brand

Does a B2B Company Need a Brand? Winning the Market When AI Makes Products No Longer Enough

“We’re a B2B business. Our clients come through sales. Do we really need brand marketing?” For many companies in technology, manufacturing, and professional services, product quality, technical capability, lead times, and pricing have always been what wins orders. Compared with investing in brand and marketing, refining the product and growing the sales team tend to show clearer, more immediate returns.

Beyond Products

That logic worked well for a long time, but it is now meeting a different kind of market. As AI makes product development, content creation, and marketing execution easier and easier, competition between companies is shifting away from technology and efficiency toward brand differentiation and trust. A B2B brand survey published by Marketing Week in September 2026 found that 58.4% of marketers said their companies had placed more emphasis on brand building over the past year, yet only 8.5% named long-term strategy as a main priority. Companies are starting to see that brand matters, but many have not yet made it a core part of how they run the business. In the same year, the Forbes Communications Council raised a point worth considering: as AI makes content faster and more polished to produce, human taste, original insight, and strategic judgment become the advantages that are hardest for competitors to copy.

This shift deserves particular attention from B2B companies. As product specifications, technical capabilities, and service packages become easier to compare, what influences a client’s decision goes beyond the product itself. It also includes how a company communicates its expertise, sets itself apart, and builds a reputation clients can trust. From technology and manufacturing to social enterprise, brand and marketing are driving growth in different ways.

｜When the product is no longer the only competitive advantage, how can a B2B company use brand and marketing to become the market’s first choice?

Further reading: ‘Human premium’: Why are B2B businesses backing brand? Further reading: AI Is Cool But 2026’s Most Valuable Marketing Asset Is Still Human Taste

Technology: Beyond Features

1. Technology: As Products and Services Keep Expanding, How Does a Brand Create a Shared Direction for Growth?

International case | Salesforce × MrBeast: Why did one ad get a million people to try enterprise software?

In February 2026, enterprise software giant Salesforce handed its costly Super Bowl ad slot to global YouTube creator MrBeast. Together they launched a nationwide puzzle game with a US$1 million prize. Rather than focusing on features and efficiency the way B2B advertising usually does, the campaign cast Salesforce’s AI tool Slackbot as the player’s trusted teammate. Players used it to organize clues, track their reasoning, and work through the puzzles, experiencing the value of AI collaboration firsthand along the way.

What started as a 30-second Super Bowl spot eventually drew more than one million players to Slackbot. Large-scale product engagement does not equal enterprise purchasing, but Salesforce managed to turn a professional, highly rational enterprise product into a brand experience the general public could take part in. It also showed that B2B marketing does not have to make everyone understand complex specifications. It can instead give people a reason to get involved, so the product’s value becomes clear through the experience.

Further reading: The Million-Dollar Puzzle: How Slackbot and MrBeast are Rewriting the Super Bowl Playbook

Technology: One Shared Vision

THINKWAYS case | H2U: From health tech company to all-scenario healthy living practitioner

If Salesforce shows how creative marketing can help the market see a product’s value, THINKWAYS’ work with H2U shows why a company needs a clear brand direction before it scales up its market communication.

H2U began in 2013 as an employee health program within Foxconn (Hon Hai) Group and gradually grew into corporate health services, with clients across technology, fashion, retail, and other industries. As the group acquired more health and lifestyle brands, its business expanded into healthcare, wellness, media, and data platforms, and H2U began moving from B2B corporate health services toward a B2C healthy living ecosystem. But as the number of business units grew, each brand brought its own culture, positioning, and way of communicating. The central challenge of the brand transformation was to unify these scattered capabilities into a consistent group value while keeping what made each brand distinct.

THINKWAYS did not start with the logo or visual design. The team first ran in-depth internal interviews, external consumer research, market trend analysis, and brand workshops to clarify the group’s vision, brand architecture, and the relationships between its business units. Grounded in H2U’s corporate vision of “applying technology to extend healthy lifespans,” the team repositioned the brand from a “health tech company” to an “all-scenario healthy living practitioner,” bringing previously scattered services together across six areas: health data, services, knowledge, entertainment, food, and active living.

The brand proposition, LIGHT ON YOUR WAY, uses the lighthouse as its central image, expressing a promise to guide and support people throughout their health journey. H2U (Health to You) was further developed into three brand values: Holistic Insight (data insight), Universal Service (service integration), and Healthy Life (lifestyle enablement), giving the group a consistent foundation for both internal and external communication.

The strategy carried through to the brand identity and digital experience. The new logo builds on the original flag shape, turning it into a lighthouse beam that represents all-scenario health services. The website uses a dark base with light beams and moving lines to create a digital presence that feels both technically credible and human, and its information architecture was reorganized around health services and lifestyle content. Group brands Everyday Health and SportsNote also received new identities that keep their own character while adopting the parent brand’s rounded, block-based design system, giving the different business units a stronger sense of belonging to one group.

