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The Marketing Model Is Outdated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.