Intelligent Brands: The New Growth Playbook for High-Stakes B2B Marketing
Unlock your Intelligence Advantage
Private equity has grown up: more capital, more strategies, more managers, and a much bigger role in building, transforming and scaling companies across the economy. Performance, relationships and discretion still matter, but they now play out in a far more crowded field. In most fundraising processes, you’re not being judged in a vacuum; you’re being compared directly with a handful of peers. The question is less “are you good enough?” and more “do you genuinely stand out from the other firms in the mix?”
At the same time, private markets are becoming more visible to regulators, employees, communities and the media as products move into wealth and semi-liquid channels. This is where visibility stops being optional. According to our latest research, Intelligent Brands, C-Suite expectations of private equity firms’ Intelligent Brand behaviour is 6x higher than how they are actually perceived.
An Intelligent Brand is one that makes its expertise, thinking and judgment visible and compelling to the people who matter most. For PE firms, that means going beyond credentials and track record to articulate a genuine point of view — on sectors, on value creation, on where the market is heading. It's what turns a capable manager into a trusted partner, and a trusted partner into the default choice when capital is being allocated.
Firms that can explain who they are and how they think have an edge when LPs, boards and investment committees are weighing up their options.
Across buyout, infrastructure, private credit and hybrids, many firms now legitimately describe themselves as flexible, solutions-driven partners offering bespoke capital in complex situations. On paper, a lot of firms can underwrite the same deal in the same sector on fundamentally similar terms. The positioning that shows up on pitch decks and websites often reflects that: “specialist generalists”, “flexible capital partners”, “bespoke solutions across cycles”.
The risk is obvious to anyone running communications: the narrative around different firms starts to converge into the same handful of phrases. Firms fail to differentiate, with little beyond logos separating one set of marketing materials from another. That is where how you frame your story quietly becomes a source of advantage. Call it brand, call it reputation – in practice, it is the shorthand investors use to decide where the next allocation of capital should go.
The macro backdrop has also become less forgiving. Higher financing costs and more expensive debt make it harder to generate the same returns in capital-intensive and hard-asset strategies; global fundraising has become more challenging and more polarised between top-tier and everyone else. Deals still get done, but with a thinner margin for error and fewer easy fixes if things don’t go to plan. Internally, investment and risk teams are already adapting to that reality.
LPs are doing the same. They are not only asking whether a manager can deploy capital, but how that manager thinks about downside protection, discipline and risk when the cycle turns. When several managers present similar numbers and similar deals, softer signals start to carry more weight: how clearly a firm can articulate its edge, how consistently it has behaved across cycles, whether it feels like a genuinely “safe pair of hands”. That narrative is what travels into the rooms you are not in – the CIO’s summary slide and the IC chair’s quick read-out before decisions are made. The firms that make those conversations easier tend to find capital easier to raise.
Given all of this, the way a firm shows up – its story, its language, the cues it sends – has drifted closer to the commercial core. This is not about glossy campaigns or trying to sound like a consumer brand. It’s about whether your current narrative does justice to the sophistication of what you already do, and whether it makes life easier or harder for people deciding between you and a shortlist of credible peers.
For marketing and leadership teams, this manifests in very practical ways. It means a smoother path from first meeting to commitment, fewer conversations where you are treated as interchangeable with peers, and more moments where decision-makers can confidently argue for choosing you. Over time, that clarity shows up in the numbers, with less friction in fundraising, stronger re-ups and better support for new strategies. There is good evidence from listed markets that strong, distinctive brands are associated with better financial performance, suggesting that these effects are not just cosmetic but commercially material.
All of this points to a simple question. As you look ahead to your next fundraise, does the story you’re telling today still fit the market you’re walking into and clearly set your firm apart? In a world where capital is harder to raise and LPs have more choice, distinctiveness is not a nice to have; it’s a growth driver that shapes how fast you close, how big you can go, and how often investors come back.
Taking a hard look at how you show up in the market means making sure partners, your materials, and your LPs are all telling the same, distinctive story. When firms get this right, brand becomes a quiet economic lever – supporting better fundraising outcomes, smoother launches for new strategies, and ultimately, more capital to put to work on the terms you want.
