B2B Storytelling Examples From Boring Industries

12 min read · 2,499 words

The reason boring industries produce bad b2b storytelling examples is not the product. It is that the marketing team keeps looking for the story inside the product, and in freight, steel, chemicals, components and industrial services the story is almost never there. It is in the consequence of the thing failing, the person who depends on it, or the constraint the buyer works under.

I learned that in a room where nobody wanted a story. I was presenting a narrative idea for a category built on tonnage and turnaround time, to an audience of commercial and operations people who had spent the morning on service levels. The response was polite and completely clear: customers buy on price and reliability, so tell them about price and reliability. They were not wrong about the buying criteria. They were wrong about what a story is for, which is not to replace the specification but to make sure the specification is read by someone who already knows who you are.

The version that eventually worked did not feature the product at all. It featured what happens at three in the morning when a consignment does not arrive, and who has to make the phone call. Same category, same buyers, entirely different reception.

Why do boring industries produce bad stories?

Three habits, and they compound.

The first is looking inward. A brief that starts with product attributes produces a story about product attributes, and in a commoditised category every competitor’s attributes are within a few percentage points of yours. There is no narrative tension in a specification sheet because both sides of the comparison are true.

The second is the belief that a rational buyer wants only rational input. This one survives because it feels responsible. The research does not support it. The LinkedIn and Magna study of 67 ads tested with 1,700 business decision makers found creative advertising produced a 40% higher likelihood of purchase consideration, alongside a 9% lift in brand favourability and 8% in research intent. The same study found business decision makers themselves saying B2B advertising was missing something: 64% said it lacked humour, 60% that it lacked emotional appeal, 59% that it lacked relatable characters. The buyers are asking for it.

The third is timing. Story work looks wasteful when you measure it against this quarter’s pipeline, because most of the audience is not buying. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute with the LinkedIn B2B Institute puts roughly 95% of potential business buyers out of market at any given moment, and John Dawes, discussing the work in Marketing Week, illustrates it with commercial banking, where in a given year only about one in ten clients will be looking to change. A story is the format most likely to survive in memory until the year someone is looking, which is exactly why it gets cut by people measuring the current quarter.

The Four Doors: where the story actually is

When the product will not yield a story, there are four other doors into the same category. I have used this as a working model for finding narrative in categories that appear to have none, and the discipline is to try them in order rather than defaulting to the last one.

Only the fourth door is about you, which is why it is the one most companies open first. The order matters more than it looks. Teams that start at craft rarely go back and check the other three, because they have already produced something that feels like an answer, and the first three doors require talking to people outside the marketing department.

Door one, consequence: the demonstration that was not about the truck

The most cited B2B campaign of the last fifteen years is a truck manufacturer’s, and almost everyone remembers it for the wrong reason.

Volvo Trucks’ Live Test series ran from 2012, and the film in which Jean-Claude Van Damme performs a split between two reversing trucks reached, according to figures given to Contagious by Tobias Nordström, head planner at agency Forsman & Bodenfors, 10 million views in 48 hours and more than 72 million in total, making it at the time the most watched automotive advertisement on YouTube. Across the series the films passed 100 million views and were shared close to 8 million times. Between June 2012 and July 2014 the brand’s Facebook following went from 16,000 to 362,000, unique monthly visits to its European sites roughly doubled from just over 175,000 to more than 300,000, and earned media was valued at 126 million euros. Nordström also reported that almost half of truck drivers who had seen a Live Test film said they would be more likely to buy a Volvo next time.

Two honest caveats, because this case is quoted far more often than it is examined. Every one of those figures comes from the agency that made the work. And no sales figures were ever disclosed. Treat it as strong evidence of attention and stated intent, not as a proven revenue case.

What it does prove is the door. The subject of that film is not the truck. It is the consequence of steering precision, dramatised so specifically that the specification becomes memorable. The product claim, dynamic steering, is genuinely dull. The consequence of it working is a man suspended between two moving vehicles.

Door two, the dependant: sixty years of somebody else’s life

India’s answer to this problem is older than most marketing departments. The Amul topical campaign began in 1966, created by Sylvester daCunha, and holds a Guinness World Record as the longest running advertising campaign in the world. Butter is the least differentiated product imaginable. The campaign has almost never been about butter. It has been about whatever the country was arguing about that week, told by a character who has nothing to do with dairy.

That is the dependant door taken to its limit. The brand attaches itself to the life the product sits inside rather than to the product, and does it with enough consistency that six decades later the association is automatic. Asian Paints has run a version of the same idea for years by advertising the home rather than the coating, and several Indian industrial and logistics brands have found the door through the businesses that depend on them: the small manufacturer whose order arrives on time, the contractor whose site does not stop.

The failure mode is worth naming because it is everywhere. A film about a farmer with a stirring soundtrack, made by a company that sells hydraulic components, with no plausible connection between the two. The dependant has to genuinely depend on you. If the link needs a voiceover to explain it, the door is not open.

Door three, the constraint: the buyer’s actual problem

The third door is the least used and, in industrial categories, usually the most productive. Instead of asking what your product does, ask what your buyer is up against.

