B2B buying has fundamentally changed. Buyers are researching independently, forming opinions earlier, and narrowing vendor consideration long before engaging with sales. AI-generated answers, peer communities, thought leadership, dark social, and buying-group influence are reshaping how decisions get made before traditional conversion points ever occur.

As Forrester recently observed: “Buying has become an act of confirmation, not selection.”

That single insight has significant implications for modern marketing. The challenge is no longer simply capturing demand when it appears. It is building visibility, trust, and preference before buyers ever raise their hands.

In what we’re calling the Preference Economy, winning brands are moving beyond isolated campaigns and channel execution. They’re creating connected experiences that shape perception, reinforce credibility, and influence decisions across the entire discovery journey.

In this issue:

• Winning Before the Funnel: Why Brand and Demand Are No Longer Separate Strategies

• In the Preference Economy, Trust is the Key Performance Metric

• From Intent to Influence: Building Connected GTM Systems in the Preference Economy

Winning Before the Funnel: Why Brand and Demand Are No Longer Separate Strategies

I was shopping for a family car recently. Five years ago I saw a Subaru commercial that talked about how a woman’s family got in a bad accident and the only reason they walked away from it unharmed was because they were in a Subaru. Guess what car I just bought for my family? Yep, a Subaru. You’d think that was an easy decision for me, but guess how long I spent researching cars still? Hours upon hours. It took me over 3 months before we pulled the trigger and bought it. Dozens of ChatGPT threads comparing Subarus to Toyotas, Rivians,  Hyundais, Fords. 3 visits to different dealerships in person. About 5 different test drives of different models and brands. So yeah, I’d say I did my due diligence. I did everything a “rational buyer” is supposed to do.

But yet, all along, I wanted it to be Subaru because of that damn commercial. 

What I didn’t realize was that I had quietly built a brand preference over the years, and every step of my research wasn’t about choosing a brand — it was about validating one. Checks and balances if you will. I’m not just going to buy a car based on a commercial… am I??

Even as Head of Marketing, someone who knows exactly how this works, I wasn’t immune to it. Over time, I had absorbed a series of signals: 

• “Top Safety Pick”

• “JD Power Award Winner”

• A commercial that tapped directly into the anxiety of putting your family in a car

• Beautiful Nappa Leather Seats that just looked cool 

Individually, none of those things closed the deal. Collectively, they built conviction. Even before I was in market for a new car, I was quietly amassing data points, building recall, and establishing brand preference. 

If you think buyers aren’t doing this in the B2B space, you’re kidding yourself. According to Forrester, 41% of buyers have just one vendor in mind at purchase start, and that preferred vendor wins 80% of the time when buyers enter with a frontrunner. 

A car is an easy example to highlight how this works. But swap in a SaaS platform, a cloud service provider, or a cybersecurity solution, and the pattern holds.

The Marketing Model Is Outdated

For years, we’ve told ourselves a clean, simple story about how B2B marketing works: brand builds awareness, demand captures intent. Different teams, different goals, different timelines.

The problem is, that model assumes buyers enter the market as blank slates. They don’t.

By the time most demand generation programs kick in, buyers have already done their homework. They’ve seen your content (or your competitor’s), heard your name in conversations, read reviews, maybe even asked ChatGPT to compare vendors. They’ve formed a point of view on who you are and whether you’re worth considering.

Or they haven’t. And that absence matters just as much.

The Visibility Vacuum Is Where Decisions Are Made

This is what Forrester calls the “Visibility Vacuum” — the space where buyers are actively researching but not signaling intent. It’s where shortlists are formed and preferences take shape long before a form fill or demo request ever happens.

And here’s the part most teams miss: this isn’t driven by one campaign or one channel. It’s driven by a pattern of signals over time.

Go back to the Subaru example. It wasn’t one ad that drove the decision. It was everything around it reinforcing the same idea from different angles — safety, credibility, emotional connection, consistency.

The same is true in B2B.

