B2B marketing has lost influence by getting effectiveness wrong, says True’s Cos Mingides

Cos Mingides, co-founder and head of effectiveness at True, argues that B2B marketing’s difficulty in talking seriously about effectiveness stems not from a lack of evidence but from the way effectiveness has been defined and applied.

He points to the IPA Effectiveness Awards. Across 45 years, B2B has submitted just 61 of 1,618 cases, or 3.8% of entries, and has won 17 of 581 awards, or 2.9% of winners. “That’s not just alarming underrepresentation. It’s a category confession,” he writes.

B2B is estimated to generate roughly 65%, or about two-thirds, of global business revenue and profit, yet it rarely shows up to make the case that marketing drives growth. Mingides concludes that this is not a category struggling to prove effectiveness but one that has never fully accepted marketing should be judged on it.

Activity is not effectiveness

Mingides says that for all the talk of effectiveness in B2B, there is little shared understanding of what it means. Marketers cite leads, cost per lead, pipeline contribution and attribution models. These are familiar and tidy, he says, but they are “records of activity”.

Properly understood, he argues, effectiveness means asking whether marketing generates additional, lasting value for the business in proportion to what was spent: not whether it produced something quickly or could be tracked neatly, but whether it changed the business’s commercial direction over time.

“If your definition of effectiveness collapses the moment a CFO asks, ‘So what?’, then what you have isn’t effectiveness. It’s reporting,” he writes.

The evidence exists

Mingides says the evidence gap has already been closed. In the last seven years The B2B Institute has funded more rigorous studies of B2B effectiveness than the category managed in the 70 years before, giving marketers evidence specific to complex B2B buying rather than lessons borrowed from consumer marketing.

That work has come from leading names in the field, he notes, among them Les Binet and Peter Field, Jenni Romaniuk, Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. “This isn’t opinion dressed up as theory but the strongest body of effectiveness evidence B2B has ever had.”

Yet little has changed, he argues. The language has improved, with more talk of brand and long-term growth and wider recognition that B2B buyers are people and that memory counts. Under pressure, though, when budgets tighten or scrutiny increases, behaviour reverts. Brand investment is paused, creativity is rationalised and effectiveness is redefined as whatever can be proved fastest.

The barrier, he says, is now translation rather than evidence. The knowledge has not been built into how B2B organisations are structured, how marketers are trained or how success is judged internally. “Research has changed the conversation, but it hasn’t changed the system.”

Why short-term certainty wins

Mingides says B2B marketing still sits inside sales-led organisations, where it is designed to support growth rather than drive it: generating leads, producing materials, feeding the funnel and staying measurable. Judged on short-term outputs, it optimises for them, favouring activity over effect, precision over relevance and reassurance over truth.

The problem, he argues, is misplaced measurement rather than too little of it. Approaches designed for quick cycles and straightforward journeys are used for decisions that unfold over years and involve whole committees.

Purchase cycles in many B2B categories can run to five years, with the buying process taking more than 12 months. Yet success is regularly judged on the last quarter, and campaigns are optimised on 90 days of data. “That isn’t discipline. It’s comfort masquerading as control,” he writes.

As a result, he says, effectiveness is narrowed to whatever moves fastest, attribution models are treated as explanations, reporting replaces judgement and brand is written off as “unprovable” because it does not run on a quarterly timetable.

Mingides argues the task is to measure properly rather than measure more, using meaningful time horizons and multiple data sources that reflect how buying decisions are really made. If marketing cannot explain how it creates value over time, others will define value for it, usually in terms that favour immediacy, control and cost over growth. “At that point, marketing moves from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat.”

A strategic choice

Effectiveness is often discussed as something marketers should believe in, Mingides says, as though conviction alone could change results. He argues instead that it is a strategic choice: organising marketing around how value is really created over time and building capability, measurement and authority to match.

Until B2B marketing is organised around effectiveness structurally, analytically and culturally, he argues, it will not be seen as a driver of growth but treated as it is currently designed: “As support.”

Mingides was the author of the first paper to win Best B2B at the IPA Effectiveness Awards.