Is Brand Positioning B2B’s Untapped Growth Lever?

10.2025 Robert Davis

Brand positioning: growth’s overlooked engine

In today’s B2B, growth matters most. CROs and CMOs are accountable for pipeline and revenue impact, and every dollar spent on marketing must prove its value. Yet one of the strongest foundations of long-term growth, the brand, is still underinvested.

That’s a problem, because buyers don’t start from scratch. Research shows 90% of purchases are made with vendors already on the buyer’s “day one” list. If your brand isn’t in memory before the process begins, you may never be considered.

Positioning isn’t just a messaging exercise. Today, it has to provide a blueprint for how your brand will be remembered, and how it can grow.

Why positioning matters more than ever

At PJA, our brand positioning practice is designed to drive market change best aligned with client’s growth goals. Shifting perception, reframing the category, even re-setting category culture are essential strategies, but today, they’re not enough.

Too often, B2B positioning stops at a “line on a slide,” leaving creative teams a blank slate for building memorability. If the position isn’t built to evoke specific memory structures, creative has no springboard to build on, or lanes to tighten focus, and it shows: recent research showed that a large percentage of B2B campaign award winners had little impact on recall.

The solution: design positioning to fuel memory architecture from the start. See it as a framework for the stories, rituals, and signals that keep your brand on the “day one” list.

Learn how today’s best B2B brands make positioning a growth engine. Get The New B2B Brand Position by PJA President Mike O’Toole. Download

The research is clear: In complex B2B buying, your brand must come to mind at the right category entry points. That requires a brand built to:

Build distinctiveness through concepts, cues, and rituals buyers instantly recall.
Encode emotion so that your brand is felt as much as it is rationalized.
Create identity alignment so buyers see themselves in your story and carry that sense into their decision environment.

Revisiting the PJA change ladder

More than ten years ago, we defined four levels of brand-driven change. They still hold true, but today each carries the additional responsibility of helping you embed your brand into memory and self-identity, so it’s recalled and preferred when decisions happen. Here’s how they can do that:

Shifting perceptions with cues and concepts buyers will recognize in the right contexts.
Disrupting behaviors by inspiring emotionally resonant experiences that lodge in memory.
Reframing the category narrative with a brand story buyers can picture themselves in and retell to others.
Shaping category culture by embedding your brand into shared market memory.

What started as levers for change have evolved into structural pillars of the brand’s memory architecture.

The bottom line: positioning = your brand’s memory architecture for growth

B2B buying may be structured and rational, but every buyer’s brain encodes memory and emotion before logic. That’s why 90% of deals go to vendors already remembered when buying begins.

For CROs and CMOs, a focus on memorability can deliver growth for metrics that matter: faster pipeline growth, higher win rates, stronger pricing power. It’s time to reconcile the demand for performance with the reality of how people decide. Because in B2B, the brands that grow aren’t the ones with the sharpest claims. They’re the ones buyers already remember.