B2B needs sharper points of view, not more content, argues Michael Ruby

Michael Ruby, co-founder and chief creative officer at Park & Battery, argues that B2B marketing has built a machine for producing content while losing sight of what buyers actually want: a clear, distinctive point of view.

B2B marketers are publishing more than ever, he says, and getting less back from almost all of it. Each week brings more white papers, webinars, “definitive guides” and nurture streams designed to keep the machine running, yet buyers are asking for clarity rather than more assets. “The issue isn’t output. It’s outcomes,” he writes.

Too many assets

Whole teams now revolve around publishing schedules, distribution and repurposing, and the editorial calendar has become untouchable, Ruby says. Effectiveness has not kept pace.

He cites the most recent Content Preference Benchmark Survey from Demand Gen Report, where 51% of B2B buyers complained that content was too generic and not relevant to them and 56% named “an overwhelming amount of available content” as their biggest frustration.

The B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report from LinkedIn and Edelman is harsher. When the two last assessed quality in 2024, only 15% of decision-makers rated the B2B thought leadership they read as “very good” or “excellent”, and fewer than half considered it even “good”.

Marketers are not convinced either. According to the Content Marketing Institute, close to half of B2B marketers see themselves as mediocre or struggling on content effectiveness, and just 12% believe they are really succeeding.

“We are publishing at scale. And we are failing at scale,” Ruby writes. In his view, B2B marketing has become very good at making content and poor at generating ideas, building sophisticated distribution and optimisation engines that run on the same recycled thinking as everyone else.

How mediocrity became a process

Content marketing started as a discipline based on expertise, he argues: teach what you know, share insight freely and earn trust in return for customer intelligence.

Over time it was operationalised. Cadence took the place of conviction and keywords the place of substance, as teams optimised for search terms and frequency rather than argument and originality. The formula became a set number of posts each week, a quarterly report placed behind a form, nurtured, repurposed and broken into fragments, then the same again.

The outcome, he says, is a flood of assets that differ in appearance yet deliver an identical message: informative, competent and interchangeable.

Perspective is scarce

Ruby points to LinkedIn and Edelman research showing that 60% of executives would more readily pay extra to work with organisations that set out a clear, compelling vision through thought leadership. A strong point of view has a measurable commercial upside, he says, yet most brands avoid having one.

A real perspective creates tension. It questions received wisdom, takes a stance on where the market is going and what is broken, and does not try to please everyone. “That discomfort is precisely why it works,” he writes.

A clear point of view signals authority, makes a brand memorable and filters the audience, drawing in buyers who share the thinking and putting off those who do not, which he says a thousand blog posts cannot achieve.

AI will widen the gap

AI makes producing content at scale easier than ever, summarising reports, drafting blogs, writing social copy and generating variations in minutes. Once production stops being the constraint, Ruby says, perspective becomes the constraint.

Without a distinct thesis underneath, AI only speeds up sameness and becomes the next generation of stock content: “polished, coherent, structurally sound and entirely forgettable.”

He argues AI will reward brands that work out what they believe before publishing what they know. Marketers broadly accept this but do not act on it, he says: in the CMI trends report, almost three in four respondents said refining strategy contributes most to content effectiveness.

CMI’s own summary is: “Strategy beats scale…fewer random acts of content, more coordinated direction.” Without that, Ruby warns, the industry risks swapping human mediocrity for mediocrity at machine speed.

Conviction over calendars

A content strategy that begins by asking what needs publishing this month is already reactive, he says. Better starting questions are what the company believes that others do not, which industry tension deserves naming, which assumption should be challenged and how the future looks from its position.

Answer those honestly, Ruby argues, and articles, reports, campaigns and speeches become strands of one coherent argument instead of standalone deliverables. “Consistency of belief builds more trust than frequency of output,” he writes.

In a market saturated with information, he concludes, the winning brand will not be the one that talks most but the one that says something worth remembering.