If you want to speak to the team about how we can help your firm, get in touch.
New research by Man Bites Dog shows that in a high-stakes B2B environment, decision-grade confidence comes from Intelligent Brands®.
A new study amongst C-Suite executives in multi-billion-dollar global organisations has found that the rules of B2B growth have changed, and that companies must change with it in order to unstick the buying process. The traditional growth levers of trust, brand awareness and personal relationships no longer give C-Suite buyers the confidence they need to commit.
The Intelligent Brands study, from B2B business and marketing consultancy Man Bites Dog, finds that nine in ten C-Suite executives now require decision‑grade confidence to move a major deal forward.
The study reveals that 97% of leaders say buying confidence comes from a partner’s visible intelligence advantage: superior ideas, experts, data and technology show they understand what’s coming and how to help their customers win.
Claire Mason, Founder and CEO of Man Bites Dog, says: “The challenge for high-stakes B2B marketing is no longer to make brands feel trusted. It’s to make buyers feel confident enough to act. Intelligent Brandsare the organisations that consistently make their expertise, insight and capability visible to the market through brand, marketing and thought leadership, giving C-Suite buyers decisive confidence in high-stakes B2B decisions.”
Intelligent Brands win on every metric. Not only do they provide the C-Suite with decision-grade confidence, they also speed up the decision-making process. 91% of leaders say Intelligent Brands make it easier for them to back larger deal sizes and longer-term contracts because they reduce perceived risk.
To Man Bites Dog’s proprietary Intelligent Brands system helps companies unlock C-Suite buying decisions in a high-stakes, high-scrutiny environment. The system defines six interlocking capabilities that enable organisations to translate their intelligence into buyer confidence.
Key findings:
While many organisations have deep expertise, buyers aren’t consistently seeing it. The study compared importance (the expectation that organisations in each sector are seen as Intelligent Brands when buyers make high‑stakes decisions) with perception (which organisations leaders currently regard as Intelligent Brands). The distance between these two scores is the Intelligent Brand® gap.
On average, only 38% of organisations in key sectors achieve Intelligent Brand status, with the lowest performing sector, the legal profession, facing a more than 9x expectation-perception gap. In private equity and private credit we see a 6x expectation-perception gap, and asset and wealth management firms face a 4.4x gap.
“As B2B has moved from transactional deals to transformational partnerships, and from technical buyers to the C‑Suite, closing the Intelligent Brand gap must become a strategic priority for marketing and sales leaders,” Claire Mason adds. “The brands that will win the next wave of high‑stakes growth are those that make their intelligence advantage impossible to miss.”
Take the Man Bites Dog Intelligent Brands Assessment to discover how your organisation performs across the six dimensions. Find out where your strengths are as well as where there are opportunities to build your Intelligent Brands status.
And download the Intelligent Brands report to explore the data in more detail and get a practical framework to inspire decision-grade confidence in your customers.
And if you want to speak to the team, get in touch.
Intelligent Brands is an in-depth thought leadership study conducted by Man Bites Dog in 2026. The study involved international opinion research with 150 C-Suite executives with buying decision responsibility in very large global B2B organisations (companies with an average revenue of $8 billion), headquartered in the US, UK and Europe.
In 2026, three letters dominate every marketing and communications conversation: G, E and O. GEO – or generative engine optimisation – is the practice of optimising your content so that it is most likely to show up in the answers generated by AI. As the younger and less mature cousin of SEO, the rules and principles underlying GEO are still being worked out and changing all the time. But for B2B brands with long and complex buying cycles, it’s fast becoming the issue at the top of every marketer’s to do list.
As part of our latest Don't Overengineer It! series, Man Bites Dog brought together marketing leaders from across the engineering, energy and infrastructure sectors to explore how AI is reshaping the way buyers find and evaluate organisations. Leading the discussion was Dan Matthews, Man Bites Dog's Head of Editorial, with a talk from Simon Schnieders, founder of Blue Array and one of the UK's leading voices on GEO and search.
