There is a phrase I hear often enough that it has become the bane of my professional existence.

"It's just B2B."

‍

It usually sounds like the speaker intends to finish that sentence with something like: "so it doesn't have to look good" or "so it doesn't have to make sense" or "so usability is someone else's problem." I have never understood where this idea came from. That the digital products and services we build for professional audiences shouldn't be as intuitive, engaging or appealing as the ones we build for everyone else.

‍

But here we are.

How did we get here?

It wasn't always this way. In the 1920s and 30s, some of the savviest commercial manufacturers realized that even if their products weren't sold directly to consumers, advertising to them built awareness and preference up and down the supply chain. Companies like Hyatt Roller Bearings ran beautifully designed print ads in trade and commercial magazines, appealing equally to the manufacturers who used their parts and the consumers who bought the finished product. The language was accessible. The design reflected the brand. Nobody was writing "it's just B2B" at the bottom of the creative brief.

Then came the internet, and we lost the thread.

The internet made it easier for anyone to talk to anyone about anything at any time. That changed how businesses connect with audiences and how they make money. But somewhere in the process, we started marketing businesses to other businesses instead of marketing to the actual people inside them. The websites that resulted looked like they were designed by committees for committees, not by humans for humans.

That's still mostly true. And it's increasingly a problem.

Why it matters more now

The people using B2B products today grew up alongside Amazon, Spotify and Google Maps. Their expectations for what a digital experience should feel like were set by products that invested enormously in getting every interaction right. Those expectations don't disappear when they log into a work tool or visit a vendor's website. They bring the same instincts and the same impatience with them.

This is sometimes called the "liquid expectations" effect: your experiences with one product or service shape your expectations for every other product or service, regardless of category. Once you've used something that works really well, something that doesn't feels broken by comparison.

B2B products are competing with that benchmark whether they know it or not.

So what do we do about it?

At Current, a significant portion of what we build is B2B. We don't approach it differently than anything else. Here's how we think about it.

Understand the audience. To build something useful, you have to know who is going to use it and how. We start every project by studying the client's current or intended audience: talking to them, observing their behavior on existing sites, understanding what would actually help them. Starting with the audience rather than the business means we end up building something the business benefits from because it actually works for the people using it.

Look for inspiration outside the industry. When we audit a brand's landscape, we don't look exclusively at competitors. If everyone only looked to peer organizations, nothing interesting would happen. We focus on the problem we're trying to solve and look for products that solve it well, wherever they exist. A manufacturing client that wants to publish mixed media content should look at how the New York Times and Spotify handle it, not just how other manufacturers do.

Design for people, not technology. Most clients come to us with a list of systems their site needs to integrate with: CRMs, inventory management tools, marketing automation platforms. These systems are built to send and receive data in specific ways that are often not very human. We frequently see B2B sites designed around how those systems work rather than how people expect to use them. We spend time learning how these systems want to receive information and then figuring out more natural, unobtrusive ways of collecting it. The integration should be invisible. The experience shouldn't be.

Make less, but better. At some point in every project, you have to make hard decisions about what to include and what not to. A lot of B2B sites launch with everything, including a catalog of every feature anyone has ever requested. The most effective digital products launch with a clear sense of what they're trying to do and do that one thing exceptionally well. We help clients find the right in-between.

The bigger opportunity

The argument for treating B2B audiences like human beings is not just a design philosophy. It's a business case.

When your digital product is intuitive, fast and genuinely useful, it converts better. When it converts better, your marketing spend works harder. When you can see how the product is performing and adjust it based on what the marketing data is telling you, the whole system compounds. That closed loop between how a product is built and how it's marketed is something most organizations have never had access to, because their development agency and their marketing agency have always been separate.

That separation is the real problem. Not just for B2B. For everyone.

"It's just B2B" was never a good excuse. It's a worse one now.