Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

As Donald Trump unleashes a volley of tariffs and his administration talks up the strength of its military alliances in Asia, you might think that these are anxious times in the country that America sees as its main adversary. In fact, The Economist’s reporting from Beijing reveals a very different picture. MAGA is putting pressure on China’s leaders to correct their worst economic errors. It is also creating opportunities to redraw the geopolitical map of Asia in China’s favour.

China has come out badly from Mr Trump’s Rose Garden rant. Counting the new levy of 34%, plus existing duties, the total rises to 65%—and slightly higher if you include the disruptive removal of a tariff exemption for small packages. Given that exports are still roughly 20% of GDP, as they were in 2017, this will hurt China’s economy. China’s tactic of rerouting its firms’ manufacturing chains through countries such as Vietnam to bypass tariffs will work less well now that America is erecting barriers globally.

The trade war comes as China is still struggling with deflation, a housing bust and dismal demography. For the past five years the Communist Party has neglected weak consumption and embraced an unwise statism that has cramped the private sector. China has exported its overcapacity, swamping the world with goods, and fostered a spiky chauvinism that unsettles America’s allies both in Asia and Europe.

Despite all this, China enters the new age of MAGA stronger than in Mr Trump’s first term. President Xi Jinping has long argued that America is too polarised and overstretched to sustain its global role. One of his slogans warns of “great changes unseen in a century”. His paranoid nationalism used to seem like dystopian hyperbole. Now that Mr Trump is committing such wanton self-harm and general destruction, it looks ahead of its time.

Mr Xi has been preparing for today’s chaotic world ever since becoming China’s leader in 2012. He has urged economic and technological self-sufficiency on his country. China has reduced its vulnerability to American chokeholds, such as sanctions and export controls. Although its banks still need access to dollars, it now makes most non-bank international payments in yuan.

China’s domestic economy has unrecognised strengths. Competition and an embrace of technology mean that its industrial firms thrash Western rivals in everything from electric vehicles to the “low-altitude economy”, meaning drones and flying taxis. Viewed from China, Mr Trump’s tariffs will condemn Detroit to 1970s-style obsolescence, just as his crusade against universities will set back innovation.

As America puts up walls, China will have a chance to reset trade relations around the world by offering to invest in manufacturing in partner countries rather than flooding them with exports.

These economic opportunities sit alongside a geopolitical one. America’s China policy is alarmingly unclear. Hawks in the administration insist that, by turning away from Europe, America is freeing up resources to contain China. However, Mr Trump admires Mr Xi and has sent an ally, Senator Steve Daines, to Beijing to put out feelers for a deal. In his first term, Mr Trump struck a trade agreement with China; now he wants to haggle over TikTok.

Mr Xi has no intention of filling the vacuum left by Uncle Sam, but he has a chance to expand China’s influence, especially in the global south.  Still, dangers lie ahead for China. A trade war could trigger a global recession. If Mr Trump fails to strike a deal with the government in Beijing, he could lash out over currencies and impose more sanctions. China may yet poison relations with the rest of the world by dumping exports on it. Whether it seizes this moment depends on one man: Mr Xi. But the fact the opportunity exists owes much to another: Mr Trump.

In an era where artificial intelligence has thoroughly transformed the startup landscape, MIT is using the technology as the foundation for new training programs for entrepreneurs. The school, of course, is known for nurturing startups. A 2015 report found that alumni across the university had started 30,000 then-active companies, generating about $1.9 trillion in yearly sales. The JetPacks (the software to foster the process of initiating a business from an idea to final product) are part of an effort to support and connect the many entrepreneurs across the MIT campus in Cambridge—and around the world—through the Trust Center’s Orbit website.

To that end, the software compliments a pedagogy known in Kendall Square as “disciplined entrepreneurship,” developed by Sloan professor Bill Aulet, the center’s managing director. Disciplined entrepreneurship takes a founder through 24 steps to scale up a business. Nineteen of the 24 steps focus on the customers—who they are, how the entrepreneur can help them, how they would buy the startup’s product, and how to sell to them.