Here are a few key takeaways from the talk:
Traditional SEO logic breaks down with generative AI. The same prompt can return a completely different answer minutes later, making keyword tracking meaningless. What matters now is whether models associate your organisation with the right categories – for example offshore wind, grid resilience, advanced robotics or public infrastructure delivery – and how prominently. For complex firms operating across multiple sectors, identifying which categories to own and consistently reinforcing them is the challenge and the opportunity.
Large language models draw heavily on user-generated content - LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Reddit, industry forums - because it contains the lived human experience that they can't generate themselves. Brands with limited public discussion are at a disadvantage, even if their technical capability is strong. For firms in the engineering sector, where this kind of visibility can feel uncomfortable, the message is simple: quiet brands are invisible brands.
Individuals matter to models. Engineers, directors and specialists who are visible through authored content, interviews and cited commentary are more likely to surface in AI outputs than anonymous organisations. This is particularly important in sectors selling into government, large enterprises or any complex business with sophisticated buyers. We are now entering the new age of experts.
Agentic AI is already being embedded in browsers. Chrome (with its 65% market share) already has agentic features built in. As AI agents increasingly act on behalf of users, the need to visit a website in its traditional sense diminishes. For engineering and infrastructure firms, this means websites are evolving into structured capability feeds that machines interact with directly, rather than marketing destinations designed for humans. An emerging standard entitled WebMCP — backed by Google, OpenAI and Microsoft — will allow AI agents to navigate your site autonomously. Early adoption could be a genuine competitive advantage: if an agent can reliably interact with your site and not your competitor's, that's your shortlist.
Changes to your owned and earned content may not be reflected in AI outputs for six to twelve months. One-off content bursts are unlikely to move the needle. What builds recognition inside the models is sustained, long-term reinforcement of core themes and expertise. Long-term multiyear strategic campaigns are the name of the GEO game, not one-off tactical bursts.
AI systems can only recombine what already exists. Low-information-gain content is actively filtered out, and both search engines and AI models are getting better at spotting it. We are entering the new age of experts, where thought leadership – backed by original ideas, proprietary data and genuine points of view – will become the sharpest point of differentiation a brand can have. These are the signals that content is real, credible and genuinely useful.
The rise of GEO represents a huge opportunity for engineering, energy and infrastructure firms: the sector has deep expertise, real stories to tell and technical experts to tell them. The brands that commit to saying something specific, informed and evidenced will be the organisations that AI models - and the buyers using them - come to regard as authoritative leaders in their field.
If you want to discuss any of these themes or think creatively about how your own marketing needs to respond to the rise of GEO, please get in touch, we'd love to help.
Marketing financial products used to be a story of optimism and opportunity. ‘Growth storytelling’ was the name of the game. Globalisation was in full swing, Larry Fink was pioneering a more wholesome view of fiduciary duty, ESG was the acronym of the decade and making the world a better place was a complement to making it more opulent, not a trade-off.
Over the last year, that changed. From global trade frictions to developments in the Middle East, growth storytelling has fallen apart – not because it no longer makes sense, but because fewer people feel the optimism it was built on.
It has been replaced by something altogether more pessimistic: risk navigation.
As a theme, navigating risk is no less interesting than telling stories of growth, it’s just less fun. In fact, human beings are so psychologically programmed to avoid risk that the pain of losing is felt roughly twice as intensely as the joy of winning. Marketers have been leaning on FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) tactics for generations for this very reason.
But when does risk marketing become opportunistic ambulance chasing, and when is it a reasonable response to long-term market conditions?
The answer lies in the seriousness with which we approach the challenges. Bad news demands deep deliberation and, latterly, big picture thinking. Marketers must engage with these themes because they shape corporate voices – and corporations largely define how the impacts of global events are felt. But for marketers to engage productively is more difficult.
Here are our three golden rules for storytelling in a heavy-hearted world:
If you want to discuss any of these themes or think creatively about how your own marketing needs to respond to the grave new world, please get in touch, we'd love to help.
Thought leadership can feel like a nebulous concept, so let’s start with a definition: thought leadership is storytelling that motivates action.
Done well, it’s ideas-led selling that harnesses the power of storytelling, supported by substantial data. It helps brands surface the opportunities their customers can seize, and the risks they can’t afford to ignore.
