Fast forward to today and an increasing number of purchase decisions are not just taking place online, but are mediated by AI. The connection between seller and buyer is being pushed further into abstraction.

47% of B2B buyers already use AI for market research and discovery, with 38% using it to evaluate and shortlist vendors. This is only going to grow: 71% of buyers say they plan to ramp up AI usage in the research and discovery phase.

And what comes back isn’t shaped by the brands with the biggest ad budgets. AI recommends brands by drawing on what’s said about them in sources such as reviews, analyst reports and forums. On the face of it, the top-of-funnel advertising campaigns brand marketers have been crafting for decades to gain share of mind and influence buyer choice don’t get a look in by the LLMs.

This all leads to the question: how important are the traditional measures and objective of brand awareness now?

Brand is what you do, not what you say

The new imperative for brands is to put more emphasis on reputation: the quality and consistency of what’s said about you. This should support a specific, credible point of view that’s relevant to what the audience is searching for, because AI queries are far more detailed about the problem they’re trying to solve than a traditional Google search would be.

This elevates the importance of brand as experience to a new level. The sources AI draws from – the ratings, reviews, reports and comments – are a direct representation of how well you’ve actually served your customers.

For brands to compete, differentiation must be based on experience and outcomes, not just talk. More than ever, brands are shaped by what businesses do, not just what they say. Marketing teams need to prepare for this.

Brand communications will need to portray the quality of experience clearly and credibly, in a way that aligns with audience intent. The ultimate goal is to influence what parameters they actually build their query from, establishing the default for what is searched for in your category.

Emotional awareness still matters

But while AI prioritises these more granular reputation markers, the role of brand awareness – rooted in emotional storytelling – is not dead.

While AI narrows the field, it is still humans who – for now – make the final call. Just 14% of B2B buyers currently use AI for decision-making.

This is true especially in the B2B world, where purchases can be worth millions, decisions need to be championed internally, buying groups need to be aligned – and the person who recommended the wrong vendor has to live with that choice. Brand awareness still functions as a shortcut to trust. A known brand feels safer. More credible. Easier to advocate for.

The most effective way to build this awareness has always been through storytelling that taps into emotion. In fact, inspiring emotion in B2B ads is seven times more effective than serving up rational benefits alone.

Emotion is elicited by evoking an experience – what a brand makes you feel, and how. And when this feeling is embedded throughout a brand and made real through the outcomes it enables for customers, this in turn feeds back into the sources that AI models draw from. It builds reputation.

The virtuous cycle

B2B brands should place more emphasis on legible reputation: what are we known for and where is that recorded? But they should continue to prioritise awareness driven by deep emotional resonance: how do we show our audience that we understand them, in their specific buying context? The two feed into each other.

Reputation helps earn the right to be on the shortlist (mediated by AI), while resonance earns the right to be chosen (by humans). And both are achieved through the same thing: creating an experience that makes audiences feel heard.

Practically, the ethos of a brand needs to be instilled deeper – beyond broad awareness campaigns. It needs to be reflected in events, community-building, sales calls and digital interactions – baked into the fabric of every touchpoint that you have with your audience.

It’s not enough just to build reach and recognition and hope that does the job of influencing buyers. It’s the substance behind it that will determine whether a brand succeeds or fails in an AI-mediated world.

Maybe we’re closer to the old days of never buying something without tangible proof of the experience than we thought.