When a founder straps in to the Disciplined Entrepreneurship JetPack by typing a business idea into the prompt, the AI scrapes the web to compose five potential markets for the product—and further subdivide each one if you choose—then analyzes them to propose a priority “beachhead” market to concentrate on. It combs through additional data to suggest market sizes, conversion rates, pricing and more, until the founder comes out with a “minimum viable business product” and a plan to develop it. A second JetPack automates a sequence of 15 “startup tactics” formulated by Cheek that guide founders through executing the plan.

The JetPacks funnel these queries through a platform developed by Stack AI, an MIT startup. “Stack AI keeps each user, and each idea from each user, separate from every other user and data,” says Doug Williams, who oversaw the software’s development for the Trust Center. And it prevents the AI from training on those queries. Currently the JetPacks use OpenAI, but, says Williams, “we’re continually evaluating the other models.”

The Orbit website and the JetPacks are currently available to the MIT community, including students, faculty, graduates, and one-off visitors such as Hotchkis. For everyone else, there’s a waitlist. Cheek says the school is giving priority to educators teaching entrepreneurship around the world.

For now the software is free, but Cheek says MIT plans to commercialize it to some degree, both to maintain the software and to improve it. (Williams says the school has invested $1 million in Orbit and the software.) He and his colleagues have in fact fed the JetPacks into the JetPacks themselves. Besides developing specialized versions, including for businesses focused on climate change and energy, Williams is working on tools to help founders prioritize their time and, as Cheek puts it, “present them with the thought-provoking questions that they need to consider but haven’t yet.” Still, says Cheek: “We’re a nonprofit. We’re not attempting to build a software company to scale this.”

Agents are the talk of the AI industry—they’re capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex tasks like scheduling meetings, ordering groceries, or even taking over your computer to change settings on your behalf. But the same sophisticated abilities that make agents helpful assistants could also make them powerful tools for conducting cyberattacks. They could readily be used to identify vulnerable targets, hijack their systems, and steal valuable data from unsuspecting victims.  

At present, cybercriminals are not deploying AI agents to hack at scale. But researchers have demonstrated that agents are capable of executing complex attacks, and cybersecurity experts warn that we should expect to start seeing these types of attacks spilling over into the real world.

While we have a good sense of the kinds of threats AI agents could present to cybersecurity, what’s less clear is how to detect them in the real world. The AI research organization Palisade Research has built a system called LLM Agent Honeypot in the hopes of doing exactly this. It has set up vulnerable servers that masquerade as sites for valuable government and military information to attract and try to catch AI agents attempting to hack in.

The team behind it hopes that by tracking these attempts in the real world, the project will act as an early warning system and help experts develop effective defenses against AI threat actors by the time they become a serious issue.

AI agents represent an attractive prospect to cybercriminals. They’re much cheaper than hiring the services of professional hackers and could orchestrate attacks more quickly and at a far larger scale than humans could. While cybersecurity experts believe that ransomware attacks—the most lucrative kind—are relatively rare because they require considerable human expertise, those attacks could be outsourced to agents in the future.

Agents are also significantly smarter than the kinds of bots that are typically used to hack into systems. Bots are simple automated programs that run through scripts, so they struggle to adapt to unexpected scenarios. Agents, on the other hand, are able not only to adapt the way they engage with a hacking target but also to avoid detection—both of which are beyond the capabilities of limited, scripted programs.

Since LLM Agent Honeypot went live in October of last year, it has logged more than 11 million attempts to access it—the vast majority of which were from curious humans and bots. But among these, the researchers have detected eight potential AI agents, two of which they have confirmed are agents that appear to originate from Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively.

Experts are still unsure when agent-orchestrated attacks will become more widespread. Stockley, whose company Malwarebytes named agentic AI as a notable new cybersecurity threat in its 2025 State of Malware report, thinks we could be living in a world of agentic attackers as soon as this year.

While we know that AI’s potential to autonomously conduct cyberattacks is a growing risk and that AI agents are already scanning the internet, one useful next step is to evaluate how good agents are at finding and exploiting these real-world vulnerabilities.  Such efforts can guide the development of safer AI systems.

