Some brands have one audience to convince. B2B2C brands have at least two. Before your customer can choose you, a buyer, retailer, distributor, operator or procurement team may already have decided whether they get the chance. That creates an interesting branding problem.
The things that make a product attractive to someone buying it for themselves aren’t necessarily the things that make a business want to stock, specify or sell it. One might be looking for taste, performance, quality or something that catches their eye. The other could be thinking about margin, range architecture, reliability, rate of sale or how efficiently something fits on a shelf.
Same brand. Same product. Two very different reasons to say yes. A good B2B2C branding strategy needs to win both.
First, understand who makes which decision
The mistake is treating ‘the audience’ as one group. We saw this when repositioning a Cawston Press that needed to work across both on-trade and off-trade environments. There were consumers drinking it, but there were also buyers deciding whether it reached the fridge, bar or shelf in the first place. Ultimately all aligned to the end consumer.
We’ve seen similar dynamics through our work with Pukka, where a distinctive consumer brand also has to work effectively within a competitive retail environment, and Croydex, where products need to make sense to retailers and category buyers while ultimately appealing to people improving their homes.
For Yonex, the relationship is different again. Players are attracted by performance, innovation and the athletes associated with the brand, while retailers and distributors need a proposition they can understand, sell and get behind.
So the first part of the strategy is simple:
Map the decisions, not just the audiences.
Who decides whether you’re stocked? Who recommends you? Who influences the decision? Who ultimately buys? And what does each of them need to believe? Those answers give the brand a much more useful job to do.
Give each audience a reason to choose you
Once we understand the decisions, we can separate what needs to be communicated from what needs to be shared.
For the trade audience, the brand needs to make the commercial proposition easy to understand. That might mean:
Clarity: What is it, where does it sit and who is going to buy it?
Confidence: Will people recognise it, understand it and want it?
Commercial sense: Does the range, format, pricing and positioning give it a credible role within the category?
Ease: Is it straightforward to stock, display, explain and sell?
For the consumer, the questions are different:
Relevance: Is this for someone like me?
Difference: Why this rather than everything sitting next to it?
Desire: Does it look, sound or feel like something I want?
Trust: Do I believe the claims, quality and value behind it?
The strategy needs to answer both sets of questions without looking like two different brands have been bolted together.
Build one idea strong enough to do two jobs
This is where positioning becomes particularly important. A B2B2C brand doesn’t need a trade proposition and then a completely separate consumer proposition. Ideally, it needs one strong central idea that creates value for both, expressed differently where necessary.
Take performance. For a consumer, superior performance might be the emotional and functional reason to choose a product. For a retailer, that same performance story can give staff something distinctive to sell, create credibility within the category and justify where the product sits in the range.
The core truth hasn’t changed. The emphasis has. That’s a much stronger model than trying to meet everyone halfway.
Design has to work from the spreadsheet to the shelf
The same principle applies to identity and packaging. A buyer might encounter the range first as thumbnails in a presentation, product codes on a spreadsheet or a wall of SKUs. The consumer might encounter exactly the same range from two metres away in a busy shop. Both need to make sense.
That means thinking about range architecture, navigation, product differentiation and information hierarchy alongside the more emotive elements of identity.
With Croydex, for example, packaging had to communicate product type, features and compatibility quickly while still building a recognisable brand at range level. Those aren’t competing design jobs, solving them together is the design job.
And that distinction matters commercially. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research has consistently highlighted the importance of mental and physical availability: brands need to be easy to think of and easy to buy. In a B2B2C model, we’d argue there’s another layer to that. They need to be easy to stock, easy to sell and easy to choose.
Don’t forget the people in the middle
There’s often a third audience hiding between B and C. The person actually selling it. A bartender recommending a drink, or a retail assistant explaining a racket, or a merchant recommending a product, or a sales team presenting a range to a customer. They might not make the original buying decision or be the eventual consumer, but they can have enormous influence over what gets chosen.
This means B2B2C branding should consider what we’d call sellability. Can someone understand the product quickly enough to explain it? Is there a memorable reason to recommend it? Does the packaging help them? Are the differences between products obvious? Can the central brand story survive being retold in one sentence?
If your brand only works when your marketing director is in the room explaining it, you’ve probably got more work to do.
The goal isn’t compromise, it’s alignment.
B2B2C branding is sometimes treated as a balancing act. Make it commercial enough for the buyer, then make it attractive enough for the consumer, then meet somewhere safely in the middle.
We think that’s the wrong ambition.
The strongest strategy finds the point where the interests of both audiences reinforce one another.
Consumer desire gives the trade confidence to stock you. Trade understanding makes it easier to range and sell you. Strong architecture makes products easier for consumers to navigate and retailers to manage.
Distinctive visual branding makes you easier to notice, remember, recommend and find again. An ownable proposition with a B2B2C mindset at the heart of your positioning, giving buyers, sellers and consumers a shared reason to believe in the brand, even when their individual reasons for choosing it are different.
One builds recognition. The other builds relevance. Together, they create a brand that can work across the whole journey without compromising for either audience.
So rather than asking ‘How do we appeal to two different audiences?’, we’d start with a more useful question: ‘What can our brand stand for that matters to both?’
If your brand needs to win over the people who buy it, the people who sell it and the people who ultimately use it, we’d love to help.