From market research and positioning to visual identity, the website, and sub-brand integration, H2U shows how brand strategy can help a company make sense of a complex business portfolio and establish a shared direction for its next stage of growth. When AI lets companies launch services and produce content faster, the hard part is often not communicating more, but making sure everything they communicate points toward the same brand goal.

Further reading: H2U | Integrating multi-brand strengths into one group language

Manufacturing: Making B2B Memorable

2. Manufacturing: Technology Is the Baseline. Brand Keeps a Company from Being Judged on Specs Alone.

International case | Schneider Electric: “No matter what you do, do it schmoother!”

In manufacturing, product quality, technical capability, and lead times are prerequisites for earning a client’s trust. But when every competitor highlights similar technical strengths, how does a brand stand out?

Global energy technology company Schneider Electric faced exactly this problem in the US industrial automation market. Despite a mature technology and product portfolio, it ranked only sixth in US industrial automation brand consideration in 2025. In response, the team launched the Schmoooth campaign, which made “smoothness” the core idea of its brand communication. Through creative video, digital media, trade shows, and sales tools, the campaign moved away from the rational, formulaic tone typical of industrial brands.

According to case data from the 2026 IPA Effectiveness Awards, the campaign increased marketing-qualified opportunities by 232% and pipeline value by 118%, and is estimated to have generated US$22 million in closed revenue. It shows that creative B2B branding can do more than raise awareness. It can deliver real business results.

Further reading: Automation runs schmooother with Schneider Electric | Schneider Electric Reference: IPA Effectiveness Awards 2026 / Schneider Electric – Schmoooth

Manufacturing: Connecting Possibilities

THINKWAYS case | LaPlus: Can connectors be as fun as LEGO?

Schneider Electric used creative marketing to move an industrial automation brand beyond technical messaging. Taiwanese electronics manufacturing brand LaPlus went further back, starting from its brand positioning to redefine its relationship with clients.

LaPlus began as a B2B contract parts manufacturer. After years of building technical and market experience, it decided to focus on connectors and develop solutions that can flexibly integrate components from different brands. Unlike traditional suppliers that compete mainly on specifications, quality, and price, LaPlus wanted to communicate open integration, flexible configuration, and the ability to work across brands.

This meant the company needed more than a refreshed image. It needed to rethink its role in the industry value chain.

Starting from market research and brand strategy, THINKWAYS repositioned LaPlus as “the LEGO of wiring architecture,” an intuitive, visual metaphor that turns specialized connector technology into a brand idea that is easy to grasp. LEGO stands for more than snapping parts together. It suggests modularity, flexible application, and open-ended creation. The team distilled three elements of brand DNA, namely strong performance, flexibility, and genuine openness, and developed Connect Creativity as the brand proposition.

This proposition redefined LaPlus’s relationship with its clients, shifting it from a parts manufacturer to a systems integration partner that helps clients bring resources together and realize their ideas. The brand concept was then extended into the visual identity and communication.

THINKWAYS turned the “Plus” in the LaPlus name into a “Cross,” using a visual language of intersection and connection that reflects the brand’s belief in Cooperation over Competition. In an electronics industry where most brands lean on a rational, high-tech look, LaPlus chose bright yellow and deep green as its primary colors, with blocky gradients that suggest flowing energy. The result is a distinctive, energetic brand personality, applied across business cards, product packaging, and presentation templates.

｜Even so, differentiation should not stop at visual style.

For B2B buyers, searching specifications, comparing components, and organizing requirements are a big part of how they interact with suppliers. THINKWAYS therefore extended the brand strategy into the website’s information architecture and user experience. Built around Connect Creativity, the site uses a grid system to organize complex product categories and adds a Wish List feature and multiple navigation paths, making it more intuitive for users to look up, save, and compare the products they need.

From positioning and identity design to the digital interface, LaPlus turned “flexible connection” from a tagline into something clients can understand and actually experience when they interact with the brand. For manufacturers, brand strategy is not about wrapping products in emotional packaging. It is about turning years of technical capability into a competitive advantage the market can recognize, understand, and trust.

Further reading: LaPlus | From parts manufacturing to brand innovation

Social Enterprise: Unwrapping the Truth

3. Social Enterprise: From Sharing a Mission to Creating Impact, How Does a Brand Build Trust and Partnership?

International case | Tony’s Chocolonely: Why does such sweet chocolate have a bitter side?

As sustainability and social responsibility become shared concerns for many companies, how can a brand move its mission beyond a formal statement and turn it into a story people remember?