B2B leaders are accustomed to using technology to help them achieve profitable growth. Lately they’ve been looking at a technology that has the potential to accelerate sales transformations across the entire seller journey—gen AI. Gen AI can help drive outsized, profitable growth by boosting revenue generation, increasing sales productivity, and streamlining internal processes. These leaders believe the potential is great. According to McKinsey’s latest B2B Pulse Survey of B2B decision-makers, 19 percent of respondents are already implementing gen AI use cases for B2B buying and selling, and another 23 percent are in the process of doing so.

That’s promising. However, the flip side is that most B2B leaders have yet to embrace gen AI or even engage with it. A few leaders tell the authors they are unsure where the benefits would come from and whether the business impact justifies the investment. Some feel overwhelmed by the abundance of ideas and seek advice on what to prioritize.

From their study, seven compelling use cases across the deal cycle (i.e., awareness and outreach, engagement and acquisition, and success and growth) by analyzing gen AI deployments and their impact on sales ROI and customer experience are:  

1. Next best opportunity:  Gen AI can gather insights and intelligence; AI can identify, enrich, and prioritize leads across accounts and products.
2. Next-best action:  AI abd gen AI powered personalization can determine next best step for nurturing and closing personalized leads.
3. Meeting Support:  Get AI can support sellers before, during, and after meeting, including with rapid preparation using most relevant insights
4. Personal responder:  Gen AI can create and iterate answers to request for proposals, freeing up sellers’ time for other tasks
5. Smart pricing:  AI can determine optimal pricing based on willingness to pay and propensity to buy; get AI can assist with negotiation support
6. Smart research assistant:  AI agents can help sellers facilitate research and improve customer interactions.
7. Smart Coach:  GEn AI and other AI tools can analyze customer interactions, determine performance needs, and offer tailored coaching to sellers.

5 key considerations that can help organizations establish a gen AI implementation strategy that aligns with their goals and desires to drive profitable growth in sales are: Start with the problem, not the technology; Keep the seller at the center; Buy the easy stuff and build for competitive advantage; Balance immediate impact and lasting capabilities with a clear AI strategy; Invest in seller adoption from the get-go.

“Despite two years of broad managerial attention and extensive experimentation, we are not seeing the large-scale GenAI-powered business transformations that many people initially envisioned.”  After a wild two-year ride of hype, disruption, and experiments for many leaders, you (and your colleagues) may still be waiting for the big business payoff. You may not have redesigned that critical process, cut time to market, or radically improved customer satisfaction quite yet.

It’s difficult to articulate how hard it is for leaders to shape AI strategy in 2025. After all, this work involves tackling everything from risk management to AI ethics, with some daunting data management and culture challenges thrown in. At the same time, AI and generative AI tools keep evolving. What GenAI tool Claude can’t do this spring, it may well do by summer.  MIT SMR gathered 10 of its most popular, valuable AI articles of recent months to share timely lessons on 10 pressing AI issues.