A procurement head in steel or cement is managing price volatility they did not cause, against internal expectations that assume stability. A logistics manager is judged on a service level determined by traffic, weather and a hundred subcontractors. A plant engineer is asked to justify a capital purchase to people who will only notice it if it fails. These are recognisable predicaments, and almost nobody is telling stories about them.

This door produces the work that gets forwarded internally, because it makes the buyer feel understood rather than sold to. It also builds exactly the associations that matter for recall. Ehrenberg-Bass research reported in Marketing Week found that each additional category entry point a customer links to a brand lowers the probability of defection, and constraints are category entry points in narrative form. A story about the 3am phone call attaches your brand to the moment the buyer is most likely to be thinking about the category, which is the mechanism I have written about in why awareness is the wrong thing to measure.

In a commoditised category, the story is never in the product. It is in the consequence of the product failing and the person who has to live with it.

Door four, the craft, and why to open it last

Sometimes the difficulty of making the thing well is genuinely the story. A tolerance measured in microns, a process that takes eleven months, a test regime that destroys the product deliberately.

The craft door works when the difficulty is real, demonstrable and surprising to the buyer. It fails when it is used as permission to talk about yourself, which is what happens in most industrial content: the factory tour film, the founder interview, the timeline of company milestones. Those are not stories. They are organisational autobiography, and the audience for them is internal, whatever the brief said.

Open this door last. If the first three are genuinely closed, the fourth is often the honest answer. If you opened it first, you almost certainly did not check the other three.

Why do customer stories fail when the customer is a company?

Because a company cannot want anything, and narrative requires somebody who wants something.

The standard B2B case study is written with the client organisation as protagonist: the company faced a challenge, evaluated options, implemented a solution, achieved a result. Nothing in that sequence is a story, because the subject has no interior life. Every case study written this way reads identically, which is why nobody reads two.

The fix is to find the person inside the account who took the risk. Someone recommended you when the safe choice was the incumbent. Someone had to defend that recommendation. That person has a stake, an opponent and something to lose, which is the minimum viable structure for a narrative. The company is the setting, not the character.

This is also what makes a case study usable at the top of the funnel rather than only at the bottom. Ehrenberg-Bass’s How B2B Brands Grow, published in November 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk, Byron Sharp, John Dawes and colleagues, argues for building memory structures across the whole category rather than optimising for the small in market group. A story with a person in it travels. A process description does not.

What does the evidence say about creative work in B2B?

Enough that the burden of proof has shifted onto the people arguing for the specification sheet.

Analytic Partners, working from a database of more than 750 brands across 45 countries, found brand messaging outperformed performance messaging 80% of the time. Binet and Field’s B2B analysis, reported by The Drum, recommended a 46% brand building to 54% sales activation split, closer to even than most industrial marketing budgets get anywhere near. And research covered by Mi3, drawn from a survey of 1,200 B2B buyers in the US and UK, found active brand rejection running at meaningful levels, meaning a brand can be known and still be ruled out, which is a story problem rather than an awareness problem.

Getting the story approved, and knowing whether it worked

Two practical obstacles kill more industrial storytelling than any creative shortfall.

The first is approval. A story about a customer needs that customer’s consent, and legal departments default to no because the downside is visible and the upside is not. Three things move it. Ask for the person rather than the company, since an individual quoted in their own name is a smaller approval than a corporate endorsement. Show the draft early rather than at sign off. And offer something back, usually visibility for the customer’s own brand, so the request stops being a favour.

The second is the sales team, who will ask for the specification because specifications are what they are asked for in meetings. The answer is not to argue. It is to give them both, with the story as the thing that gets the meeting and the specification as the thing that wins it. That framing has never failed to end the argument in any room I have been in.

On measurement, resist the urge to attribute a story to a deal. The honest tests are these: does the language of the story come back to you unprompted from customers and salespeople, does prompted association with the relevant category entry points move over two or three tracking waves, and does the piece get shared internally at the customer’s end. Those signals are directionally right and available. A revenue number attached to a film is almost always fiction, for reasons I have set out in more detail on marketing inside the supply chain.

What to do with this on Monday

Take one product you consider unstoryable and run the four doors on it, in writing, in an hour.

1. Consequence. List the five worst things that happen when it fails. Pick the one with a human in it.
2. Dependant. Trace three steps downstream from your customer. Who is at the end, and do they know your product exists.
3. Constraint. Write your buyer’s job description as they would describe it to a friend at a wedding, complaints included.
4. Craft. Ask an engineer what part of making this is genuinely hard, and whether a buyer would be surprised.
5. Pick the door with the most specific answer, not the most flattering one, and brief that. Specificity beats scale in every one of these categories.

Then check the work against the standard I keep returning to in brand storytelling that actually works and in where emotional branding in B2B is real and where it is theatre: if a competitor could put their logo on it unchanged, it is not a story, it is a category description.

My position, which I know a lot of industrial marketers disagree with, is that there is no such thing as a boring category, only categories where nobody has been paid to look past the product for long enough. The story is usually one conversation with an operations person away.

What is the worst thing that happens when your product fails, and why is that not your campaign?