The boardroom doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And neither does your brand.
Group Account Director, Havas Red
If you’re leading communications for a B2B company, chances are your stakeholder map is tidy: investors, enterprise clients, partners, maybe regulators. The “general public”? Deprioritised. Deemed irrelevant. Too expensive to reach for too little return.
It’s a logic that makes sense on paper, until it doesn’t.
I’ve watched this play out recently with a client operating in a highly complex and regulated sector. For years, they focused communications exclusively on their direct B2B audience. Sophisticated messaging for sophisticated buyers. The everyday person? Not their concern.
Then the landscape shifted. Scrutiny increased. Public understanding became a business imperative. And suddenly, they were playing catch-up – trying to build awareness and trust with communities they’d never invested in. The cost of that catch-up? Significantly higher than the cost of showing up earlier.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern. And it’s a blind spot that too many B2B communications leaders share.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your client’s customers, the end consumers, the everyday people, influence your client’s decisions more than most B2B brands want to admit.
Public sentiment shapes regulation. Community perception impacts talent attraction. And yes, what people talk about over coffee or scroll past on LinkedIn has a way of surfacing in executive conversations.
When a B2B brand lacks broader awareness, it loses the ability to influence these conversations. Relevance erodes. And when the time comes to defend a position, launch a product, or weather a crisis, there’s no foundation of understanding to build on.
The brands that win aren’t just known by their buyers. They’re understood, at least directionally, by their buyers’ customers too.
Stop treating the “general public” as a catch-all you can’t afford to engage. Instead, identify the specific communities that influence your client’s operating environment: local residents near operations, professional communities adjacent to your sector, or consumer groups affected by your client’s products downstream.
You don’t need to reach everyone. You need to reach the right someones – and reach them before you need them.
B2B communications often drowns in jargon, technical detail, and abstraction. The assumption is that simplification dumbs things down.
It doesn’t. It opens things up.
The discipline of translating complex research, data, or innovation into real-life outcomes for real people isn’t about losing nuance. It’s about earning relevance. What does your client’s supply chain innovation mean for the price of groceries? What does their cybersecurity platform mean for whether someone’s personal data stays safe?
This is where PR earns its seat at the strategy table, not just distributing messages, but shaping them from the start with broader resonance in mind.
The cheapest time to build awareness is when you don’t urgently need it. The most expensive time? When you’re in reactive mode, trying to educate sceptical audiences who’ve never heard of you.
Thought leadership that connects B2B expertise to B2C consequences isn’t a “nice to have” – it’s insurance. It builds the kind of ambient awareness that pays dividends when the stakes rise.
For communications professionals, this shift represents both a challenge and an opportunity.
Because if PR isn’t at the centre of how messaging is formed and how a brand shows up to the world – all of it – then we’ve undersold ourselves.
Your customer’s customer is paying attention. The question is whether you’ve given them anything to see.
Take the next step and reach out today.