1. Reap GenAI value: Start with “small t” transformations.  despite two years of broad managerial attention and extensive experimentation, we are not seeing the large-scale GenAI-powered business transformations that many people initially envisioned.  “What happened? Has the technology failed to live up to its promise? Were experts wrong in calling for giant transformations? Have companies been too cautious? The answer to each of those questions is both yes and no. Generative AI is already being used in transformative ways in many companies, just not yet as the driver of a wholesale redesign of major business functions. Business leaders are finding ways to derive real value from large language models (LLMs) without complete replacements of existing business processes. They’re pursuing ‘small t’ transformation, even as they build the foundation for larger transformations to come.”
2. Make smart AI tech-debt trade-offs. The companies that are well positioned for change have a reinvention-ready ‘digital core’ — a set of key components such as cloud infrastructure, data, and AI that can be easily updated. They also typically set aside around 15% of their IT budgets for tech debt remediation.  Addressing tech debt is not about eliminating it but managing it. The key lies in knowing what the debt is, what to fix, what to keep, and how to recognize the tech debt that is boosting your company’s innovation capacity.”
3. Unstructured data matters again.  “The great majority of the data that GenAI works with is relatively unstructured, in forms such as text, images, video, and the like. A leader at one large insurance organization recently shared … that 97% of the company’s data was unstructured. Many companies are interested in using GenAI to help manage and provide access to their own data and documents, typically using an approach called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. But some companies haven’t worked on their unstructured data much since the days of knowledge management 20 or more years ago. They’ve been focused on structured data — typically rows and columns of numbers from transactional systems.”
4. AI success requires building a data-driven culture.  For many leaders, the challenge is not buying advanced analytics tools or building accurate technical solutions. The real hurdle is subtle yet much more important: fostering an environment within an organization where individuals instinctively turn to data anytime they must make a decision. This is the real meaning of being data driven or creating a data culture.”
5. Philosophy could eat your AI strategy.  “Philosophy is eating AI: As a discipline, data set, and sensibility, philosophy increasingly determines how digital technologies reason, predict, create, generate, and innovate. The critical enterprise challenge is whether leaders will possess the self-awareness and rigor to use philosophy as a resource for creating value with AI or default to tacit, unarticulated philosophical principles for their AI deployments. Either way — for better and worse — philosophy eats AI. For strategy-conscious executives, that metaphor needs to be top of mind.”
6. GenAI can turbocharge how organizations learn.  “Combined with traditional AI, generative AI expands the scope of potential improvement in many processes and decisions and the ease with which this new knowledge can be applied. This, in turn, creates the potential for a positive compounding effect on organizational learning, with human and machine agents working in concert to create new competitive advantages.”
7. GenAI versus analytical AI: Pick your projects wisely.  “Leaders should recognize that generative AI and analytical AI [tools] are complementary rather than interchangeable. GenAI focuses on efficiency and automation, like using AI-powered chatbots to increase call center productivity, whereas analytical AI enhances strategic decision-making, like determining the best time or offer for each customer contacted by the call center.
8. Bring your own AI (BYOAI) can’t be banned.  It  can only push employees to find unofficial workarounds, potentially bypassing established governance frameworks. This can ultimately amplify the very risks leaders aim to mitigate.
9. Pay more attention to GenAI app evaluation.  Underinvest in evals can result into uneven progress and, ultimately, canceled GenAI projects or flawed applications that fail to achieve the business goal.
10. What-if questions call for a new machine learning tool.  “Causal ML — an emerging area of machine learning — can help to answer … what-if questions through causal inference. Similar to how marketers use A/B tests to infer which of two ads is likely to generate more sales, causal ML can inform what might happen if managers were to take a particular action.

In lean manufacturing, the goal is to establish precise procedures for making products in the safest, easiest, and most efficient manner possible. When critical processes become standard work, variation decreases, throughput increases, costs fall, and quality rises. Companies as diverse as Toyota, Amazon, Intel, and Nike leverage this approach in their operations to great effect.

In contrast, strategic decision-making is the epitome of nonstandard work at most companies. Strategic decisions are often thought to be unique—like snowflakes—with each one requiring a bespoke process. Consequently, similar decisions—for instance, about whether to enter new markets—are frequently handled in vastly different ways within the same company. That inconsistency leads to slower, lower-quality decisions—a problem that’s starkly clear in the feedback Bain & Company received from the executives at 350 large companies the company surveyed about their strategy processes.

If a manufacturing process had a 25% defect rate, exceeded targeted cycle times more than 45% of the time, and experienced a yield loss of more than 30%, it would be deemed unacceptable. Yet many companies tolerate those levels of inefficiency and ineffectiveness in their strategy making.

It’s time to redesign the strategy process to achieve better results. There’s no reason that strategic decision-making can’t become standard work, just as critical manufacturing processes are. By adopting a rigorous approach to it, companies can reduce waste, move faster, make smarter choices, and gain a competitive edge.