Preference is built across what buyers see, hear, and validate:

• the thought leadership that actually has a point of view

• the executive voices that show up consistently

• the PR and analyst coverage that reinforces credibility

• the paid media that amplifies your narrative

• the content that doesn’t contradict itself depending on where it’s found

• and increasingly, how AI systems interpret and represent your brand

Most organizations are doing pieces of this. Very few are doing it in a way that compounds. And that’s the difference between being remembered and being chosen.

Where Brand and Demand Actually Collide

So at this point, you’re probably thinking “brand is so back, baby!” The same signals that were once dismissed as “hard to measure” are exactly what shape buyer perception in the Visibility Vacuum. They’re also what AI systems rely on to determine which brands are credible enough to surface, summarize, and recommend.

For all the marketers who’ve been fighting for brand budget in boardrooms for years, this feels like a bit of a victory lap. A long-awaited “I told you so” moment. But this isn’t just a comeback story. The line between brand and demand is breaking down, and that shift is critical to how pipeline gets built moving forward.

Brand doesn’t replace demand generation. It determines how effective it is.

When buyers already trust you, everything works better. Pipeline converts faster. Win rates improve. Sales cycles shorten. Pricing pressure decreases.

When they don’t, you’re fighting just to get on the shortlist — or worse, being used as leverage in a deal you were never going to win.

You have to get comfortable investing earlier in the buying journey, even when it’s harder to measure. The signals that shape preference — thought leadership, PR, executive visibility, consistent messaging — don’t always show up cleanly in pipeline dashboards. That doesn’t make them less valuable; it just makes them harder to attribute.

Consistency matters more than volume. Buyers aren’t forming opinions based on one campaign, they’re forming them based on patterns. If your messaging shifts depending on where someone encounters you, you’re making it harder to build trust with both buyers and the systems interpreting your brand.

And if you’re only measuring success at the point of conversion, you’re only seeing the outcome, not the work that made it possible.

Winning Before the Funnel

I thought I was making a rational decision when I bought my car. In reality, I was validating one I had already made.

That’s what’s happening in B2B buying right now, just at a much larger scale. By the time buyers convert, they’re rarely starting from scratch. They’re showing up with a point of view shaped by everything they’ve seen, heard, and experienced along the way. I spent three months actively researching my car. But in reality, that decision started years earlier, the moment I had a meaningful interaction with the brand.

We’ve always known that on some level, we’ve just tried to stay in our lane. We no longer have the luxury of operating in silos. The difference now is whether you’re actively shaping that point of view, or reacting to it once it shows up.

In the Preference Economy, Trust is the Key Performance Metric

You won’t ever go wrong by taking inspiration from Maya Angelou:

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I’m sure she never expected that sentiment to become a guiding principle for B2B marketers, but in an environment where buyers are arriving with opinions already baked - and with AI shaping what they see, read, and trust - being known and credible isn’t really enough. Given competitive saturation, differentiation is driven by how your brand feels before a conversation ever takes place, and this can determine whether your company is shortlisted before the buying journey even begins. 

When Buying Becomes Confirmation

As you know, buyers are self-educating, comparing vendors, reading reviews, and exploring perspectives before ever speaking to sales.

That said, there’s a more profound shifting of the tectonic plates we’re standing on. They’re no longer just gathering information independently - they’re forming a sense of conviction upstream, often by outsourcing both research and interpretation to a blend of AI platforms, peer networks, analyst voices, and trusted content sources.

This is why Forrester’s observation that “buying has become an act of confirmation, not selection” resonates so strongly with me. By the time a buyer reaches out, the decision framework has already taken shape - a shortlist exists, as does a frontrunner. What’s more, the chances are that a feeling about which vendor is the safest, smartest, or most credible has already taken root.

This process is unfolding largely outside your purview, happening in what Forrester describes as the Visibility Vacuum, that vast nether region where buyers snoop around without ever really signaling intent. If your brand is absent or inconsistent in this space, you don’t just miss awareness but, fatally, you’re missing the moment preference is formed - often before your demand engine ever has a chance to engage.

AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Discoverability

I feel tired saying it at this point - and you’re likely rolling your eyes reading it - but AI-driven discovery is acting as a catalyst for all this. Traditional notions of visibility - be it impressions, traffic, or share of voice - start to become less effective when buyers are no longer navigating journeys themselves, instead receiving synthesized answers.