And it works. Beyond strengthening reputation and deepening relationships, good thought leadership packs a commercial punch. Our Thought Makers research found that 74% of C-suite leaders always consider a strategic supplier’s thought leadership when making buying decisions.
So it’s powerful stuff. But when does it pack the greatest punch, and what does “great” thought leadership actually look like?
Far from just being a content tactic, thought leadership is a strategic tool that can help organisations navigate moments of change, ambition and complexity. Here are just three scenarios where powerful thought leadership becomes the difference between drifting and leading.
A new CEO wants to establish authority with a new brand story.
A leadership transition is a high-stakes moment for an organisation. A new CEO doesn’t have long to establish credibility, articulate their vision, and unite employees, investors and customers behind it. Thought leadership gives them the platform to do this — offering a bold point of view and a forward-looking agenda that signals confidence and sets the tone for the future.
A team is looking to “own” a topic, shape debate or close a credibility gap.
When pitching in on important conversations, whether it’s around sustainability, AI, customer experience or industry transformation, teams need to offer more than marketing messages. Whether they’re trying to shift perceptions, influence policy, or assert expertise in a competitive space, a strong point of view elevates them from participants to agenda setters. Thought leadership provides fresh insights to bring to the table and demonstrates real authority.
A company needs a unifying narrative in the wake of M&A activity.
In the face of M&A uncertainty, competing cultures and complex integration challenges, organisations need a way to align their people around a shared purpose and future direction. Thought leadership provides the golden thread: a unifying story that explains the “why”, demonstrates the value, and helps stakeholders see the bigger picture.
To understand what makes for effective thought leadership, it helps to think of it as a series of waves:
The future belongs to the Thought Makers: the leaders who take a bold stance on what’s next, earning their place as strategic partners to the C-suite.
So how do organisations reach – and, crucially, maintain – Thought Maker status?
There’s real power in a story well told. Great thought leadership has to start with a big idea – something fresh, unexpected, a little “man bites dog”. This should link back to your organisation’s strategy, but it also needs enough edge to grab attention. In a market overrun by same-y AI-content, unique human thinking matters more than ever. And if it’s thinking that could genuinely shift the conversation? Even better.
A strong idea will spark an emotional response, but data makes it land. It satisfies the rational part of the brain, which is especially important in B2B where decisions must stand up to scrutiny from a range of stakeholders. It’s no surprise that three-quarters of C-suite leaders say they’re more likely to read or engage with content that is supported by original research.
Bold ideas create interest. Strong data creates belief. Together, they drive thought leadership that motivates action.
Want to learn more about how to do this? Download our Thought Makers research to uncover the five steps to creating thought leadership that not only stands out, but makes real waves in the market.
And if you want to speak to the team, get in touch.
With a name like ‘Man Bites Dog’, we’re often asked to explain the origin story behind it. “It’s the definition of a good story,” we say.
“Why?” they ask.
Well, at any given time, somewhere in the world, a dog is biting a person. Usually only a playful nip, but it still counts. The reverse scenario offends the rules of nature; it almost never happens, so there’s normally an interesting backstory – hence, news.
The name reflects our ambition to ideate fascinating stories that move the needle and get chins, not tails, wagging. We avoid the obvious and humdrum in favour of delivering big ideas and in-depth insights that surprise and inform the reader equally. These are economic indexes, eye-catching future scenarios and unique research that carry enough velocity to resonate around the world.
It is the key to our award-winning thought leadership and why we’re proud to call ourselves the ‘growth department for intelligent brands®’. For our clients, it means brand-building cut-through, elevating them to the lofty status of Thought Maker.
The phrase ‘man bites dog’ evokes the newspaper boom of the late nineteenth century in New York and London, where the aphorism was born. It is most often attributed to American newspaperman John B. Bogart, who rose to prominence at a time when urbanisation and better literacy fuelled huge audiences.
"When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news," he is quoted as saying.
Printing technology became faster and cheaper, so supply of what we now might call infotainment could meet demand. Competition for eyeballs was fierce, with Bogart’s paper the Sun vying for supremacy with the World and the Journal. It was the same situation in London, where the Times, Telegraph, Daily News and a newcomer called the Daily Express were locked in a circulation battle.
