From Chaos to Competitive Advantage: Why B2B Marketers Need a New Playbook

The VUCA playbook is obsolete. Although the concepts of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity might certainly characterise the current environment, a more fitting acronym is BANI: Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible.

BANI was introduced in March 2020 by Jamais Cascio as a framework for understanding an increasingly turbulent world. “So many of the upheavals now underway are not familiar, they’re surprising and completely disorienting,” Cascio wrote. “They manifest in ways that don’t just add to the stress we experience, they multiply that stress.”

Marketers are certainly feeling the stress of the BANI era. Marketing budgets for 2025 represent just 7.7% of company revenue, the same as 2024, which was the lowest percentage since the pandemic, a Gartner survey found. Nearly six in ten CMOs (59%) say they don’t have sufficient budgets to execute their strategy in the year ahead.

Beyond budget cuts, here’s what the BANI era portends for B2B marketers – and how they can turn chaos into opportunity.

From “Brittle” to “Resilient”

Digital systems are more interconnected than ever, but also more susceptible to risk. The fragility of systems and structures, combined with macro trends such as climate change and geopolitical unrest, can create a ripple effect around the globe when something breaks. When the Ever Given container ship became stuck in the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021, it blocked a popular global shipping route, holding up nearly $10 billion of goods in trade per day.

For marketers, consider the impact of an extended Google outage. How would such an outage disrupt your paid search strategy? How quickly would you be able to pivot to alternative media channels? Unfortunately, traditional marketing teams and their agency partners are not agile enough to respond quickly to these types of sudden disruptions. High-fixed-cost global networks are mismatched to a BANI environment.

Brands that can withstand upheaval are better positioned to win. Marketers can help to create a more resilient brand in three key areas:

• Invest in brand building. Too many businesses cut back on brand investment after a seismic shock, but many studies have shown that proactively defending share of voice can help a brand recover faster from aftershocks.
• Build an agile operating/agency model. Traditional operating models and agency partnerships are too rigid to pivot rapidly to address a brittle system when it breaks. A highly complex marketing environment requires an agile model featuring access to specialist capabilities and teams that can scale up or down as needed.
• Lean in on an omnichannel strategy. In a BANI world, it’s more important than ever to avoid over-reliance on a small number of tactics, distribution channels, or a single strategy or target audience. Resilient brands consistently adjust their tactics to ensure they’re getting the biggest return from their marketing efforts.

From “Anxious” to “Reassuring”

Geopolitical uncertainty, ongoing cost scrutiny, and AI disruption are all contributing to longer B2B buying cycles. A Pipeline360 study found that 74% of marketers report longer sales cycles, with 46% experiencing increases of 2+ months. Marketers must recognise the effect anxiety is having on decision making and find ways to remove fear and doubt from the buyer journey.

When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, SaaS giant Salesforce quickly pivoted its marketing efforts to launch its “Leading Through Change” initiative, a content series designed to support businesses during the pandemic. The series, which positioned Salesforce as a trusted partner for customers working through the disruption of a pandemic, helped drive a 24% year-over-year increase in revenue.

Marketers can establish a reassuring mindset for their brand with the following actions:

• Create campaigns that show empathy for how their customers are navigating an uncertain world. To do that, you need data-driven insights about your target audience’s pain points. By showing an outside-in understanding of their challenges – and a path to solving those challenges – you can make the complex seem as simple as possible.
• Produce thought leadership that establishes credibility and trust in the brand. Longer sales cycles require content and messaging that helps the buyer before they’re ready to buy, so that your brand is top of mind at the key moments leading to a sale. In other words, you need a point of view that matters to your audience, even before they’re ready to buy.
• Demonstrate a long-term vision that emphasises the safety, longevity, and trust in the brand.Show customers through your messaging that your brand is not going anywhere and can respond quickly to any disruption that lies ahead.

A reassuring mindset is important for internal stakeholders as well. Marketing leaders must focus on building stronger, long-term relationships with senior leadership to secure buy-in and budget for executing their strategy.

