The brand problem India's B2B sector has been refusing to see

New Delhi: Two-thirds of all world trade is B2B. In India, the majority of companies are suppliers to other companies, feeding global supply chains that ultimately make someone else rich.

Yet if you walk into any top B-school in the country today, B2B marketing is, at best, an elective somewhere. Every industry award, every celebrated campaign, every headline belongs to B2C. This is not a new observation. But it is one that the industry has been remarkably comfortable ignoring.

A Ceiling built from within

The problem is not capability. India has the talent, the craft, and the manufacturing muscle to compete at the highest level globally. What it has consistently lacked is the belief that any of it is worth building a brand around.

Most Indian B2B companies are, at their core, suppliers feeding global chains. But the value almost always stays elsewhere. An apparel manufacturer sells to Gap. Gap walks away with 95% of the margin. The supplier takes 5%.

This is not an isolated story. It is the defining story of how Indian B2B businesses have operated for decades, and very few in the industry have treated it as the problem it actually is.

Rajesh Kumar, who has led marketing at Microsoft and SAP across India and Asia and now works with businesses as a fractional CMO, has watched this pattern repeat itself for nearly thirty years.

“There is a colonial hangover at play here. We were conditioned to keep our ambitions in check, to believe that wanting too much is somehow improper. That thinking has slowly set a ceiling on how boldly Indian businesses choose to grow,” he observed.

The ambition gap shows up in numbers as much as in attitude. Startups taper off at 25-30 million dollars not because the market stops them, but because the vision does not stretch beyond that.

B2B firms run multi-crore operations with no marketing function to speak of, and call it efficiency. Everything downstream, including how much a company invests in brand building, follows the lead of that original, self-imposed ceiling.

This thinking made sense once, when demand outpaced supply and simply being available was enough of an advantage. “Think of a late-night paratha shop in Delhi. When you are hungry and it is the only option around, you will eat there and enjoy it. That shop does well not because it is exceptional, but because it is simply the only one present,” Kumar noted.

But when the market grows and competition multiplies, presence alone stops being a strategy. Many Indian B2B companies are still running on that logic, even as the world around them has fundamentally shifted.

The tariff wake-up call

The current global tariff shake-up has made this conversation more urgent than the industry would like to admit. The comfortable assumption has always been that in a cost-pressured world, the cheapest supplier wins. But that logic collapses quickly when you look at how serious purchasing decisions are actually made.

“Nobody is choosing a Caterpillar machine or a Mercedes truck on price alone. They are paying a premium, and doing so willingly, because the brand has earned that trust. India has very few companies that sit in that space, and that is the real gap,” Kumar said.

China's manufacturing scale is larger. Competing purely on cost is a race India cannot win forever, and the tariff disruptions are only making that more visible.

A brand, once genuinely built, changes the terms of competition entirely. “Basmati rice is a useful example. People seek it out by name, pay more for it, and tie it to a specific origin and quality. That is not accidental. That is what brand-building does to a commodity. India has the raw material for dozens of stories like that across sectors, and most of them remain untold,” he explained.

The pattern Kumar describes is consistent across industries. A founder-led sales function carries the business. Relationships are the primary currency.

Marketing investment is kept deliberately thin, often just salespeople on the road. And there is a quiet confidence that this model will hold indefinitely. “It works until it does not,” he said simply. The fragility of that model is the part most B2B firms are not yet willing to examine.

When B2B learns to speak to everyone

Not every B2B company needs a mass consumer campaign to break out of the commodity trap. There is a more considered path, one that some of the world's most durable industrial brands have already proven, what practitioners call B2B2C, where a manufacturer builds equity directly with end customers while still working through intermediaries.

Intel's "Intel Inside" is the most studied example. Bose audio in premium cars is another. The logic is straightforward once you see it. “What Intel figured out early on is that its real strength lay with the end consumer. If the person buying a laptop is already asking for Intel by name, the manufacturer has very little room to swap it out. That pull, built at the consumer level, keeps Intel's position safe across the entire supply chain,” Kumar explained.

A technically stronger competitor can always emerge. But a brand that has already earned the end consumer's trust is far harder to displace than one competing on specifications alone. India's B2B sector has the products to play this game. What it has rarely had is the strategic intent to do so.

The fractional fix

Part of the structural problem is that good marketing leadership is expensive, and most mid-sized Indian B2B firms cannot justify the cost of a full-time CMO. The result is that marketing either gets handed to someone underqualified or does not happen in any meaningful sense at all.

The fractional CMO model, according to Kumar, is beginning to offer a practical way around this. Experienced marketing leaders working with companies for a focused day or two each week, bringing strategic clarity without the overhead of a full-time hire. 

“Most mid-sized B2B companies do not need a full-time CMO from day one. What they need is someone experienced enough to point them in the right direction, sort out the priorities, and make sure the team is working on the right things. The doing can follow. The thinking is where the real value sits,” Kumar stated.

It is a small shift in structure, but it addresses a real gap that has kept many capable B2B businesses from ever building a coherent marketing function.

The change going forward

The most reliable signal of change may not be coming from the boardroom. It is coming from the next generation stepping into businesses their parents built, and refusing to run them the same way.

This is playing out across sectors, quietly but consistently. The next generation is more educated, more exposed to global markets, and less willing to accept thin margins as a permanent condition. As Kumar put it, “They always had the foundation. The next generation has simply found the language for it and is seeing a bigger opportunity sitting in the same product.”