But while in the UK newspapers were the preserve of the middle and upper classes, doling out information in vanilla format, Bogart popularised the notion that news should be interesting – and that interest came from difference, not necessarily scandal.
He might not have minted the famous phrase – some attribute that to previous Sun editor Charles Anderson Dana or even British newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth – but he certainly coined it and gave the idea (four) legs.
He was also instrumental in applying theory to practice. Along with mass circulation, newspapers developed eye-catching headlines, emotional storytelling, human interest focus and words accompanied by illustrations – and, later, photography. They amplified outlier events and delved deeper into detail, uncovering what was special.
With great power, as they say, comes great responsibility. It’s not easy to walk the line between good storytelling and sensationalism – or what we might now call clickbait. While some tabloids took ‘man bites dog’ to an extreme, distorting facts to augment shock value, the best publishers understood how to sell a story while remaining truthful.
Right now, getting that balance right is harder than ever. With the rise of social media and clip culture, the battle for people’s attention is as much science as it is art. The digital blizzard and information overload, increasingly driven by AI and automation, aims to ‘trigger’ the market into longer dwell times.
Newspaper circulation – which, thanks to ‘man bites dog’ principles, peaked in the mid twentieth century, topping 30 million readers for UK Sunday editions alone (two for every household) – has fallen off a cliff in the modern era.
In Japan, where newspapers remain popular, Yomiuri Shimbun is widest read, but even its mighty circulation dropped from a record 10 million in 2010, to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ABC figures.
India has the world’s largest population, but its leading daily averaged only 3.6 million editions during the same year. US newspapers no longer even make the global top ten.
The information gap created by falling readership has been replaced in part by digital editions, but also by X, Instagram, YouTube, and their Eastern equivalents.
The net result is that important, interesting information is being muscled out by AI manipulations, funny gifs, video shorts and pithy memes, instant gratification over resonant content.
Social media removed the brakes on the ethos for compelling stories, turning a witty rule of the newsroom into the omnipresent definition of what it takes people to engage, truncating both attention and memory spans in the process, blurring lines as it deluges brains.
Simply put, the job of drawing attention constructively is harder than ever.
We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but we can stick to our guns, fashioning important, useful and engaging content to help leaders make the right decisions.
In its heyday of the printing press, inky-fingered journalists gave readers context surrounding the events of the day. We think that ethos is as important now as it was then - perhaps even more so.
It’s the job of B2B marketers to rise above the clamour, delivering timely stories to existing and prospective clients, winning the scrum for relevance against what can feel like overwhelming odds.
By sticking with the spirit of ‘man bites dog’, creating fascinating insights without compromising principles, you can build a loyal audience and booming sales, just like print journalism pioneers did all those years ago.
Dan Matthews is head of editorial at Man Bites Dog.
Talk to Dan about custom publishing, branded magazines, websites, dynamic digital and editorial products to help your business become a thought maker in its market.
If you'd like to speak to us about anything else, please get in touch, we'd love to help.
Brace yourselves for yet another piece of content on COP30, but I do have an important point to make, I promise.
As COP30 kicks off we're bracing to be inundated with generic sustainability content. The noise levels will rise, and standing out will be harder than ever. That’s why proprietary, industry-specific data – rich in insight and capable of telling a story companies haven’t heard before - is essential for cutting through the noise. It’s the kind of content that earns attention, not just airtime.
What sets a company apart is its ability to bring evidence to the table – to surface a challenge, uncover a blind spot or spotlight an emerging opportunity that others haven’t yet recognised. This isn’t just reactive behaviour; it’s proactive leadership.
And COP30 is the perfect moment to do that. Businesses should be thinking about this kind of content well ahead of any major event – whether it’s Davos, COP30, or New York Climate Week.
These global moments put sustainability in the spotlight. Governments unveil updated climate plans, and the private sector comes under the microscope. Investors, media and policymakers are watching closely, looking for signals of who’s serious, who’s innovative, and who’s shaping the future.