AI pulls from a myriad of signals - your website, analyst commentary, media coverage, executive perspectives, third-party validation - and constructs a view of who you are and where you fit, subsequently rewarding something very different from volume or frequency. Instead, it upweights clarity, consistency, and corroboration.

Discomforting as it may feel, your brand isn’t what you say about yourself, but rather what the ecosystem surrounding it says about you.

Fragmented messaging isn’t just a creative or positioning pain point - it’s an expensive toll booth to discoverability. If different parts of your organization describe your value in divergent ways, or if your external go-to-market lacks cohesion, AI has less confidence in representing your brand.

The Hidden Cost of Fragmentation

This is where many organizations begin to feel friction, characterized by a heap of busy work and a lack of cross-team alignment:

Marketing runs campaigns.
PR secures coverage.
Executives contribute to conversations.
Sales tell a story across the table from buyers.

Individually, each function is objectively effective but collectively, they often lack a single, reinforcing narrative, and this becomes disorienting for your discerning audience.

Buyers end up encountering bastardized versions of the same brand depending on where they look, AI struggles to enunciate a clear position and, over time, the brand becomes harder to trust and choose.

At that stage, a lack of coherence is killing your growth ambitions.

PR’s Quiet Evolution into a Growth Lever

One of the more interesting consequences of AI-driven discovery is the renewed strategic importance of PR.

For years, the discipline has been framed as a brand or awareness driver - valuable, but frequently difficult to tie directly to revenue outcomes. That framing’s starting to look more than a little bit old-fashioned.

The same signals PR produces - earned media, analyst mentions, expert commentary, editorial placement - are exactly the type of markers that AI systems lean on to establish credibility. PR isn’t just vaguely shaping perception in the market, it’s an indispensable lubricant for machines to understand and recommend your brand. In an environment where buyers are forming opinions before engaging, these signals don’t just build awareness, they reinforce preference by validating your credibility across the ecosystems buyers trust.

When PR operates in isolation, that value is diluted, but when it’s tightly aligned with marketing, it becomes a propellant for distributed authority.

Why Feeling Still Wins in a Rational Market

For all the complexity introduced by AI and digital discovery, one fundamental hasn’t changed: B2B decisions are still human.

The rise of ambiguity and risk in modern buying environments has made emotional cues more important than ever. Buying committees - faced with multiple viable vendors offering similar capabilities - seek reassurance, confidence, and familiarity. 

They favor something that just feels right and this is where that Maya Angelou quote stops being metaphorical and becomes commercially relevant. Like it or not, your technical capabilities are table stakes and differentiation lives in the more intangible layer of perception, shaped by how clear your point of view is, how confidently it’s expressed, and how consistently it’s hammered home across every touchpoint. That feeling is what ultimately translates into preference - the quiet conviction that one vendor stands above the rest before formal evaluation even begins.

You’re in the business of creating comfort - that warm, fluffy, soothing emotion that underpins a final decision when the stakes are high. Preference isn’t something you capture at the bottom of the funnel. You need to get cracking long before the journey formally begins.

You feel me?

From Intent to Influence: Building Connected GTM Systems in the Preference Economy

As temperatures rise across APAC, marketing teams are beginning to feel a different kind of heat from a new species: the influence-proof buyer.

They move before you can track them. They research in the jungles of generative AI, peer networks, communities, and dark social. They compare, question, shortlist, and decide long before they enter your CRM or appear in your pipeline.

And that is the uncomfortable truth for modern GTM teams: You cannot influence what you cannot see.

You cannot reinforce a preference you cannot recognize.

For marketing teams built to influence active buyers, this should land hard. The decision is no longer waiting inside the funnel. Buyers are self-educating, using AI, comparing options, and entering the formal process with their minds half-made up.

Globally, close to 70% of B2B buyers already have a front-runner vendor in mind at the very start of their purchasing process. And 80% of the time, that front-runner wins, according to Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey 2025.

In APAC, buyers engage sellers at around 60% of the buying journey, about 12 weeks earlier than in 2024, while 76% of winning vendors are the ones buyers engaged first, according to Green Hat and 6sense’s 2025 APAC B2B Buyer Journey Research.

