Emotional influences of modern marketing
Editor’s note: J. Brooks is the founder and CEO of GlassView.
Most B2B marketing operates under an outdated assumption that business buyers are persuaded almost exclusively by facts and features, and emotion is a luxury reserved for consumer campaigns.
Nvidia is an example proving that emotion has an important role in B2B campaigns. Until recently, Nvidia was primarily perceived as a gaming company. Fast forward just a few years, and Nvidia has become an important B2B company, sitting at the center of AI infrastructure, enterprise computing and national economic strategy.
That transformation did not happen on performance specifications alone. Yes, undeniably, Nvidia’s GPUs are powerful and outperform alternatives on benchmarks. But rational arguments only explain part of the story. The more overlooked driver is emotional: a generation of technical decision makers already trusted Nvidia long before they ever evaluated it in an enterprise context.
Today’s IT leaders and engineers grew up gaming. Many formed an emotional relationship with Nvidia products at home — associating the brand with reliability and personal mastery. When the same people later found themselves making purchasing decisions at work, that emotional familiarity traveled with them.
The perception problem: B2B is still treated as “too rational”
By default, B2B campaigns are designed around product capabilities and metrics: “Cutting-edge solutions” that “increase leads by 200%.” Platforms that “cut compute costs by up to 50%.” The implicit assumption is that decision makers in business contexts leave their emotions at the door.
But that is not the reality of how humans work. Even in boardrooms and procurement reviews, emotion quietly governs attention, memory, trust and preference — subconsciously shaping what feels safe, credible and worth advocating for long before rational evaluation kicks in.
A 2024 analysis of B2B advertising on LinkedIn underscored this gap. While more than half (55%) of business decision makers said the ads they saw were clear, only around a third (36%) found them emotionally appealing or creative. Clarity alone, it turns out, does not move the needle.
Despite this, many B2B marketers still underinvest in creative that is designed to elicit an emotional response. The same research, conducted by LinkedIn and MAGNA Media Trials, indicates that most B2B campaigns lack humor, strong storytelling and characters that target audiences can connect with.
The case for emotion in business marketing
A wide range of evidence proves that emotional campaigns perform better than rational ones across important brand metrics.
Les Binet and Peter Field wrote an 82-page report about this phenomenon back in 2013 — after analyzing 30 years of Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) effectiveness award submissions, they found that emotional campaigns outperformed rational campaigns on all seven brand metrics measured: awareness, commitment, trust, differentiation, quality, fame and image.
The power of emotionally appealing advertising was reaffirmed in a July report by the IPA, which studied how empathetic ads that expressed humor, generosity and humanity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic outperformed ads that ignored emotional context.
In B2B specifically, research from the LinkedIn B2B Institute has found that inspiring emotion in B2B ads is seven times more effective at driving business outcomes in the long term over relying on rational messaging alone.
The reason emotion outperforms pure logic in marketing is due to the way our brains are wired. Neuroscience and behavioral studies tell us that the emotional brain processes stimuli faster than cognitive processing, embedding emotionally salient experiences in memory more strongly. That means ads that evoke genuine feeling are more likely to be recalled, giving a brand a better shot when a buyer finally steps into the market.
This is especially important in crowded industries and environments, where campaigns that spark curiosity or resonance have the ability to separate “just another vendor” from “trusted partner.”
Research shows emotion is the deal-accelerator in B2B
There’s also a practical, overlooked reality in enterprise sales: nearly every major B2B deal is unlocked by one key internal advocate.
Procurement committees might sign the paperwork, but it is a single human being — a VP, a director, an innovation lead — who champions your product, pushes through objections, rallies colleagues and defends your value when you’re not in the room.
You do not earn that person’s advocacy with spreadsheets alone.
To inspire someone to personally fight for your solution, you have to trigger something emotional — excitement about the future, pride in choosing something innovative, relief that your product solves a pain point or the confidence that you “just get it.” When that emotional spark is there, logic becomes the justification, not the motivation.
Emotion may be the most undervalued deal-accelerator in the entire B2B world.
The power of human connection in B2B
When the sharpest competitive edge companies can create is differentiation, memorability and trust, emotion is an essential component of any marketing campaign — whether it’s targeted at consumers or business leaders.
That doesn’t mean throwing out metrics and capabilities but leveraging emotion to make them stick with stories that feel meaningful, visuals that resonate and pacing that surprises. Especially considering that engaging stories are the lifeblood of how search and social algorithms optimize.
Because ultimately, B2B marketing isn’t about convincing an entire company. It’s about connecting deeply with one human — the one who will carry your torch the rest of the way.