By publishing a data-backed study or thought leadership campaign ahead of any major climate event, companies can set the agenda by introducing new insights that influence discussions at the summit. They can position themselves as experts by owning a specific climate-related issue in their sector, drive media and stakeholder engagement through a compelling narrative that attracts attention and builds credibility, and inform policy by providing evidence that can support or challenge regulatory direction.
Generic commentary won’t cut through the noise. The most impactful campaigns are built on proprietary data that’s collected through opinion research, economic analysis, climate models, customer insights, or industry partnerships. To truly resonate, content should be anchored in a bold, original idea.
This kind of data-driven storytelling allows companies to highlight global and region-specific risks or opportunities across sectors, benchmark progress and demonstrate leadership compared to peers, and reveal trends that others have not yet quantified.
It’s not just about being a thought leader. It’s about being a thought maker – shaping the conversation, not just joining it.
To truly resonate at global gathering like COP or New York Climate Week, a campaign should be:
A great example of this approach is GHD’s water security campaign, Aquanomics. Taking the Aquanomics campaign to COP gave GHD a global platform to elevate water risk as a critical climate issue. By sharing proprietary data that quantified the economic impact of floods, droughts and storms - $5.6 trillion in potential GDP losses by 2050 – GHD shifted water from a technical challenge to a boardroom priority. This presence allowed GHD to influence high-level discussions on adaptation vs. mitigation, showcase innovate solutions like digital water technologies and strengthen relationships with policymakers and industry leaders. Ultimately, it positioned GHD as a trusted voice in climate resilience and future infrastructure planning.
Done well, climate-aligned thought leadership at major climate events can do far more than tick ESG boxes. Positioning as a climate leader strengthens brand reputation and attracts values-driven customers and top-tier talent. Partnership opportunities emerge with governments, NGOs and investors – creating new markets and shared value. Companies gain influence over regulation, shaping the rules instead of simply reacting to them. Also, new revenue streams open up, from green products and services to sustainable finance.
These events aren’t just summits, they’re strategic moments for business reinvention. They’re where sustainability meets profitability, and where bold leadership translates into long-term value. But in this new climate economy, insight is as powerful as action.
For businesses, harnessing proprietary data will be a game-changer. It will empower evidence-based narratives that don’t just speak of change - they will validate it.
At global climate events, those who bring insightful, data-driven stories to the table won’t just be seen as responsible, they’ll be seen as visionary. For those ready to act, sustainability isn’t just about doing good, it’s about turning climate ambition and data-backed thought leadership into a competitive edge that builds brand awareness and advances positive change.
If you'd like to discuss a data-backed campaign please get in touch.
Last week the team at Man Bites Dog and a select group of friends took to the 24th floor of the Shard to tackle one of the biggest issues impacting sustainable marketers today: language. More specifically, how can global marketing teams working in complex B2B businesses ensure their campaign messaging works across borders and audiences in a world where a common sustainability lexicon is seemingly fraying at the seams.
No mean feat, especially for a breakfast meeting. But armed with pastries, a tonne of industry expertise and the Chatham House Rule we set to work unpicking these challenges and stitching together practical solutions for overcoming them.
The insights from the session can be broken down into five key points:
From greenwashing becoming a regulatory issue, to net zero becoming overly technocratic for some audiences, terminology (and the impact it has) is evolving quickly. CMOs must stay on top of this shift, and ensure their organisations speak the language of sustainability in a way that resonates with key markets while being commonly understood.
As well as having a positive impact on the planet sustainability can have a positive impact on profits. It can also mean ‘investability’, ‘insurability’ and growth. It’s not enough to communicate purpose alone – performance can unlock greater engagement to ensure messages resonate with investors and markets to make change happen.
Across sectors and roles, there’s a significant perception gap – terms are interpreted in varied ways, leading to misalignment and confusion. Establishing a shared, consistent language is essential to unify understanding and drive meaningful action.
2030 is less than five years away, but many organisations are losing sight of the timeline. Reframing communications to highlight this urgency, without overwhelming audiences, is a powerful way of landing your sustainability messaging.
In sustainability, broadness and ambiguity have prevailed – inviting scepticism and diluting impact. By choosing a clear, focused theme, brands can communicate with greater credibility and achieve stronger engagement and impact.