How then do marketers build preference before the buyer makes an appearance?

The Buying Journey is Full of Potholes

Buying journeys in APAC span multiple markets, languages, and regulatory environments. This means GTM is inherently more fragmented in the region, making early visibility and coordinated influence far harder to achieve.

Couple that with the fact that buyers in APAC engage an average of 5.5 vendors during the buying process, making consistent visibility and influence across the journey critical.

If buyers are moving earlier and faster than ever, the real question is not just visibility. It is why that visibility is missing in the first place.

The visibility gap often begins inside the GTM engine itself. Buyer signals are scattered across paid media, CRM, ABX platforms, sales intelligence, content engagement, and AI search performance.

Each function sees a fragment of the buyer but no one sees the full picture of which accounts are already leaning toward your brand, what is shaping that preference, or how close they are to committing.

Bottom line: GTM systems are too disconnected to spot buyer preferences while there is still time to shape it.

From Multiplicity to GTM Singularity

GTM Singularity challenges that. Coined by Forrester, GTM Singularity is the shift from siloed marketing and sales functions to a unified system that works together to understand and influence buyers across the entire journey.

Leading organizations are bringing together signals from paid media, ABX programs, CRM, sales intelligence, content, and AI visibility to build a clearer view of account-level behavior.

Most organizations already have the tools to identify active accounts. What changes is how they act on that signal.

Take a company researching GPU cloud solutions. People from that account are clicking ads, reading related content, and appearing in intent data. Today, that activity is visible but treated separately. Without coordination, that account may already be forming a preference — but the brand has no way of recognizing or reinforcing it. Marketing continues with planned campaigns. Sales waits for a lead. The account remains uncoordinated.

In a connected GTM system, that same activity is treated as a shared signal. The account becomes a priority. Marketing shifts budget and targeting toward that account, ensuring it repeatedly sees the same GPU cloud messaging across content. Content deepens around the same problem. Sales engages with context, building on what the account is already exploring.

This may sound familiar. Account-based marketing already aims to prioritize high-value accounts. But in most organizations, these actions are still driven by marketing alone or triggered late, once intent is clear.

GTM Singularity extends this. The same account is recognized earlier and treated as active across marketing, sales, and revenue teams at the same time.

What You’re Measuring Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Forrester’s point is sharp: What marketing now needs most, including building buyer preference and gaining visibility in generative AI search, “will scarcely show up in engagement data.”

That makes account-level visibility and cross-functional orchestration more important than lead score.

GTM Singularity is not about adding more tools. It is about rebuilding GTM so marketing, sales, product, and customer teams work as one system to close the visibility gap and build preference earlier.

This changes how teams read the account. Marketing, sales, revenue operations, and customer teams are no longer interpreting separate fragments through their own lens. They are working from the same account view: what the buyer is researching, where interest is building, which narratives are influencing them, and how close they may be to active evaluation.

That shared view makes it easier to decide what the account needs next, rather than letting each function act on partial information.

In APAC, where buying journeys are already fragmented and increasingly self-directed, this shift is strategic. As buyers move faster and further outside traditional visibility, the advantage will go to the brands that recognize preference early and act on it.. Growth is no longer driven by who shows up at the moment of conversion. It is driven by who the buyer already trusts before that moment arrives.

The heat is rising in the Preference Economy. The real question is whether APAC marketers can make invisible buyers visible early enough to influence them.

B2B Marketing Is Entering a New Era.

Buyers are more informed, more independent, and less visible than ever before. Discovery now happens across AI systems, peer networks, communities, thought leadership, paid media, and buying-group collaboration long before traditional conversion signals appear.

Across regions, this issue makes one thing clear:

Winning brands do not wait for buyers to enter the funnel.

They shape market perception before active evaluation begins.
They build visibility and authority across every discovery channel.
They create trust before buyers ever speak to sales.
And they reinforce preference long before conversion occurs.

The organizations succeeding in the Preference Economy are not relying on isolated campaigns or last-mile demand capture. They are building connected growth systems designed to shape buyer preference before the buying journey formally begins.

The future of B2B growth belongs to the brands buyers already believe in before the first conversation ever begins.

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