by Grant Polachek, head of branding for Squadhelp.com (now Atom.com)
Failing to see the forest for the trees is a popular metaphor for missing the big picture, but when it comes to B2B branding and marketing, there’s an opposite concept: missing the trees for the forest. B2B startups are all about the big picture: big ideas, big strategies, and big ambitions. That means it’s natural for founders to focus on their own knowledge, experience, and the innovative solutions we offer when brand building.
This offers a solid foundation for growing your business, but a fixation on big-picture ideas can crowd other things out. Put simply, it’s easy to forget who’s actually buying our product or service when we’re busy thinking big and, in the process, to miss the trees for the forest.
While B2B brands are selling to businesses, they need to connect with people: the decision-makers embedded in the businesses you’re marketing to and building your brand for. B2B markers and founders can’t afford to ignore personal psychology any more than B2C brands and, in fact, leveraging insights from the world of psychology can supercharge your B2B brand strategy. Here’s how.
The Evolving Landscape of B2B Branding
A colder, more clinical brand strategy often emerges out of B2B branding because we’re focused on emphasizing efficiency and expertise. While trust, professionalism and performance are often at the heart of B2B brand positioning, a hyperfocus on these concepts can overlook the fact that people must always be at the heart of any business. These people’s needs, values and passions have to be heard. That means psychological insights are essential for B2B brand strategy and marketing, particularly in a changing landscape.
As of 2025, there has never been a better time to build a powerful B2B brand, as an integrated digital ecosystem and sophisticated AI tools create huge opportunities for both reach and engagement. Conversely, it’s never been harder to stand out as new startups emerge daily, each clamoring for the attention of an increasingly younger and more marketing-savvy set of end-users.
Traditionally, B2B brand-building and marketing has tended to be a dry affair, focusing on legacy, reliability, and the objective features of a product or service. But in 2025, it’s not enough to solve your customers’ problems in the most optimized and effective ways; you need to connect on a personal level to forge the relationships that will see your B2B brand outpace competitors and find success.
Leveraging Psychology in B2B Marketing
Effective B2B branding takes in both the forest and the trees: the larger organization might be your ‘customer’, but the individuals, with their opinions, preferences and emotional commitments are the ultimate decision-makers. Meeting the needs of business and individual, and marketing to both, requires an understanding of human psychology as well as the industry expertise you’ve built your product or service around.
Creating Connection in Naming
Your business name is the first opportunity to create a long-lasting connection with the individuals who act as decision-makers for the businesses you’re targeting. Your name should hint at your brand’s commitments and character: don’t just tell your customers what you do, but tell them how you do it. Evoking emotions in your customers leaves a lingering impression than the brute facts of your impact on efficiency, workflow or conversions.
Traditionally, B2B brands landed on factual, informative yet ultimately passionless names, and some of these historied brands are still industry powerhouses, like IBM and General Electric. But in today’s fast-paced commercial landscape, that’s no longer enough. Modern B2B brands like Slack, Mailchimp, and Shopify have powerful names that are memorable for their quirks and modern styles and tell a much better story of these brands’ aims than a simple acronym.
Make a Visual Impact
With half of the human brain being devoted to vision, it’s fair to characterize humans as intensely visual creatures. Understanding the relationship between color, design and psychology takes advantage of this constant background search for meaning taking place in your customers’ minds.
Atom.com’s research on color psychology found that brand color has an immediate impact on your audience, who will perceive red as exciting but unfriendly, and blue as cool, calm, and collected. Whether your logo consists of smooth, swooping lines or hard angles will guide your customers to perceive you as creative or calculatingly rational.
MailChimp, for example, has built a powerful brand with an impactful visual style: a playful monkey logo, a ubiquitous yellow brand color, and humanized, hand-drawn design. While MailChimp is squarely positioned as a B2B brand, they understand that people — business founders, entrepreneurs and creatives — are their true audience.
A strong and consistent visual identity reinforces the character of your brand and enhances an emotional connection: the foundation of loyal customer relationships.
Build Relationships with Reciprocity
Reciprocity is the principle of exchanging goods and services for mutual benefit and it’s deeply embedded in our psyche as well as universally present across all cultures of the world. Psychologists speculate that reciprocity has contributed to our survival as a species, making it evolutionarily ingrained.
Reciprocity is all about relationship building, and in B2B branding this requires that you make the transaction a little less transactional. Think about what you can offer your customers above and beyond your core service, like offering your expertise in webinars and walkthroughs or through free tools. Follow up a sale with additional value-adding materials that aren’t hinged around upselling a further add-on for your product or service.
Add the Personal Touch
Personalization is an important psychological tool because it allows your customers to feel heard and valued. In a B2B setting, this can be especially important: people don’t lose their identities when they step into the office and appreciate being treated as individuals.
With the rapid expansion of AI tools facilitating data gathering and analytics, personalization has never been easier. This is about more than greeting people by name in your email marketing. Fine-tune your campaigns with personalized email headers and even content based on how they’re using your product, to provide highly relevant content that optimizes their experience.
A Digital World Needs a Personal Touch
Businesses aren’t faceless entities, and even in today’s digital, AI-powered world, a real human is making every important decision at the businesses you’re selling to. Even though your customers are organizations, understanding the psychology of those organization’s employees will help you build relationships and lasting connections. In B2B branding, you have to see both the forest and the trees.
Grant Polachek is the head of branding for Squadhelp.com (now Atom.com), 3X Inc 5000 startup and disruptive naming agency. Squadhelp has reviewed more than 1 million names and curated a collection of the best available names on the web today. The world’s leading crowdsource naming platform, supporting clients such as Nestle, Dell, Nuskin, and AutoNation.
