Why signal loss is exactly what the industry and its leaders need.

Let’s stop with the hand-wringing.

Signal loss isn’t killing B2B marketing. It’s exposing it. The shallow thinking. The disconnected tech stacks. The dashboards are full of vanity metrics that looked good in slides but never actually moved the business forward.

Clark Barron’s Signal Loss: Why B2B Marketing May Not Survive What Comes Next gets it right: much of today’s B2B marketing has become noise, misaligned with strategy, detached from buyers, and drowning in a sea of tactics nobody cares about.

But here’s the reframe we need right now: This isn’t the end of marketing. It’s the beginning of something better.

We haven’t lost signal, we’ve lost clarity. And signal loss is forcing us to get it back.

What Actually Went Wrong

We didn’t arrive here overnight. This breakdown has been building for years.

We replaced strategy with software. Bought tech before we had targeting. Confused automation for relevance. Too often, marketing leaders reached for tools when they should have doubled down on insight.

We built performance dashboards that celebrated activity instead of impact. Chasing MQLs became the goal. Form fills stood in for conversations. The business asked for growth, and we answered with click-through rates.

We stopped listening to how people buy. We worshipped lifecycle models that bear little resemblance to how B2B decisions are made. Buyers took control, and instead of adapting, we doubled down on nurture flows and gated PDFs.

We diluted our brands until they said nothing. “Strategic growth partner” became the punchline, not the differentiator. Positioning became a consensus-driven filler, not a sharp expression of value.

And finally, we optimized for efficiency instead of effectiveness. We moved fast but in circles. More content. More campaigns. More stuff. But velocity without clarity just creates well-organized irrelevance.

This isn’t a crisis. It’s a correction. And it’s long overdue.

What You Need to Do Now

Signal loss is not a reason to retreat. It’s a reason to reset. And that starts with marketing leaders because this isn’t just about tactics. It’s about responsibility.

Get Your Positioning Right

If your positioning could apply to your closest competitor, it’s not positioning, it’s wallpaper.

B2B firms must define their target customer with precision. Not a vague persona or a broad market segment, but a group of buyers with real tension, real stakes, and real potential. You must understand what they’re navigating and express your difference in a way that makes it obvious why you matter and others don’t.

This isn’t optional. In a world where targeting is getting harder and buyers have tuned out, your positioning is your targeting strategy.

Make Brand Your Operating System

Brand isn’t frosting. It’s not a campaign. It’s the internal logic that connects strategy, product, marketing, and customer experience. When a brand is weak, everything feels fragmented. When a brand is strong, everything aligns.

Used well, brand becomes the commercial spine of the business. It guides how you show up, how you sell, and how you grow. It ensures consistency across channels, confidence in the market, and clarity internally.

Great brands don’t slow down performance. They accelerate it.

Invest in Commercial Creativity

Creativity isn’t frivolous, it’s your advantage in a saturated, commoditized market.

When you can no longer rely on perfect targeting or trackable funnels, you need distinctiveness. You need emotion. You need ideas that earn attention.

In B2B, that doesn’t mean gimmicks. It means high-conviction, insight-driven thinking that breaks patterns and builds preference. If your content is forgettable, the problem isn’t your audience, it’s your message.

Creativity is how you become the signal.

Measure What Actually Matters

If your KPIs don’t map to revenue, retention, or reputation, you’re not doing marketing—you’re doing theatre.

Yes, brand is harder to measure. But it’s not impossible. Start tracking memory, preference, and salience. Measure the lagging indicators that reflect long-term value, not just the ones that are easy to find in your CRM.

Good marketing earns trust, creates demand, and drives profitable growth. Bad marketing checks boxes and still gets cut.

It’s Time for Marketing to Lead Again

There’s one more thing we need to say out loud: this isn’t just a tactics problem. It’s a leadership one.

For too long, marketing has been reactive, following trends, chasing new platforms, deferring to other departments. Signal loss is forcing us to stop playing defence and start leading again.

And it couldn’t come at a better time.

Buyers are skeptical. Budgets are under pressure. Attribution is murkier than ever. But none of that means marketing is powerless. It means we must become more disciplined. More focused. More aligned with how businesses grow and how people make decisions.

The Bottom Line

Signal loss didn’t ruin B2B marketing. It’s forcing us to rebuild it on stronger ground. This is our chance to reset the function around what actually works:

• Clear, sharp positioning

• Brand as a multiplier, not an accessory

• Distinctive, insight-led creativity

• Metrics that map to commercial outcomes

• Leadership that’s strategic, not performative

It’s not time to panic. It’s time to get better.

Less theatre. More traction. Less noise. More signal.

That’s how B2B marketing doesn’t just survive, it earns its seat at the table.