Think bigger, work smarter: how marketing and insight can co-create the future

Marketing, insight, and the myth of the moment 

There’s a lot of talk right now about how pivotal this moment is for B2B marketing. AI disruption. Economic pressure. Changing buyer expectations. The rise of new C-suite titles. Talent gaps. Sound familiar? 

It should, because it’s not just B2B marketing experiencing these challenges. These aren’t industry-specific shifts; they’re systemic. And the sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we can move beyond siloed thinking and start doing something truly impactful. 

I recently attended a B2B marketing conference; my first, after years on the market research and insights circuit. I expected a new world. Instead, I came across familiar waters. The same questions. The same anxiety. The same determination to prove value and stay relevant. It was a vivid reminder that B2B marketing is not alone, and that its urgency is shared across disciplines like research, insight, and beyond. 

It’s not just you: the challenges B2B marketing shares with others 

Let’s unpack a few of the recurring themes from the event, each widely recognized talking points not just in marketing but across the professional landscape: 

• AI and tech disruption: Every industry is reckoning with the rise of AI. This isn’t just a marketing issue, it’s a future-of-work issue. The challenge isn’t adoption; it’s intelligent integration, and that requires human judgment everywhere. 
• ROI pressure: Commercial impact is the new universal metric. Research, product, insight, even HR. No one is exempt. Proving the value of what we do is no longer a discipline-specific dilemma. 
• New organizational structures: Titles like Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Data Strategist don’t just influence marketing or insight, they’re rewriting how entire businesses operate. Structural evolution is happening company-wide. 
• Talent attraction and perception: Try finding an industry that isn’t struggling to explain its value to the next generation. Marketing isn’t unique in its fight to seem relevant 
• Storytelling and creativity: Whether you’re marketing a brand or delivering a research debrief, one truth holds: humans remember stories, not stats. This, again, is true for many industries 

The real issue: siloed problem solving 

Treating these shared challenges as if they’re unique to B2B marketing is not only misleading, it limits the solutions we explore. If we stay in our lanes, we miss the opportunity to learn from each other and co-create new, smarter approaches. Insight and marketing teams need to stop thinking of themselves as adjacent and start seeing themselves as co-architects of strategy. 

If we recognize that our problems are not exclusive, we can begin to design solutions that draw on broader thinking; from behavioral science, data analytics, organizational psychology, and beyond. That’s where breakthrough happens: not within silos, but between them. 

A new approach: think bigger, work smarter 

So, what now? 

Stop thinking you’re uniquely challenged by this moment. Start asking who else is facing the same problems, and what they’re doing about them. 

Stop drawing hard lines between disciplines. Start forging deeper partnerships that amplify creative and commercial impact. 

And above all, stop waiting for the ‘marketing solution’ or the ‘insight solution’. We need the right solution, not the branded one.