Lessons from B2C: Emotion, Clarity, and Problems
- chloehall83
- Jun 23
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 24
What a fintech rebrand taught me about building B2B messaging that actually resonates with your buyers.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: most B2B marketing is written for an audience that doesn’t exist. In B2C, if your message isn’t clear and relevant in a few seconds, you’re ignored. In B2B, funnily enough, it's the same experience. Cross-border payments. Multi-market compliance. FX risk. These are things that sound important in a boardroom, but mean very little to someone just trying to pay an invoice without speaking to six chatbots and a compliance officer in Lithuania.
Strangely, we’ve convinced ourselves that complexity earns credibility. It doesn’t. It's just confusing and frustrating for everyone.
The most effective B2B marketing borrows from B2C: lead with clarity, understand the emotions behind the decision, and speak to the real-world pressures people face.
That’s the approach I took when leading the rebrand at 3S Money.
Stripping the brand back to the real reasons customers choose us. What I learned applies to any B2B company trying to cut through.
Find the emotional hook, even in technical industries
Let's use the 3S Money example, which operated in a complex space: cross-border payments, multiple markets, layers of compliance, and bureaucracy. But when we started the rebrand, we actually talked to customers, and their challenges weren’t just operational; they were emotional. They didn’t talk about “global financial infrastructure.”
They said things like:
“I need to move money fast without being treated like a risk.”
"I'm sick of being stuck on the phone to chatbots"
We realised what we were selling wasn’t a feature, it was relief. Relief from barriers, from delays, and from banking bureaucracy.
So, we shifted the narrative. From long, boring feature lists to ease, trust, and freedom. The messaging became grounded in outcomes:
A tagline that embodied the mission "Business Without Borders. Rapid payments. Premium service."
No borders. No bureaucracy.
Global payments without limits.
That emotional clarity helped us reposition as more than a payments provider; we became a trusted partner for global growth. This was brought to life in our rebrand launch video:
Please. For the love of ****. Kill the jargon.
In B2C, If something sounds confusing, people will click away. One of the great lies in B2B is that using complex language makes you sound smarter.
In reality, it makes you sound like someone who’s never spoken to a customer.
At 3S Money, we rewrote every line of the website. No more internal language like “integrated banking rails” that meant nothing to the person trying to pay their invoice in Spain. Instead, we focused on what they were actually thinking:
“Can I send this payment without delays?”
“Will someone talk to me if something goes wrong?”
“Is this going to be complicated?”
When we shifted from technical language to human language, it made a measurable difference:
Landing page conversions increased by +53%
Organic traffic started converting at a much higher rate, resulting in over 3M in CLTV
A more transparent pricing page helped drive a +22% uplift in subscriptions
3. Define your ICP by their pressure, not their title
We stopped anchoring our ICP around titles like “CFO” or “Head of Accounting.” Instead, we mapped the pressures they were under:
Scaling globally with limited resources
Frustration with slow onboarding or compliance barriers
Needing transparency and fast international payments
This shifted everything in our ad copy and sales decks. It also helped us better qualify leads, because our messaging was attracting the right pain, not just the right role.
Final thoughts
Too often, B2B brands default to long, technical product descriptions packed with features that are honestly mind-numbingly dull.
We seem to believe that more information = more trust.
But what if the opposite were true?
The best results I’ve seen come from asking a simpler question What’s my buyer under pressure to solve, and how can we speak directly to that?
If your messaging reflects what someone’s feeling, not just what they’re doing, you're far more likely to earn attention, trust, and action.
B2C brands never sell to “demographics.” They sell to emotions and motivations. B2B should too. Because the person reading your ad, your landing page, your sales deck, they’re a person under pressure. And they’re taking a risk by choosing you. They don’t want to be sold to; they want to be understood.
The more human your marketing feels, the more likely it is to work. The clearer your message, the easier it is to trust.
Remove the jargon. Talk like a person. And for once in B2B, try not to be boring.
Titles don’t make decisions. People do.