Why B2B Buyers Are Just As Emotional As Shoppers

Here is an uncomfortable idea for anyone who sells to businesses: the procurement manager reading your RFQ response has already made up their mind about you. The spreadsheet is theatre. The decision is memory.

That is the provocation at the heart of a recent opinion piece on ETBrandEquity by Piyush Lilaramani, head of brand, communications and CSR at PVNA Group, who has worked across both FMCG and automotive. His argument: auto component manufacturers dismiss brand-building as a consumer-goods indulgence, and it is costing them.

The shelf and the vendor list are the same place

In FMCG, Lilaramani notes, the purchase is essentially settled before the shopper reaches the aisle. Familiarity, recall and peer recommendation do the work; the in-store moment merely confirms a decision already taken. He describes the store visit as confirmation rather than discovery.

Swap the aisle for an RFQ inbox and the mechanism is identical. By the time a request for quotation lands, a supplier has already been judged, through industry events, chatter between procurement teams, the quality of its communication, and — crucially — how it behaved the last time something broke.

Behavioural science has a name for this: processing fluency. Options that come to mind easily and feel familiar are judged as safer, better and more truthful. A B2B buyer does not escape that bias by having a scoring matrix. The matrix simply gives the pre-formed preference a respectable place to live.

Consistency beats brilliance

The piece makes a point that consumer marketers keep relearning: the most enduring FMCG brands are rarely the most innovative ones. They are the most consistent — in quality, in tone, in how they handle a crisis.

The same holds in components. A supplier who delivers the same quality, communicates the same way and resolves problems the same way every single time is building an asset no spec sheet captures. As Lilaramani puts it, procurement teams are human, and “humans trust patterns”.

This matters commercially right now. Vendor consolidation is accelerating across OEMs and preferred-supplier programmes are tightening. In that squeeze, the survivor is not necessarily the cheapest or the most technically advanced — it is the most trusted. And trust, he argues, is a brand function, not a sales one.

The product is the floor, not the ceiling

Technical compliance is table stakes. Everyone on the vendor list has cleared the spec. So the real question shifts from who can build this part to who we want to build it — a question answered by reputation, relationship and narrative.

Most component firms stop at the spec sheet. They pour money into engineering, tooling and certification, then assume those investments speak for themselves. They don’t — not loudly, and not to the people who sign off. The fastest-growing players translate technical capability into a business story.

Loyalty already lives in your spreadsheet

The sharpest reframe in the article: preferred-vendor status is brand equity. Procurement managers have suppliers they champion internally and suppliers they merely tolerate and would quietly swap out. That preference is built exactly the way consumer preference is built — repeated positive experience over time. B2B just never gave it a name.

For brand and marketing leaders in industrial categories, that suggests a few practical moves:

• Audit the in-between moments. The dormant LinkedIn page, the trade-show booth with a banner and no story, the industry newsletter you never contribute to — that is where preference forms.
• Measure recovery, not just delivery. How a failure is handled is a stronger memory-maker than a hundred on-time shipments.
• Codify tone. Same voice, same escalation path, same person. Pattern recognition is the cheapest trust-building tool you have.
• Turn capability into narrative. Make the invisible visible: where the company is headed, not just what it can machine.

Why the window is closing

India’s auto component sector sits at an inflexion point. Localisation mandates, the EV transition and new mobility ecosystems are rewiring supplier relationships faster than incumbents are adapting. EV-native entrants are building brand and business at the same time, unburdened by legacy assumptions about what marketing is for.

The lesson generalises well beyond axles and actuators. Any category where buyers say “we decide on merit” is a category where brand is doing quiet, unbudgeted work — for someone.

Source: ETBrandEquity.com