The Hard Button and the honest work of b2b brand strategy

What a perception problem looks like at Staples#

A fox never mistakes a familiar scent for a familiar meal. Everyone in the hedgerow knows the smell of Staples; the question is what they expect to find at the end of the trail. That question is the whole of b2b brand strategy in one sniff, and it is why a black button placed beside a red one this September deserves a slower read than the usual campaign gossip.

On 15 September 2026 Staples announced a brand platform called Hard vs. Easy, timed to the fortieth anniversary of its first store, according to Staples’ own press release. The idea is a paired choice: the familiar red Easy Button, and a new black Hard Button that stands for too many vendors, disconnected processes and late or incomplete orders. The sign-off, as The Boston Globe reported it, is "Don't choose hard. Choose Staples."

Two days later Marketing Dive interviewed chief marketing officer Bob Sherwin, and one line has been circulating since: "We don't have an awareness problem, we have a perception problem." His reasoning, as reported, is that most people hear the name Staples and picture stores, office supplies, ink and toner, while the company wants credit for enterprise work such as furniture consultation, janitorial and breakroom supply, and same-day delivery. Marketing Dive also reported that the spots run on YouTube, Hulu and Netflix, with shorter cuts on LinkedIn and Meta, backed by billboards, elevator screens and sales collateral.

Hold that claim at arm's length. The press release says businesses including 75% of the Fortune 500 rely on Staples account teams, and Marketing Dive described the figure as an estimated 75%. Both are company-sourced, and neither measures what buyers think. We found no perception research, before or after launch, published alongside the campaign, so everything below treats Sherwin's diagnosis as an informed hypothesis about b2b brand strategy from a chief marketing officer, not as a result.

It is a good hypothesis, though, and it travels. A plain, well-known B2B category has an awareness problem far less often than a perception problem. The same diagnosis fits a cybersecurity vendor whose logo every buyer has seen and whose work almost none can describe, a fintech infrastructure provider filed under "payments plumbing", or a healthcare supplier in a regulated category whose name means "distributor" to everyone who has met it once. Getting b2b brand strategy right starts with knowing which of the two problems is sitting in your den.

Why b2b brand awareness and perception are different diseases#

Start with the trail everybody follows. Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, writing in a study for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, reported that companies change providers of services such as banking, legal advice, software or telecoms around every five years, as the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute summarises. That puts roughly 20% of buyers in the market across a year and about 5% in a quarter. In his own paper Dawes is careful: the 95% figure is a heuristic, and he calls it "not meant to be a precise rule".

The lesson is where b2b brand awareness earns its keep. Most of your audience is not shopping today, so the brand has to sit in memory, patient and unfussy, until they are.

Now the awkward bit. The same research family, which underpins most modern b2b brand strategy, says awareness usually matters more than rejection. Professor Jenni Romaniuk’s brand rejection paper for the B2B Institute found rejection low, at around 10%, in two common B2B services categories, and concluded that a lack of awareness is far more likely to hamper growth than active rejection. On its face that sounds like the opposite of Sherwin's claim.

Read closely, it is not quite the opposite. Romaniuk's advice is to build more useful mental structures, by linking the brand to the cues buyers use when they shortlist. A buyer who knows Staples as the place for ink and toner is aware of Staples, yet holds no mental link between Staples and "the partner who runs our workplace supply". In ordinary language that is a perception gap. In Ehrenberg-Bass language it is a mental availability gap. That reading is ours, not Romaniuk's finding, and Staples has not said it frames the problem that way.

So the working distinction for b2b brand awareness runs like this. Awareness asks whether buyers can name you. Perception asks what job they hire you for once they do. The B2B Institute frames the job of marketing as making a brand "easy to mind and easy to find", by creating awareness in relevant buying situations, in its own How B2B Brands Grow guide. A relevant buying situation is exactly where a narrow perception bites: the buyer facing a furniture refit never thinks of the ink shop.

Awareness tests are cheap and flattering. Perception tests are cheap and occasionally humbling, which is why fewer teams run them. The rest of this piece is about running one, because b2b brand strategy without a perception test is a guess in a nice jacket.

What the research says about b2b brand strategy, and where it thins#

The chart comes from an IPA and Brand Finance investment analyst survey, as analysed by Ian Whittaker and reported by PPC Land. Handle it with tongs. The sample was about 200 analysts and investors across the US and UK, Whittaker himself flagged a margin of error, PPC Land noted that the episode gives no fieldwork dates, and it does not say how the remaining 12% answered on cuts. Inside those limits: 79% put brand at the top of what they weigh when judging whether a company is well positioned, 52% called a spending reduction a positive measure, and only 36% said a reduction causes long-term damage.