With the world becoming ever more fractured, finding clarity in your sustainability marketing campaigns whilst getting cut through with your audiences will become more important – as well as more challenging. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but choosing your words carefully, showing how sustainability drives real business value, and crafting messages that are specific, urgent, and audience-aware are just some ways to set your next campaign up for success.
In a world where tech buying cycles are longer and product features alone no longer cut through, insight-led thought leadership has become a critical tool for influence and growth.
At a recent techUK webinar - Supercharging Sales with B2B Tech Thought Leadership - Man Bites Dog and BT shared a powerful new playbook for turning thought leadership into commercial impact. The takeaway? Bold thinking, underpinned by bespoke data, is the new currency of influence in tech marketing.
Claire Mason, CEO & Founder of Man Bites Dog, and Fiona Buckley, Technology Divisional Director, shared findings from our transatlantic Thought Makers research, revealing how senior decision-makers engage with thought leadership and how it drives their buying decisions.
These findings prove that thought leadership is far more than just brand building. It’s the spark that ignites boardroom conversations and shapes vendor shortlists. One-off white papers and isolated blog posts won’t break through at the C-Suite level. To win real influence and drive commercial impact, tech brands need a sustained stream of provocative, data-driven insight that challenges assumptions, earns a seat at the decision-making table and directly fuels revenue growth.
The webinar spotlighted BT’s Cyber Agile Organisation campaign - developed in partnership with Man Bites Dog - as a powerful example of thought leadership driving strategic repositioning and measurable growth.
The campaign was built around a bold hypothesis: that cyber-agile organisations outperform their peers. Research proved it true, revealing that businesses with strong cyber agility achieved 20% higher growth rates over three years. By reframing cybersecurity as a growth enabler, not just risk mitigation, BT elevated the conversation to the boardroom, repositioning security as a competitive differentiator.
Turning thought leadership into measurable growth requires more than great content, it takes close collaboration with sales too.
Hassiena Albohaithi, BT’s Global Head of Field Marketing, explained:“As part of this campaign we wanted to cement and showcase our expertise in security, and thought leadership gave us the platform to do that. This was a unique opportunity to work side-by-side with sales to drive demand, accelerate pipeline and position BT as an expert voice in this space.”
Sales engagement was amplified through a benchmarking tool and strategic influencer partnerships, opening doors to new conversations. And LinkedIn Live sessions proved successful in reaching senior buyers at scale. The campaign also created momentum internally, aligning wider teams behind a unified value proposition and accelerating go-to-market impact.
Whether you're a scaling tech SME or a global enterprise, the mandate is the same: anchor your go-to-market strategy in content that delivers new insight, credibility and commercial impact.
At Man Bites Dog, we work with intelligent brands to create thought leadership that commands C-Suite attention and accelerates growth. If you want to learn how to turn your expertise into influence, and influence into impact, download our latest Thought Makers report, or get in touch to find out how your brand can become the next Thought Maker in your market.
Man Bites Dog was pleased to host a panel session for B2B Ignite 2025 with special guest marketing leaders David Keene and Mike Scott for a conversation that’s reshaping how we drive growth in B2B, which is now available to watch on demand.
In this session we explored how breaking down silos between sales and marketing is no longer optional, but essential. From the power of thought leadership to the rise of blended ABM strategies and smarter sales enablement, we hope you left with fresh ideas and practical insights to take back to your teams.
The Growth Department: The future of B2B sales & marketing integration
Growth is back on the agenda, but in today’s competitive landscape, real success comes from breaking silos and aligning sales and marketing like never before.
Enter The Growth Department - where marketing isn’t just a function, it’s the engine driving business success. Join Man Bites Dog’s Founder and CEO Claire Mason, leading tech CMO David Keene, and Mike Scott, Senior VP of Hitachi Rail for a dynamic discussion, exploring how CMOs and CROs can unite to fire up revenue growth.
Using real-life examples, we explored:
You can download our Thought Makers report here, and if you're interested in continuing the conversation you can book a briefing with one of the Man Bites Dog team.