Several leading companies that the author have worked with and studied offer a blueprint for standardization that others can follow. Their lean approach to strategy typically has three components:

Setting strategic priorities.  Lean strategy begins with articulating (or revising) a company’s multiyear performance ambition, which typically includes both financial objectives, such as revenue and operating profit goals, and strategic goals, such as relative market-share growth and improvements in customer satisfaction.  A performance ambition is not a typical target—meaning one that senior leadership believes it can meet or exceed.  In contrast, a performance ambition is aspirational. It’s designed to motivate business and functional leaders to surface breakthrough ideas that can significantly enhance a company’s performance. The ambition should be realistic yet beyond the reach of the current strategy.  The next step is to compare the performance ambition against a multiyear outlook (MYO), which projects what a company’s future performance will be, given the decisions and resource commitments its leadership has already made.  The final step is to create (or update) a decision calendar, which outlines when each item on the strategic backlog will be addressed and notes the leadership team member accountable for recommending the best course of action (after getting the input of experts and others).

Ongoing Strategic Management.  With every issue on the backlog, leadership follows a standard decision-making process that guides resource allocation. It entails two distinct strategy sessions:  Facts and alternatives. During this session, leadership works to fully understand the issue, identify its causes, and come up with a range of ways to address them. The goal of this meeting is not to select the best alternative but to engage in an expansive dialogue that will help the team develop a comprehensive set of viable options.  The next session is choices and commitments. In this session leadership reviews evaluations of the alternatives, uses agreed-upon criteria to select the best one, defines performance milestones for it, and identifies the resources it will require. The outcome of this meeting is a final decision, which includes committing resources in exchange for expected performance improvements.

Monitoring Business Performance.  The true purpose of these reviews should be to determine whether the company needs to alter its strategic direction.  It’s not enough to merely note that sales fell short of the plan. Leaders must probe deeper into the reasons behind such misses and determine whether corrective measures are needed.

On Monday, Feb. 17, 2025, a Delta plane had crashed on landing and was sitting upside down on the tarmac at Toronto Pearson International Airport.  For J. Bastian, the leader who had helped guide Delta through 9/11, bankruptcy, and the COVID pandemic, this was a trial like no other. Delta hadn’t suffered a crash that caused fatalities in his entire 26-year career there.  “Undoubtedly that first hour was the toughest moment I’ve spent as CEO,” Bastian says. “I went from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. You just feel helpless.”

Bastian could only visualize the “terrible event”: Photos and videos wouldn’t go viral until the next morning. But over the next 60 minutes, by phone, Bastian’s team gave him the play-by-play of a remarkable rescue effort. Delta crews safely evacuated the 76 passengers who’d been dangling upside down, held by their seatbelts; there were, miraculously, no deaths. Recounting those dramatic minutes, Bastian praises the alacrity of the flight attendants who swung into action; the speed of the ground crews that doused the burning hulk; even the “strength and flexibility of the seats” on the plane.

The cause of the crash is still under investigation. The CRJ-900 en route from Minneapolis landed amid 40 mph gusts; it appears that it lost part of its landing gear upon hitting the runway, skidded, rolled, and flipped over. Images of a giant charred metal tube lying upside down seemed like a potentially crippling blow to Delta’s burnished brand. The safety first responders had stepped up; now it was Bastian’s turn. 

The CEO quickly turned the narrative to the incident’s positives. In an interview on CBS Mornings two days after the crash, Bastian declared that “the crew on board performed heroically but also as expected, as we train for this continually.” Questioned by host Gayle King about whether recent job cutting at the Federal Aviation Administration “impacts safety,” Bastian responded that “the cuts do not affect us,” adding that the Trump administration had assured him it was committed to “modernizing the skies and hiring additional air traffic controllers.”

Bastian garnered further favorable reviews by committing Delta to give $30,000 to each passenger—not just the 20 or so who were hospitalized. Delta also covered medical bills in the days following the accident. Letters written on Bastian’s letterhead and individually signed by the CEO went to each passenger’s home. 

Fallout from the crash is far from over: Several passengers have already filed suit against Delta. Thomas Demetrio, an attorney who represents plaintiffs in airline liability cases, believes more litigation is coming. Still, he awards Delta high marks for its response. “The payment was very good PR, because it was phrased as helping people with their immediate needs,” he says, adding that it’s likely to create goodwill. “It’s rare for an airline to step up to the plate this early.” 

In his role as crash crisis manager, Bastian was taking an original flight path, and it’s hardly the first time he’s done so. Indeed, for 15 years, including Bastian’s nine as CEO, Delta has often charted a course in the opposite direction from its rivals. When other airlines reckoned that low prices were the biggest lure for customers, Delta bet that fliers would pay a premium for a superior experience. When the pandemic pressured the industry to slash capital investments, Delta kept building. 

