Jason Ing on Why B2B Marketers Need to Stop Ignoring Emotion

B2B Marketers Conflate Brand Marketing with Mass Marketing

Most B2B marketers think brand equals Super Bowl ads. Jason Ing thinks that's why they're leaving performance on the table.

The real issue isn't budget. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what brand work actually is. Brand isn't about reach. It's about narrative, delivered through whatever channels make sense for your audience—whether that's a targeted event, a partnership with sales, or connected TV.

We conflate brand marketing and mass marketing and we assume that they're the same. But oftentimes it's really not about the channel. It's really about figuring out how you deliver that narrative in the right way through whatever channels might make sense for you.

— Jason Ing

Ing's team at Gusto launched a campaign called Choose Gusto, built on a simple insight: running a business is exhausting, and every decision feels heavy. The campaign compared mundane tasks like watching grass grow to doing payroll—with the twist that payroll is actually easy with Gusto. It worked because it tapped into the emotional reality of small business owners, not just the rational job-to-be-done.

Start with Qual, Then Let Data Validate

In a world drowning in data, Ing does the opposite of what most growth marketers do. He starts with qualitative research, then uses quantitative data to validate or kill the hypothesis.

You can find data to justify anything actually in a world where you can measure a lot more and you're getting a lot more signals. But I've come to learn that using a hypothesis-driven approach and then having data validate or invalidate something is very important as opposed to just looking at walls of numbers and trying to pick out patterns.

— Jason Ing

This isn't just a preference. It's a lesson he learned at Amazon, where Jeff Bezos famously said: "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." Data can be wrong. Data can hide context. But a well-formed hypothesis grounded in customer reality will point you in the right direction faster than a dashboard ever will.

Ing even mentioned piloting synthetic research with a company called Evidenza, which uses AI to create survey respondents that approximate real customer behavior—half the time, half the cost, with better quality checks than traditional email surveys.

Emotion Isn't Optional in B2B—It's the Unlock

B2B buyers are humans. They want to feel confident they're making the right choice, especially when their job is on the line. Yet most B2B marketers treat emotion like a nice-to-have.

Ing thinks this is a mistake rooted in two things. First, the belief that brand requires mass-market budgets (see above). Second, the structure of B2B marketing teams, which are often tightly coupled to sales—and sales leaders are focused on making quota this quarter, not building long-term trust.

You're selling to humans at the end of the day and people want to feel confident that they're making the right choice, especially when those stakes are high. And so just like in B2C, there are emotions. Those emotions might be a little bit different, but in a B2B context, there's things like trust and confidence and knowing that I'm making the right decision.

— Jason Ing

Gusto's brand distinctiveness isn't just in their marketing—it's in the product, the customer support tone, the website animations. Consistency across every touchpoint builds trust. And trust turns users into word-of-mouth advocates who eventually become founders who choose Gusto again.

How to Get Buy-In for Unmeasurable Channels

Everyone loves paid search until the CAC curve starts bending the wrong way. That's when you need to test channels that don't have a direct ROAS—and that's when the CFO starts sweating.

Ing's playbook is simple. First, allocate your budget into three buckets: measurable, experimental, and "feels right." Keep the "feels right" bucket under 15-20% early on. This reassures finance that you're not going to blow the budget on a hunch.

Second, run small-scale experiments at the DMA or zip code level. Measure the indirect return on ad spend—how much more efficient did your bottom-of-funnel channels become when you layered in mid- or top-of-funnel awareness spend?

Ing calls this a blended CAC calculation. It's not about proving the billboard worked in isolation. It's about proving it made your paid search more efficient. If you can show that, you've built the case for scaling.

Demand Gen and Brand Are Complementary, Not Competing

The customer doesn't care if your ad is a "brand campaign" or a "demand gen campaign." They see it as one experience. So why do marketing teams treat them like warring factions?

Ing's view: you need both, but sequence matters. Start by getting the mechanics right. Nail your demand gen motion—capture high-intent prospects through paid search, optimize your funnel, prove your unit economics work. But once you hit diminishing returns on hand-raisers, you need to build intent, not just capture it.

That's where brand comes in. Brand fills the top of the funnel. It creates the awareness and trust that make your demand gen channels more efficient. The two aren't at odds—they're multipliers.

Ing also emphasized the importance of consistency. At Gusto, the playful, approachable tone isn't just in the ads—it's in the product, the support calls, the onboarding emails. That consistency across every touchpoint is what makes the brand stick. And it's what turns a payroll platform into something customers actually enjoy using.