Why trust is the defining B2B marketing challenge of the decade

Trust has always been table stakes in B2B. So why does it suddenly feel like the central marketing problem of our time?

Trust is table stakes — and always has been. Stephen Covey was writing about it as the foundational principle of all human relationships more than thirty years ago. The economists have been at it even longer; trust, they tell us, is the invisible variable that reduces friction in every market exchange ever made. None of this is new.

So why does it feel like trust has suddenly arrived as the conversation in B2B marketing? My answer is that three forces have collided to make trust simultaneously more valuable and harder to earn than at any point in the modern history of the discipline. Together, they make trust the defining marketing challenge of this decade — and a generational opportunity for the brands that take it seriously.

Force one: the societal trust recession

Edelman has been publishing its Trust Barometer for twenty-five years now, and the 2025 edition makes for sobering reading. Edelman characterises this year as the era of the “Crisis of Grievance” — a society in which repeated institutional failures have curdled into generalised resentment, and in which trust in governments, media and NGOs continues its long downward drift. As Richard Edelman put it at Davos: “Over the last decade, society has devolved from fears, to polarization, to grievance.”

There is one bright spot for B2B. Business is now the most trusted institution in fifteen of the twenty-eight countries Edelman measures — but it is a precarious perch. Business is trusted not because it has earned new credibility but because everyone else has lost theirs. And whether B2B brands like it or not, they inherit the broader cultural mood. Their buyers are the same people who have spent the last decade learning to distrust authority of every kind. As Andrew Mildren of Edelman observes, this leaves people “hungrier for advice on how to navigate challenges” — but only from sources they have decided are worth trusting in the first place. The bar for being one of those sources has risen considerably.

Force two: the AI content avalanche

If the societal trust recession is the slow-moving backdrop, generative AI is the accelerant. Adoption of platforms like ChatGPT and Claude inside B2B marketing teams has happened at extraordinary speed, often without policy or oversight. The result is a perfect storm: the quantity of B2B content is going up, and the quality is going down.

AI has removed what used to be the biggest bottleneck in marketing — capacity and cost — but in doing so it has also removed the constraint that made content selection meaningful. When everyone can produce a thought leadership report in an afternoon, the value of having one collapses. AI-generated content is, by its nature, derivative; it can look polished, but it rarely says anything that hasn’t been said before. And buyers are not fooled. The FT and IPA’s Bridging the Trust Gap study found that just 9% of B2B decision-makers feel they can trust generative AI, and 69% disagree that trusting a piece of technology is the same as trusting a human.

There is a second AI dynamic at work that is going to bite a lot of B2B brands in the next eighteen months. Buyers are increasingly using GenAI platforms rather than search engines to research suppliers. Where Google returned a list of links, ChatGPT returns a single, confident answer — built from whatever content the platform can read. Anything sitting behind a gate (still a B2B mainstay) is invisible. Generic content is now doubly penalised: ignored by humans, and useless to the AIs that are increasingly mediating discovery.

Rob Mitchell, formerly of FT Longitude, frames the upside neatly: “Good thought leadership by definition involves original insight, which is currently something that AI cannot do. So, for now, this creates a bit of a ‘competitive moat’ around genuine thought leadership.” That moat is the most valuable real estate in B2B marketing right now.

Force three: the buying environment

The third force is the sheer difficulty of B2B buying in 2025. Buying groups are larger, sales cycles are longer (Edelman and LinkedIn report nearly 90% of buyers saying their purchase process became more drawn-out last year), and the volume of information any individual buyer has to process is, frankly, absurd. The average business executive receives 100–150 emails a day and is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 advertising messages in the same period. Seventy-three per cent say they feel bombarded with more information than ever; 59% say the volume itself is making decisions harder.

Brent Adamson puts it well: “As hard as it has become to sell in today’s world, it has become that much more difficult to buy. The single biggest challenge of selling today is not selling, it is actually our customers’ struggle to buy.” In an environment this crowded, this slow, this scrutinised, trust isn’t just an attribute brands aspire to — it is the variable that decides whether decisions get made at all.

Why this makes trust the decade-defining challenge

It would be easy to read those three forces as a list of headwinds and conclude that B2B marketing has it tough. That is true, but it misses the bigger point. Trust isn’t one challenge among many; it is the variable that determines whether anything else marketing does will work. Three reasons it deserves the “defining” label.

First, trust is the bottleneck on every other commercial outcome. You can’t generate a qualified lead, close an account-based deal, command a price premium or land a purpose-led campaign if the underlying trust isn’t there. The FT’s analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank shows trust has risen from the sixth most powerful metric driving business effects twenty years ago to the second most powerful today — behind only product or service quality, and above loyalty, differentiation and brand image. A remarkable repositioning for a metric that used to be considered too soft to measure.

Second, trust compounds — or collapses. Unlike awareness, which decays gracefully, trust can be destroyed in a single misstep: a hallucinated claim in a sales pitch, a data breach, a botched implementation that turns into a public review. That asymmetry — slow to build, fast to lose — makes it strategically more important than the metrics most marketing teams currently optimise for.

Third, trust is the one thing AI can’t shortcut. As generative content floods every channel, the scarce resource is no longer information itself but credibility — the signals that help a buyer decide which information to believe. AI can produce content at infinite scale; it cannot produce the original insight, the lived expertise or the institutional reputation that makes content worth trusting. In an AI-saturated market, those credibility signals become the most valuable thing a B2B brand owns.

So what do we actually do about it?

There are three techniques that demonstrably build trust at scale in B2B markets, and they are all currently underused. The first is thought leadership — substantive, original, evidence-based content that helps buyers see their own challenges in a new light. The Edelman/LinkedIn 2024 report found that 73% of decision-makers say a company’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials. Man Bites Dog’s Thought Makers study found that 74% of C-suite buyers always consider a strategic supplier’s thought leadership when making a buying decision. And yet only 17% of entries to the B2B Marketing Awards include thought leadership at all.

The second is advocacy — reviews, referrals, recommendations, customer stories. Eighty-four per cent of B2B transactions begin with a referral, according to Harvard Business Review. And yet, as Barbara Stewart puts it, advocacy in most B2B organisations is still treated as “the cherry on top” rather than baked into the strategy. Piecemeal and reactive, rather than orchestrated and strategic.

The third is influencer marketing — not the consumer kind, but the increasingly sophisticated use of independent voices, journalists, analysts and category experts to lend external credibility to brand messaging. This is the breakthrough trend of the last eighteen months in B2B, and the ecosystem is maturing fast.

These three categories overlap and interlock more than they first appear. The same individual can play different roles in different campaigns, and the people who actually carry trust in B2B markets break down into five quite distinct personas — internal thought leaders, employee advocates, unpaid external influencers, paid external influencers, and customer advocates. I’ve mapped these out in more detail in the B2B Matrix of Influence for anyone wanting to go deeper. For the purposes of this piece, the headline point is simpler: all three of these techniques are still minority sports in B2B, and that is precisely where the opportunity sits.

Designing for trust, not hoping for it

Trust is no longer a brand attribute, a campaign objective or a hoped-for by-product of doing decent work. It is the operating environment that will shape B2B marketing for the rest of the decade. The forces driving its rise — societal scepticism, AI saturation, buying complexity — are not going away. They will only intensify.

The brands that adapt their thinking to that reality, and design for trust rather than hoping it shows up, will be the ones still standing in 2030. The ones that don’t will find themselves out-competed by quieter, more substantive operators who understood early that the real job of B2B marketing in this decade is no longer to generate demand. It is to earn the right to be believed. That is the work — and it is, frankly, more interesting than anything we’ve been asked to do for a long time.