Today, that contrarianism has made Delta the largest U.S. air carrier by revenue, and the most profitable—while earning the kind of customer loyalty that can help it weather catastrophes like the Toronto crash. Its place atop the podium represents a crowning achievement for Bastian, who has led Delta with a rare blend of salesmanship, showmanship, and an accountant’s mastery of return on capital—and who has helped the airline build strong employee-management relations in an industry where those ties are often strained.

Even competitors respect Delta’s strategic acumen. “I admire Delta,” Frontier Airlines chairman Bill Franke tells Fortune. “They’ve done a terrific job on reliability and meeting the needs of the business traveler.” The former CEO of another major airline, who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, also credits Delta for its big bet on upscale service. “I do believe they do a better job catering to premium travelers than American and United,” declares this person. For Raymond James analyst Savi Syth the best measure of Bastian’s foresight is that United Airlines is embracing Delta’s focus on affluent travelers: “The highest form of flattery is that United’s copying them.”

How Delta gets top dollar.  Delta was America’s most profitable airline last year, and it generated 14% more revenue per “seat mile” than its competitors—largely by wooing travelers who don’t mind paying a premium for reliability. Here’s how the airline maintains that cushion.

1. On time, most of the time.  Delta’s North American flights arrived on schedule nearly 84% of the time in 2024—putting it in first place for the seventh straight year, which endears it to time-pressed business fliers.
2. A handy hub.  Delta has 73% market share at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International, the world’s busiest airport. That makes Delta a must-fly carrier for many, while helping boost its profit per passenger.
3. Keeping staff satisfied.  A generous company-wide profit-sharing program helps Delta build goodwill among its frontline staff, which in turn correlates with better customer service.
4. Fresher facilities.  During COVID-era travel slowdowns, Delta sped up its investments in new terminals, airport lounges, and in-flight entertainment tech—amenities that lure finicky fliers.

Businesses have a vital interest in highlighting women’s contributions to society and the world—approximately half the global audience of consumers is made up of women, after all. Moreover, the internal benefits for a company that actively supports and empowers women are numerous and well-documented, from being viewed as a more attractive employer and seeing higher employee retention rates to finding greater organizational success.  12 members of Forbes Agency Council share insightful and creative takes on the best ways to show ongoing support of women in the workplace and celebrate their achievements.

1. Compile An Online Book.  Companies can create an online “Women’s HerStory” book where employees can share stories about the inspiring women in their lives, whether they’re famous figures or personal heroes. These stories can be compiled into an online anthology for everyone to read and share. This creates a lasting and accessible tribute that not only honors women, but also becomes a part of the company’s own story.
2. Develop An Affinity Forum.  Develop an affinity forum for women within your company to regularly uplift, inspire and learn from one another. This ongoing initiative will foster candid discussions on topics like business, work-life balance and wellness.
3. Create A Mission Council.  Create a mission council of employees passionate about women’s empowerment. This council can facilitate discussions, develop social media campaigns and explore ways to support women’s organizations, women-led businesses, and mentorship programs. Within businesses, this initiative can foster community engagement and empower employees to make a tangible difference collaboratively.
4. Host A Virtual Panel.  Host a “Women Entrepreneurs” virtual panel. Invite diverse female leaders to discuss their career journeys, challenges and successes. Open it to the public and record it for later viewing. This creates accessible, inspirational content, positions your company as a thought leader and highlights the varied contributions of women in business.
5. Launch A Storytelling Series.  Launch a raw, unscripted series where women share their real stories, struggles and wins—no corporate polish, just honest conversations that inspire action. When women speak their truth, others gain the courage to rise. True celebration isn’t just about recognition; it’s about amplifying voices that drive change.
6. Share ‘Meet Our Team’ Posts.  Feature the successful women on your team in daily or weekly “meet our team” posts on social media. Highlight their stories and the paths they took in achieving their success in order to inspire others. Showcase that your brand is dedicated to the growth of women in your industry and at your company.

Establish A Mentorship Program. 

Build A Bank Of Role Models.

Bring Women-Led Ideas To Life.

Guide New Women Entrepreneurs

Spotlight Women Via Owned Media

And Sponsor Micro Businesses; Fund Grants

Regardless of what industry your brand operates in, chances are, your niche is more crowded than you first expected. As much as you’d like to have a truly unique brand, the reality is that there are likely many other brands that are very similar to yours.  While this may feel discouraging at first, you can still find success. By identifying ways to better position your brand, you can build a loyal customer base, even in a crowded niche.

Identify a unique selling proposition.  No surprises here—the first thing a brand needs to stand out is a unique selling proposition. For some companies, this means finding a way to differentiate their product (such as a food company using organic ingredients). Others differentiate through pricing. And still, others use giving back as a way to showcase their company values and stand out.  Regardless of the specifics, your USP should be in line with your goals and values, while also being relevant to your target audience.

Create a memorable brand identity.  A distinct brand identity is critical for communicating your unique selling proposition and crafting a memorable persona for your brand. The brand identity can stem from your logo, the tone of your marketing messages, and even the level of transparency you provide into your team and its work.

Niche down.  Targeting a broad niche can make it hard for your brand to stand out. Because of this, many brands “niche down” — or focus on a smaller sub-set of the broad audience. By looking for audiences that aren’t being served, brands can become the go-to resource for a specific group.

Leverage influencer relationships.  Big name celebrity endorsements have long been used by brands as a way to stand out. In today’s crowded marketplace, however, brands don’t have to spend millions. Finding relevant connections in your niche (even social media micro-influencers or local personalities) can make your brand more memorable.

Deliver superior service.  Emphasizing customer service is one of the best ways to help your brand stand out in the long run. Delivering exceptional service to your existing customers is what will retain them and turn them into a marketing force for your brand.  Service that goes the extra mile makes your customers more likely to leave positive online reviews or provide word of mouth recommendations to others they know (who are likely also in your target audience). Such referrals will ultimately be far more influential than any marketing you attempt.  Even in the digital age, word of mouth remains the leading way people discover new brands.

What often gets overlooked in the “rational” world of B2B marketing is the fact that buyers respond to compelling stories. While data, metrics, and ROI calculations matter, storytelling humanizes your message. It makes things relatable. It cuts through the noise and helps prospective buyers envision a better future state in which your product is at the center.

Why storytelling matters in B2B.  The common perception is that B2B purchase decisions often hinge on budget approvals, compliance requirements and measurable returns. Yet, according to research by Google and the Corporate Executive Board, buyers who perceive personal value in a B2B solution are more likely to favor that solution even when business value is comparable across alternate solutions.  

Key elements of a B2B story.  You should base your story on a real customer of yours, but when crafting the story, you should make sure it has a protagonist, a challenge, a solution, a clear outcome and the lesson learned. The protagonist is, in this context, the customer or persona who is making the buying decision.  Though the overall focus here is on storytelling, B2B buyers still need clear proof of results and ROI. Provide metrics that help establish your credibility. Lastly, if possible, identify the moral of the story. 

Common pitfalls to avoid.  Firstly, make sure you do not overcomplicate the narrative. Second, do not stuff your story with too many metrics and data points. Next, do not forget the human element: Framing the story purely around features is not storytelling, and this is critical to avoid.  Make sure that you include quotes, anecdotes or short personal backstories to maintain emotional engagement. Lastly, don’t forget to have a call to action (CTA). 

Measuring the success of storytelling.  An important aspect to measure is engagement; in this context, you could track time spent by prospects on the webpage of your story.  Another aspect to consider is conversion: You should look at how many prospects request demos or downloads and how many leads convert to opportunities more efficiently. A final suggestion on things to track is the impact of your story on the sales cycle: Measure how quickly deals progress when your case study or story is shared early in the sales process.

As you implement the storytelling principles, make sure to keep your stories authentic and to reuse and repurpose your content across webinars, short social media clips or infographics. In a marketplace cluttered with competing alternatives that all have similar characteristics, a compelling story that is well narrated can make all the difference in securing the deal.