isn’t enough. The brands that win are the ones already living in people’s minds before they arrive.
That’s mental availability. Building the memory structures so your brand can come to mind in buying situations.
In FMCG, your product can tap all five senses. The feel of packaging, a distinctive scent, a flavour that triggers a memory. Your raw ingredients are tangible. In SaaS, they’re invisible – data, software, user experience. Your brand lives entirely in digital touchpoints, including the product interface, onboarding, website, content, a sales conversation. These become your sensory cues.
For challenger brands going up against category leaders who’ve had years to build mental availability, distinctiveness is more than a nice-to-have, it’s essential.
The 95 % Problem
There’s another layer.
For many B2B categories, only around 5 per cent of potential buyers are actively in the market in a given quarter. Companies tend to change suppliers roughly every five years, meaning most of your marketing is reaching people who aren’t ready to buy. In those moments, a marketer’s job isn’t conversion; it’s memory.
“Forgettability is expensive,” Disney’s Henry Ong said at the NZ Marketing Association’s Brand Summit last year. It rings just as true in B2B tech. The brands that come to mind first when a need eventually surfaces have a compounding advantage.
The Forgettability Tax
Defaulting to safe, rational messaging doesn’t just make B2B campaigns less interesting – it erodes effectiveness.
If a brand isn’t memorable, those impressions among out-of-market buyers simply disappear. When that happens, you pay for it elsewhere – in higher acquisition costs, more dependency on performance media, and more pressure on price.
The real cost of dull marketing isn’t low engagement, it’s the hidden tax it places on future growth.
Look Outside the Category
This isn’t a case against whitepapers or case studies. They play a real role – giving buyers the proof points to justify decisions they’ve already made emotionally. But they’re rarely what makes a brand memorable.
I’ve been lucky to work at two founder-led businesses with real challenger energy. The categories couldn’t be more different. The instinct worth borrowing from B2C is the willingness to look outside your category entirely – find inspiration where your competitors would never look, and bring it somewhere unexpected.
Same Human, Different Environment
Moving from B2C into B2B hasn’t made marketing feel like a completely different discipline. If anything, it reinforced the opposite.
The fundamentals are the same. People still rely on mental shortcuts, follow social proof, remember what’s distinctive and respond to emotion.
What’s different is the environment. In B2B, there are more stakeholders, more scrutiny, more risk. But at the centre of it all, it’s the same human brain. The one that’s also a parent, a partner, a person trying to figure out what’s for dinner while signing off on a decision worth six figures.
Still new to the role, I haven’t had to rewire my brain nearly as much as I expected. The fundamentals travel. What doesn’t is the instinct to be distinctive – every category norm, competitor benchmark, and “what does good look like in this space” conversation is pulling in the same direction. That’s the gravitational pull toward safe. The opportunity lies in resisting.