This webinar in our Thought Makers series was hosted by techUK, bringing together industry leaders to discuss strategies for crafting thought leadership that effectively drives C-Suite engagement and sales.
The session was hosted by Fiona Buckley, Technology Divisional Director at Man Bites Dog, and featured insights from Claire Mason, our CEO and Founder, with special guest Hassiena Albohaithi, Global Head of Field Marketing at BT. This webinar is now available to watch on demand from techUK here:
Showcasing BT’s latest thought leadership campaign, "The Cyber Agile Organisation," developed with Man Bites Dog, Hassiena and Fiona reflected on the campaign's successes, and delved into how to use thought leadership to develop Account Based Thought Leadership to drive relationships and sales.
Law firms face many challenges when it comes to marketing and creating thought leadership content – from the intangibility of their services to differentiation in a competitive market. We believe one of the most unique challenges is choosing how to go-to-market within a matrix structure. But, as always, there are effective strategies to overcome these hurdles.
The legal landscape is highly competitive, as evidenced by the rising number of mergers. To grow and expand, firms need to make effective use of marketing and thought leadership. However, high-value law firms are by their very nature often complex organisations. As well as by overall brand, they go-to-market by industry group, service line or practice area. And if that wasn’t enough, on top of this structure, there is the additional layer of geography.
Because of this matrix structure, firms can appear fragmented, lack cohesion and operate as disconnected entities in the eyes of the outside world. Effective marketing requires focus, and the enemy of focus is fragmentation. This division often leads to competition for budget, attention and resources, as well as diluting brand clarity. Without unity, important synergies can be lost, and firms can fail to realise their full potential.
When effectively positioning a matrix organisation and creating thought leadership content, there are two potential approaches to consider.
The first is to embrace a ‘better together’ strategy. This emphasises the strength firms can achieve from collective collaboration. Rather than focusing solely on individual parts of the matrix, differentiation stems from the combined expertise and capabilities of the entire firm.
It’s about showcasing how the unique combinations within the matrix structure make you stronger and more valuable to your clients.
When considering a thought leadership campaign within a collaborative approach, the organising idea could be based on a ‘diagonal thematic’ that is relevant across the firm, such as ESG or AI. Alternatively, the idea could be based on a ‘golden thread’. This approach pulls together your knowledge and experience and allows you to create a holistic campaign or content that aligns to a strategic goal or aspirational state.
The alternative thought leadership approach for a matrix organisation is to effectively position and create campaigns for different parts of the matrix, while still maintaining overarching coherence. Each service line, practice group, industry group or territory has its own positioning within the larger ecosystem. However, importantly, there is alignment.
With this approach, individual parts of the matrix can have their own tailored messaging or campaigns – content that resonates with its audience, highlighting specialised expertise and unique value propositions. And while individual parts of the matrix have their own clear narrative, there’s still an overarching story that ties everything together. This provides a clear view of how each component part fits into the bigger picture.
This personalised approach can be advantageous, as it allows firms to provide insights on a more granular level. The data and outputs can be tailored to engage with more specific topics or conversations with clients that only apply to certain sectors, practice areas or markets. It can also allow for more creativity. One of the disadvantages of a ‘golden thread’ or ‘diagonal thematic’ campaign can be that it is harder to find an idea that serves everyone to the level they require within the matrix.
At Man Bites Dog we work with our professional services clients to identify the best approach, based on their strategy and overarching goals. In a world where change is the only constant, law firms need to foster focus rather than fragmentation in order to stand out in the expanding crowd. Thought leadership helps bring that focus and provides a platform for strategic positioning and messaging.
Find out more about thought leadership in our latest Thought Makers report. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you differentiate and capture market share, get in touch.
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Man Bites Dog has been named Specialist Consultancy of the year in the B2B Marketing Awards.
Our award-winning Zeronomics campaign for Standard Chartered is a cornerstone example of the storytelling, positioning and strategic work we do at Man Bites Dog.
Man Bites Dog recently partnered with Women in Journalism to conduct a major new study on gender inequality in UK journalism and media.
For some years now, we have been campaigning to close The Gender Say Gap, a term we coined to highlight the invisibility of women and diverse leaders as expert authorities in business and public life.
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