B2C Truths B2B Needs to Know: A Retrospective from The Gathering 2025

01
Your customers aren’t Googling you anymore, they’re prompting you

Remember when SEO (search engine optimization) was your golden goose? When owning the top SERP (search engine results page) on Google meant you could basically print website traffic?

That era is now officially over.

As Erik Huberman, Founder and CEO of full-service digital marketing agency Hawke Media put it in his masterclass entitled ‘From SEO to GEO: Winning the Frontiers of Brand Discovery’, “ChatGPT is the new front page of the Internet.”

Your homepage is quickly becoming irrelevant. Potential buyers aren’t entering a search query into a search engine and scrolling through a list of blue links deciding which one to click. They’re reading a summary their favourite LLM stitched together in seconds after skimming through thousands of public articles and resources, that may or may not include your business.

This means that AI is interpreting and summarizing your positioning, not indexing it. We’ve hit an inflection point where ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity have become decision-making platforms. They’re not just influencing search, they’re supplanting it.

Discovery has basically changed overnight and the brands or B2B businesses that do not understand how LLMs parse and recapitulate information will quickly become invisible.

“If your brand isn’t showing up in AI-generated answers, your future customers won’t even know you exist.”

So what’s the lesson here? Context is the new keyword. What high quality backlinks and relevant keywords did to improve discoverability of blog posts in SERPs is what semantic clarity and content structure will do to increase visibility of Q&A-rich, schema-marked, citation-ready content in answers on LLMs. Your new goal isn’t to be at the top of Google, it’s to be cited in ChatGPT. Google helped people find you. Now ChatGPT decides where you’re even worth mentioning.

02
You don’t own your audience anymore, you’re simply borrowing their attention

In a world dominated by algorithms, most businesses no longer own their customer’s attention. They rent it temporarily through digital platforms, creators, or paid advertising.

Oddly enough, one of the most insightful lines from this year’s festival came from the most unlikely of sources: Dude Perfect in their keynote on ‘Creating the Future of Family Entertainment’.

“Influencers rent attention.”

For those of you who don’t know Dude Perfect is, they’re a sports entertainment group that rose to fame with jaw-dropping trick shot videos. Known for viral sports entertainment challenges, Dude Perfect has become one of the most recognizable creator collectives of the modern media era amassing over 60 million subscribers on YouTube.

But their insight about renting attention isn’t just exclusive to influencers and content creators. The same can be said for brands and businesses alike.

The truth is we all pay for eyeballs, whether it be jockeying for screen time on social feeds, occupying temporary space in inboxes, or living momentarily on the back of a conference lanyard. It’s all fleeting yet we act like we’re all building community, when really, we’re just borrowing it. And at the same time, your audience isn’t sitting around waiting to hear from you again. Because, again, they don’t belong to you.

So what’s the lesson here? In our world, attention is the most precious commodity that exists today. From influencers and content creators to midsized businesses and global enterprises, we all trade attention.

In a panel entitled ‘Day Trading Attention’ moderated by Avery Akkineni, Chief Marketing Officer at VaynerX, that featured Jessica Williams, Head of Brand & Partnerships at Shopify, Adam Burchill, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE), and Leisha Bereson, Director of Media at Tubi, the conversation centered around this idea of ‘why should somebody care about your brand?’

The real challenge isn’t just capturing attention, it’s giving people a reason to care once you have it. You have to listen, lean in, and most importantly, stop trying to manufacture ‘community’. Instead, show up in communities that already exist. Acknowledge them. Respect them. Add value.

Attention isn’t owned. It’s earned. Figuring out how you earn it is how you build your brand in 2025 and beyond.

03
Your next big opportunity will start small

The final nugget of wisdom I will share came from the closing keynote delivered by Chris Kneeland, Principal at Cult Collective, and it perfectly summarizes an idea that B2B businesses often struggle with.

“The next big thing is small.”

We’re all guilty of being addicted to scale, especially marketers. We chase massive activations, enterprise-wide rollouts, robust loyalty programs, and lavish go-to-market launch campaigns.

But branding isn’t how you build loyalty. Touch points are.

It’s cultivated in the small moments. It’s built during meaningful human connection.

A line of copy that makes somebody feel seen. A scrappy fix that earns internal praise in a Microsoft Teams chat. A personalized newsletter that feels more like a wink than a sales pitch. A simple app feature that solves one minor issue randomly mentioned as a throwaway comment during a daily standup meeting.

These aren’t headline, marquee moments. They’re human ones.

And in many ways, the small stuff is all that has ever really mattered. We’ve just buried it under KPIs, performance metrics, and data dashboards.

So what’s the lesson here? Stop chasing the next big idea and start to recognize that big things rarely start big. They start niche, weird, and, often times, risky. But the power of a small, memorable action is that it almost always outweighs a big, forgettable one. Small isn’t the opposite of big, it’s just the beginning of bold.

What I Gathered at The Gathering

“Conferences teach. Summits inform. Festivals transform.”

That line from Ryan Gill, Co-Founder of The Gathering, actually helped kick off this year’s festival. And by festival close, I couldn’t think of anything more true.

I showed up at this year’s Gathering with an expectation that I would take a few notes on some clever branding campaigns, leave with a checklist or two, and maybe even reverse-engineer tactics from a proven B2C playbook to try to apply in a way that would resonate in the more pragmatic world of B2B. Instead, I walked away with something very different.

No new tactics. No best practices. But a new filter. A new lens. A new perspective. A new curiosity.

I realized the question I need to be asking myself, with every new product launch, every new campaign, every new line of copy, every new brief, and every touch point is this: “why should anyone care?”

And that’s the shift. That’s the transformation. And it’s painfully simple. But maybe that’s what truly iconic, cult-like branding is actually built on. Not perfection. Not polish. But on purpose and on intention.

If I have to leave you with anything, it’s this. Disruption isn’t coming. It’s already here. And it was likely written by AI. You want the TLDR version of this blog post? Just ask ChatGPT. It’ll probably write it better than me anyways. But at least mine came from somewhere real.