Whittaker's reading, as PPC Land reports it, is that investors value brand as a state, visible in pricing power, retention and margin stability, while treating spend as a line to trim. For any b2b brand strategy that is a warning label. A brand programme has to surface in numbers a finance director already reads, or it will be pruned in the first lean quarter.

The budget question has its own thin ice. The Drum reported an early cut of the IPA case-study databank made for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, published in May 2019, in which Les Binet described a "limited sample" of B2B campaigns and a tentative analysis. On average it pointed to 46% of spend on brand building and 54% on activation, against the 60:40 balance the IPA describes for The Long and the Short of It (62:38 in Effectiveness in Context). Binet's headline was that reach looked like the name of the game in B2B as well as B2C, with broad-reach campaigns seeming to work best.

The B2B Institute's own five principles of growth page, drawn from that Binet and Field work, says campaigns aiming to build share of mind tend to do best, and the more famous a firm becomes, the better its business results. Fame, then, is the quarry the research keeps circling. For any b2b brand strategy, fame for what is the question Staples has raised.

Four moves that turn b2b branding into a perception fix#

Four moves turn b2b brand strategy from a decoration into a perception fix. None needs a new logo, and every one can be tried before the next media plan is signed.

Move one is the hardest and the least glamorous. Staples' release gives its platform a single promise, make work Easy, and CEO Rachel Huckle summarises the method as "Show the Hard, then present the Easy way forward." Whatever you make of the button gimmick, that is a brand with one job. Our archive piece on giving a platform a job covers the same discipline, and the Sonos story shows why the repair came first.

Move two is where a prowl through the undergrowth of most B2B sites goes wrong. The Staples release pairs each pain with a proof point: managing multiple suppliers against one partner for everything, an order that shows up late or incomplete against one that is in stock, delivered tomorrow or collected today. Those are claims a buyer can hold to account. Compare the kind of adjective that collapses under a scoreboard, as in a supplier that declared it and could not show it.

Move three is the one that separates a b2b brand strategy from a media plan. Romaniuk suggests a one-off check of rejection against other brands in your category, and says that if the level is low and normal, you can ignore it until something changes. Put the same instinct to work on perception: before booking streaming, run two proof lines against each other in cheap paid social, and read which one buyers can repeat back. Our paid social work starts this way, and it is the honest use of LinkedIn and Meta, the two social platforms Marketing Dive says Staples chose.

Move four needs a single dashboard line, not a research programme: awareness on one side, consideration on the other, and the distance between them as the number to shrink. If awareness is 80% and consideration is 12%, more reach only repeats the same misunderstanding at higher volume. That distance is also the number a finance director will accept, which matters given what the investor survey suggests about who reads the budget. Proof pages that close the gap belong in your content marketing, not a brand film.

None of this argues against reach. The Ehrenberg-Bass and IPA work reviewed above leans hard towards it. It argues for the order of operations: a wrong message repeated at streaming scale is still a wrong message. Whether Staples tested its Hard vs. Easy message before launch, the interview does not say.

Cybersecurity, fintech and healthcare: the same diagnosis, plus a Monday plan#

Regulated categories raise the stakes for a b2b branding strategy, because the proof has to be true as well as vivid. A cybersecurity claim you cannot back is a liability, a fintech claim about settlement is a regulatory question, and a healthcare supplier's compliance promise is a legal one. That is the reason proof over adjectives is not merely style in these thickets. It is risk management. Our industry pages on cybersecurity marketing, fintech marketing and healthcare marketing carry the sector detail.

Now the honest opinion, held lightly. Staples has picked a defensible diagnosis and a smart instrument: one funny contrast that makes a long service list memorable. We would still not bet a budget on either until someone measures the shift. Marketing Dive notes the Easy Button has been through several permutations and the occasional hiatus, and The Boston Globe reported Sherwin calling last year's revival a momentary campaign of around 10 weeks. Perceptions move slowly and stay moved only when the message stays put. A platform built to last "the next few years", as Sherwin described it to the Globe, is at least aimed at the right clock.

One interview is not a controlled result. There is no comparison group, no pre-launch baseline in the public record, and a chief marketing officer explaining a launch has every reason to sound sure. Treat the Hard Button as a well-argued experiment worth watching, and watch the awareness and consideration numbers, if Staples ever shares them, before copying anything except the diagnosis.

What would we copy? The order of a good b2b brand strategy: diagnose first, name one job, attach proof, then buy reach. What we would not copy is the habit of treating a diagnosis quoted in an interview as though it had already been verified. The best b2b branding strategy is the one that can be wrong quickly and cheaply.

If the gap turns out to be perception, the next step is a sharper b2b brand strategy brief, starting from our brand strategy work,, not a bigger budget. If you would like a second pair of eyes on the undergrowth, the door is open, and the running commentary on campaigns like this lives in our newsroom.

Frequently asked questions#