From “Non-Linear” to “Reinvention”

The sales funnel has exploded; Gartner projects that 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur in digital channels by 2025. Buyers loop endlessly through tasks, often without speaking to account reps. However, while a separate Gartner study found that 75% of buyers say they prefer a rep-free experience, self-service deals carry higher regret.

Changing media consumption habits require new ways of thinking about your audience. Shifting workplace trends such as hybrid work and the transition to a younger workforce impact relationship-building, requiring marketers to innovate (where practicable) across their operations, strategies, and tactics. To create an opportunity to win in a nonlinear world, try these reinvention strategies:

• Keep what’s working, change what’s not. You don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Be open to new ideas that can deliver more value while also blending seamlessly with existing tactics and systems.
• Lean into AI for automation and operational streamlining. In the Marketing AI Institute’s newly released 2025 State of Marketing AI Report, 60% of respondents said their marketing teams are piloting or scaling AI. Asked about their own adoption rates, 26% of marketers said AI is already infused into daily workflows. Marketing leaders should work with their IT counterparts to ensure their teams have the tools, training, and governance required to experiment with AI and define the best ways to use it. Don’t wait on this.
• Build a better “push/pull” balance into your campaigns. Nonlinear buyer journeys require a more diversified set of touchpoints for customers and prospects. While traditional funnel stages (awareness, consideration, evaluation, purchase) still exist, they’re not as easily mapped in a straight line, requiring a more nuanced approach that balances awareness and demand generation levers. The key is providing value at every step, with every asset – especially when you’re asking prospects to fill out a registration form.

From “Incomprehensible” to “Revealing”

A decade after customer experience expert Jay Baer said marketers are “surrounded by data but starved for insights,” the quote still rings true: a 2025 survey by Wunderkind found that 59% of marketers check performance data daily but struggle to act on the insights. Marketers need to identify the best tools and partner knowledge to help them see beyond the data and identify truly actionable insights. Here’s how to turn incomprehensible data into revealing insights:

• Focus fully on the data you need, not all the data you have access to. Marketing leaders should work with their IT counterparts to consolidate data sources, automate processing and reporting activities, and define personalised dashboards that speed decision making.
• Interrogate your first-party data. Dig more deeply into your most important information resource:  transactional and behavioural data from existing customers, website visitors, event attendees, and others who have engaged with you in some way. Consider focusing more on account-level data to identify trends from your most important targets.
• Identify new signals beyond the standard metrics. Marketers and their agency partners tend to look at the same types of performance metrics, with insights blending into a sea of sameness. To break out, prioritise “few, true, new” metrics over vanity dashboards. Look beyond the data for fresh insights – for example, are we attracting the most important influencers within a decision-making unit (DMU)?
• Look beyond intent. Intent data has long been a key method for identifying potential buyers in B2B, but these signals don’t really prove intent to buy, nor do they offer insight into the vast majority of potential customers who are not in market at that moment. Intent data can be a useful metric, but only in the context of a wider data set.

Implications for the agency model

As B2B marketers look to become more resilient, reassuring, reinventive, and revealing, they are finding that their agency partners also need to adapt. Large agencies lack flexibility and are hindered by high fixed costs, while smaller agencies lack scale and the in-house expertise to handle an evolving, highly complex digital landscape.

The new landscape requires a new model of specialist capabilities. A flexible, on-demand network of specialists lets marketers shift spend from overhead to innovation and moves with the market instead of against it. This new agency model is the service equivalent of manufacturing’s “just in time” model – let’s call it a “built for BANI” model. By partnering strategically, marketers can tap into the expertise and agility they require without being encumbered by the costs of a large sitting resource.

Preparing for the next shockwave

In a BANI world, chaos isn’t a curse – it’s an opening. Marketers who cultivate Resilience, Reassurance, Reinvention and Revealing insights across their operations and with agency partners will out-manoeuvre brittle competitors and convert anxiety into market share gains.

A new agency model will help marketers adapt their strategy before the next BANI shockwave hits.