Why B2B Buyers Choose Trust Over Features – An Interview with Angelika Attwood
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is often measured through dashboards, campaigns, and conversion data, but many of the decisions behind major purchases happen long before they become visible in analytics. In this exclusive interview, Angelika Attwood, the founder of DjE'KA and a neuromarketing and behavioural strategy expert, explores how understanding human decision-making can help Software as a Service (SaaS) and manufacturing brands communicate with more clarity, trust, and distinction.
Drawing from her experience across B2B marketing, advertising, and behavioural economics, Angelika shares why buyers respond to confidence, expertise, and customer experience as much as they do to features and pricing. The interview explores the psychology behind high-stakes B2B decisions, the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on modern marketing, and how brands can create meaningful differentiation without losing the trust their customers need.
Angelika Attwood, Creative Director & Founder of DjE'KA Marketing
What led you to bring neuromarketing into B2B and build DjE'KA around the way people actually make decisions?
I believe that if you do something, you should do it properly. I started my marketing journey by learning marketing and advertising principles through the lens of behavioural economics, then moving into strategy and creative.
Many marketers joke, “Sometimes we don’t know why the stats improved,” but I don’t like to settle for that answer. I believe it’s the entire dark funnel that we often forget about and give the least attention to.
As marketers working in the industry, we don’t always have the tools or resources to measure or test everything, such as psychological responses to a commercial using eye tracking, heart rate, or other sensory tools. That’s why we have behavioural economics and decades of research showing us that decision-making isn’t linear.
Our B2B marketing journey isn’t as simple as a drip campaign and a cold email. We can't measure everything, but that doesn't mean everything we can't measure doesn't influence the decision.
What does neuromarketing reveal about B2B buyers that traditional marketing tends to overlook?
We definitely overlook the impact of fear and corporate drama that affects every corporate deal in B2B.
Working in SaaS and manufacturing has shown me one consistent trend: if a deal involves spending money, there is accountability. If your campaign and core brand messaging don’t communicate trust and expertise, and instead blend in, you’re going to end up in a boardroom being evaluated alongside similarly positioned competitors by undecided people who are afraid of making the wrong decision.
Not everyone is willing to take the risk of spending huge amounts of money on something that doesn’t feel like a safe choice.
My point is: make yourself the obvious choice. Make your deck, offer, and value proposition communicate an obvious benefit. Stand out with clear copy, sharp creative, and excellent customer service that speaks to their brains, not just their pockets.
How do factors like risk, loss aversion, and cognitive ease shape decisions when several stakeholders are involved?
So, my answer is somewhat controversial when it comes to these phenomena. While I do believe we overcomplicate B2B copy by using all the big business lingo words that don’t really tell us anything, we also have to consider, as Ogilvy said, “The customer is your wife.” So we shouldn’t oversimplify it either.
My recent observation is that AI has made everything sound easier: shorter sentences, shorter answers, cutting to the point, getting processes in place within hours rather than days. But we forget that proper processes in SaaS and manufacturing are run by specialists. They require expertise and testing.
Although machine learning is fast and feels easier to apply, our marketing is still an entire journey, from the pitch to delivery and post-purchase.
If we oversimplify the value of a software or manufacturing solution, it can make the solution feel like it isn’t worth the money. I think the balance is: make the decision easy, but don’t make the expertise look easy.
Simplify enough for the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to understand and sign off on the deal, but keep it concise and valuable for the minds that are actually going to work with the solution.
We need to be careful. The old practice of gating information wasn’t necessarily wrong; it’s about finding the balance.
Why do industries like manufacturing and SaaS often fall into such similar messaging, despite having real opportunities to stand apart?
The answer is simple: it’s the value of the solution. B2B manufacturers and SaaS companies generate huge revenues. They are often at the core of the business. That’s where information and company processes are evaluated, and where the investment and risk-taking are the biggest.
It’s a money-making industry, which is both boring and tense. Because the stakes are high, companies tend to communicate safely, which is why so much of the messaging starts to sound the same. So you must be creative to make it work.
As AI makes content easier to produce, what do you think will separate genuinely memorable brands from those creating more noise?
That depends on how big the accounts you are targeting are. Some people will settle for the safe choice, evaluating five similar partners with the same messaging and choosing the one with a slightly better offer. Others will look for expertise, and that’s where an AI-sloppy message won’t work.
