Your B2B Buyers Don’t Want More Value. They Want Status First.

We all say B2B buyers aren't rational, and yet we still treat them as such in our stories.

In this week’s Trust Lab:

• I reflect on the Social Identity Theory and how it should play out in B2B comms.

• Get hands-on support on how to implement SIT in your next presentation

  

  Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash

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SIT with this when creating your next B2B deck

Back in WWII, Henri Tajfel was captured by the Nazis and thrown into a prison camp. Although he was born Polish, he had moved to France and fought on behalf of the French while speaking the language with a perfect accent.

Once in the camp, he survived by lying about his group identity. They knew he was Jewish. But he told them he was a French Jew, not Polish. The difference was invisible, but it saved his life. The Nazis generally kept French POWs alive, but Polish prisoners, especially Jewish ones, were far more likely to be executed or sent to camps.

After the war, Tajfel couldn’t shake the question: How can a meaningless label, like what country he was from, determine his survival? So he set up an experiment.

He showed people a page of dots and asked them to guess how many there were. Then he split them into “over-estimators” and “under-estimators.” Total nonsense groups that didn’t mean a thing.

At the end, participants had to allocate money. They could:

• Give everyone $5, or

• Give their own group of over or under-estimators $4 and the other group $3.

Over and over, people picked the option where they lost money as long as the other group lost more.

This wasn’t a glitch. It’s how we’re wired. Status over value. Relative advantage over absolute gain.

And Tajfel’s work became the foundation of Social Identity Theory.

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What This Means for B2B

Marketers say we know buyers aren’t rational. “People buy with emotion, justify with logic.” Everyone nods.

But then I open a deck and see content that says the opposite: particularly, presentations that don’t give the audience a way to picture themselves inside the story.

This gap shows up in different ways: