By Marc Keating, Chief Innovation Officer, Stein
This article was originally published in the Brand Finance Global Most Valuable B2B Brands Index 2025
Starting three years ago, Brand Finance, Stein and IAA collaborated to provide something the B2B world had long been lacking: an index of the world’s most valuable B2B brands.
The Brand Finance B2B Brands ranking is now in its third annual iteration, elucidating the role brand plays in realms ranging from marketing performance and talent acquisition to finance and overall enterprise value.
A leading role that is now widely acknowledged by B2B leaders is brand’s ability to accelerate demand all the way through the funnel and drive growth by doing so. As revealed in the 2025 and prior rankings, top B2B brands actually have greater enterprise value than their B2C peers, yet they also have considerably lower brand value. Trillions of dollars of intangible value are absent from B2B balance sheets as a result. This “brand deficit” is reason enough to up the B2B brand ante.
But there is much more to it than that. Disconnected brand and demand strategies, prioritization, budgets, media allocations, teams, goals and KPIs lead inevitably to the two worst-possible outcomes: 1) Sub-optimal effectiveness at a time when CMOs and their organizations are on the hook for greater effectiveness to drive growth, and 2) sub-optimal efficiency when budgets are under pressure (especially given prevailing political and economic uncertainty).
As a direct result, while many B2B enterprises continue to treat brand and demand as separate and siloed functions, more and more are seeking to unify brand and demand in pursuit of the holy grail: greater effectiveness and efficiency.
Recently, Stein in partnership with ANA conducted extensive research among B2B CMOs and senior marketers to better understand their level of brand-to-demand marketing maturity.
Of note, 75% of those surveyed stated that integrated brand-to-demand marketing is very or highly important to them. Add “moderately important” the tally and it climbs to 99%. Stein, World Advertising Research Council (WARC), LinkedIn and others developed a model in response called BDX™ (Brand-to-Demand Experience).
Crossing the brand-to-demand chasm
Barriers to realizing the value of B2B brands remain, including budget allocation and emphasis.
At present, only 27% of Maturity Study respondents report a balanced media allocation for brand media and demand media (between 60% brand/40% demand and 40% brand/60% demand). Yet fully 78% believe a balanced allocation is optimal.
Similarly, only 22% of respondents report a balanced overall approach to brand-to-demand. Yet again, 72% believe a balanced approach is optimal. Exacerbating the data points, particularly about budget allocation, 84% of marketers surveyed believe that marketing is somewhat to massively under-invested.
So, what do CMOs c-suite peers think about all of this? Most (68%) have at least some interest in brand-to-demand, but far less so than their marketers. For higher-growth companies, 68% leaps to 86%.
Nonetheless, the belief in unified, balanced brand-to-demand outpaces its realization. This is borne out by Maturity Study findings that 84% of marketers state their brand-to-demand marketing is disconnected, while only 14% state it is fairly connected and just 2% state it is unified.
B2B marketers are inevitably progressing toward a more connected, unified approach with pace. Some CMO verbatims from the study underpinning BDX:
- “Brand recognition is key to developing a stronger pipeline long-term, especially in a business with a long sales cycle and large, well-known competitors.”
- “We need to look at the marketing funnel as one – not work in silos – to maximize efficiencies and reach.”
- “Every dollar spent needs to yield business impact – only integration of brand and demand can make this possible.”
All the above makes the operative point about brand, one the B2B marketing community should consider embracing in the face of lukewarm support from c-suite colleagues. Brand is the furthest thing from “fluffy.” When applied from brand to demand, it has a massive commercial effect. Brand harvests near-term demand, cultivates future demand, and drives growth.