There’s also emerging research showing that the question isn’t simply whether people like or dislike AI-generated advertising. The bigger issue is whether the work creates emotion, distinctiveness, and strong brand associations. That’s where I think expertise becomes critical.
If your marketing gets as far as creating documents, strategies, copy, and creative entirely through AI, you are risking your entire brand position. Interestingly, recent research from System1 challenges the idea that consumers automatically reject AI-generated advertising. Andrew Tindall’s research found that people often couldn’t even identify when an ad had been made with AI, and when prompted, their stated dislike of AI didn’t necessarily match their emotional response to the advertising.
That’s actually the point: AI itself isn’t the problem. The problem is using AI as a substitute for expertise, strategy, and creative thinking.
AI can help experts work faster, but it shouldn’t replace the people who understand the customer, the category, and what makes a brand distinctive. If everyone uses AI to produce the same kind of content, the brands that stand out will be the ones using expertise to make AI work for them, rather than using AI to do the thinking for them.
This is why SaaS and manufacturers can end up spending money twice on wrong decisions. The choice was exciting and fast, so the delivery was therefore quick and sloppy, full of faults or delays.
We cannot forget that delivery and customer care are also part of your brand and part of marketing. The best brands know this. Their core competency is having employees with the expertise to work with AI, not using AI to work for them.
When a B2B brand sounds interchangeable with its competitors, where should it look first for meaningful differentiation?
That one is obvious: it’s your customer care.
Your customers are your revenue makers. Keep them alive for as long as you can. It’s not a skill to get a customer; it’s giving them a reason to stay.
Your delivery might be extended, deadlines might not be met, and things might go wrong. But the way you handle this, with the right information delivered to the customer throughout the entire process, shapes your brand value.
SaaS messes up frequently, so your marketing should be working very closely with your account managers to get this right. We always overlook this.
I think sales and marketing should be best friends, but we also need to remember that recurring revenue often lies in the relationship between account management and marketing.
How can a company become bolder and more distinctive without undermining the trust buyers need to make a high-stakes decision?
Trust comes from delivering the best service you can to your previous customers. Of course, this means your marketers should work hard on reviews.
I hate boring creative and repetitive copy. The only thing I strive to make boring and repetitive over time is the pattern within your customer statements. If their statements clearly praise you for your core value proposition, the same one your entire marketing is pushing and your company is working towards, then you are definitely bold.
I am bold in my creativity and in the way I present my message for one simple reason: stand out, show the value, deliver the value, and watch that value appear through recurring revenue, customer statements, AI overviews, and organic citations. I think that’s a pretty bold move.
Which principles from your early advertising education still influence the way you approach marketing today?
Oh, I think the lessons about scent marketing and colour psychology stayed with me the most.
I remember learning how the smell of coffee or cinnamon buns could make consumers feel hungry and want to stop by the shop, simply because it smelled so good that they had to walk in.
Or the art of merchandising: placing products at eye level if you want them to sell quicker, or understanding the best stocking practices in high-traffic areas of the store.
Because of those lessons, I can’t go to the supermarket without evaluating the marketing placements and trying to translate them into B2B behaviour.
What is one belief about B2B marketing you would most like business leaders to reconsider?
I think business leaders should reconsider relying too heavily on cutting corners with AI and dashboards.
C-level executives love dashboards, but they don’t always have the working knowledge behind the numbers. If we look at a dashboard that says a lead came from a LinkedIn ad, based on the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) tracking, we’ll naturally push for more LinkedIn advertising.
But without mapping all the other efforts – organic search engine optimization (SEO), AI citations, reviews, peer-to-peer recommendations, Reddit research – you’ll never know whether that LinkedIn click was actually the final click in a journey that had already been completed.
The same applies to a sponsored link on Google. Someone might click it simply because it appeared in the first position, while they had already searched for your company by name and made most of their decision beforehand.
A lot of those decisions happen quietly, while someone is scrolling on their phone over a coffee on a Sunday morning. The dashboard won’t show you that.
You know what does? Marketers and account managers working in tandem, looking at the entire customer journey rather than just the last measurable click.
Read more from Angelika Attwood
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