Dutch chocolate brand Tony’s Chocolonely exists to end exploitation in the cocoa industry. Instead of the serious image typical of advocacy campaigns, it uses a bold brand personality, striking colors, and playful design to make a complex social issue easier to understand and talk about. Its best-known example is the deliberately uneven chocolate bar. Rather than identical squares, Tony’s divides its bars into pieces of different sizes to represent the unequal distribution of value in the cocoa industry, so the product itself carries the brand’s mission.

From its bright, instantly recognizable packaging and unconventional tone of voice to “Only Red,” the brand color developed with Pantone in 2025, Tony’s keeps turning its social mission into a brand language people can recognize, experience, and share. What stands out even more is that the brand did not keep its mission confined to the consumer market. Through Tony’s Open Chain, it invites other food companies to adopt responsible cocoa sourcing principles, so businesses can do more than agree with the idea. They can take part in the change through real collaboration.

The Tony’s case shows that the real strength of brand strategy lies not only in telling a moving story about a cause, but in carrying the brand proposition through identity, product experience, and partnership models, so it becomes a shared value that keeps driving action.

Further reading: Unwrap Tony’s Only Red. Impact in Every Bite.

Social Enterprise: Designing for Impact

THINKWAYS case | ASE Social Enterprise: How can invisible social impact be designed into a visible brand?

Tony’s Chocolonely shows how product design and brand storytelling can turn a social mission into a brand experience that people understand and even want to join. For organizations built around resource integration and social innovation, brand strategy matters just as much, though the problems it needs to solve are different.

The challenge for ASE Social Enterprise was to bring its diverse social innovation resources and organizational mission together into a clear, recognizable brand language that could also unite its partners.

Starting from the organization’s positioning and brand architecture, THINKWAYS identified “action” as the core of the brand and developed the proposition ACTIONS FOR ACTIONS. The idea is that an organization’s value lies not only in how many resources it commits, but in whether each concrete action supports, connects, and inspires more people to get involved, so its social impact keeps spreading.

The team then built three brand values around ACT: Achieve, Care, and Trust, which serve as a shared language for organizational culture, brand communication, and team alignment. The brand concept was also translated into a concrete identity system.

Building on the parent brand’s core image of light, THINKWAYS used three arrows converging toward a center to represent the coming together of different industries, resources, and social forces. The colors carry over the parent company’s green, orange, and yellow, keeping the new brand connected to the group while giving it a younger, more energetic look. Supporting visuals use a flock of birds in flight to convey the power of collective action, and the arrows from the logo are extended into a footprint motif that reflects the brand’s focus on practical action and steady progress.

The brand system was applied across business cards, presentations, ID badges, tote bags, and apparel, so the mission does not remain a written statement but becomes, through consistent identity and communication, a language the organization can keep using.

From positioning and core values to identity applications, ASE Social Enterprise shows how brand strategy can turn an abstract organizational mission into a clear, concrete brand promise that can be carried forward over time. This echoes the “human taste” the Forbes Communications Council emphasizes: when AI can generate ideas and stories in seconds, what truly sets a company apart is the values it actually chooses, and whether it takes enough action to back up that promise.

Brand trust is not built on a more beautiful mission statement. It grows over time as a company’s values are consistently reflected in how it acts and how it works with others.

Further reading: ASE Social Enterprise | Inspiring action through action

Conclusion

AI helps companies move faster, but brand decides where they are going

For B2B companies, brand marketing does not have to chase mass awareness or require a large advertising budget. What matters is whether it solves the specific problems a company faces as it grows:

When the business expands, brand strategy helps integrate resources and align communication.

When products get stuck competing on specs and price, brand positioning gives clients a reason to choose differently.

When a company enters new markets, marketing uses content and experiences to help potential clients understand the product’s value, build trust, and move toward working together.

AI can make execution more efficient, but it cannot answer the question for you: why should clients choose us? Before any company, B2B or otherwise, invests in brand and marketing, that is the strategic question most worth answering first.

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marketing

When Brand and Marketing Operate Separately, What Does a Business Actually Lose?

Brand strategy and advertising marketing have long been treated as separate disciplines, each with its own professional territory. Brand teams define positioning, value proposition, and long-term direction. Marketing teams focus on market communication, media execution, and conversion performance. Both are specialized, and both carry distinct responsibilities. Yet as brand touchpoints multiply — spanning social media, advertising, retail, and product experience — the paths consumers take to encounter a brand are no longer singular, and audiences have grown increasingly fragmented. When strategy and execution advance independently, any gap in messaging or visual expression gradually dilutes what was once a clear brand image. The real challenge for brand and marketing is not simply doing each job well, but ensuring that strategy and execution connect — so that every external communication moves toward the same brand direction. Whether consumers encounter a consistent brand across different touchpoints is increasingly a determining factor in brand trust and business outcomes. This article examines three common gaps between brand and marketing, illustrated through real cases, to reconsider why the two cannot be treated as separable.