Business Storytelling vs Entertainment Storytelling: What B2B Gets Wrong
By Karan Kashyap · Founder, Stay Noisey
The most consumed marketing advice today is built for brands selling to consumers, and B2B businesses and leaders are absorbing it without noticing the switch. We are all consumers before we are operators. We scroll the same feeds, watch the same ads, and feel the same emotional pulls. So when the advice says be authentic, be vulnerable, and build a personal brand, it sounds correct because it's the logic behind almost everything we buy as individuals.
The argument of this article is simple. That logic belongs to a different discipline, aimed at a different audience, and when a B2B brand applies it to an enterprise buyer it does the opposite of what was intended. Whether you're a CMO shaping how your business shows up, or a CEO whose own standing is on the line, the kind of storytelling you choose decides whether the right people take you seriously.
Entertainment Storytelling vs Business Storytelling
Entertainment storytelling manufactures emotion to capture and hold attention across the widest possible audience. Its success is measured in views, watch time and shares, and it has one goal, to make a broad crowd feel something.
Business storytelling does a different job. It exists to demonstrate that a business understands its market, sees clearly what is broken in it, and has a credible view of where it's going, so that a serious buyer trusts the product will still be the right choice in the future. Its success is measured in whether the people who buy come to trust the judgment behind the business.
That understanding is most powerful when the leader carries it, because the leader embodies the judgment behind the business, and buyers trust a company more when its leader is visible. It doesn't stop there. Once the leader sets the signal, the rest of the business can carry it into their own conversations, whether that's the sales team, marketing or the people delivering the work, all telling the same story underneath.
Why B2B reaches for the wrong storytelling playbook
The pull towards the wrong discipline is easy to understand. Whether you're a CEO or CMO, outside of work we are all consumers, and almost all the content we consume is built to move us emotionally towards a purchase. That's the content we see every day, so it becomes the model in our head for what good content looks like.
Much of the advice pushing you in that direction comes from agencies whose expertise is genuinely B2C, and for their clients and their market, that advice is right. Emotional, personality-led storytelling is exactly how a consumer brand wins. Surreal became the fastest-growing cereal brand in the UK on the strength of voice and wit alone, with none of the budget the established players spend. Oatly reframed an entire category with a sarcastic tone and a deliberately awkward advert fronted by its own chief executive. Both are masterful, and both work, precisely because they are selling to consumers.
The mistake is assuming the same moves transfer to B2B businesses, because they don't. An enterprise buyer evaluating a six-figure decision is not in the emotional, impulsive frame a consumer is in when they pick a cereal. Aimed at that buyer, the consumer playbook achieves nothing, and sometimes worse than nothing.
The cost: the wrong audience, and your reputation
Entertainment storytelling optimises for attention and forgets who the buyer actually is. A B2B post engineered to go viral pulls in an audience that will never buy: other consultants, students, people performing engagement in the comments. The platform reads that crowd as the audience and serves your content to more of the same, people who have no intention of buying your product. You may get a million views but zero conversion, whereas a thousand views from the right buyers can actually generate revenue.
The deeper cost to the wrong storytelling is reputational, and it's the one that travels further than you might think. When an investor, enterprise buyer or senior hire sees a B2B leader manufacturing emotion for attention, it raises a quiet question about judgment. Is this person serious about the product? Do they understand their market, or are they chasing whatever is trending this week? In a consumer context that behaviour can convert into sales, but in a B2B context it can quietly lower the leader in the eyes of the exact people whose trust they most need. The biggest risk to a leader here is that if it damages the business, the damage stays with the business, but if it damages the leader, it follows them into every room they enter afterwards.
Consider what happened when Shield, a long-standing LinkedIn analytics tool, announced it was shutting down. A rival company saw an opening and posted an image of a graveyard with Shield's logo on a headstone. It was entirely manufactured to go viral, and it did. But the reaction was not the one they wanted. The people filling the comments were their own customers, and a number of them said publicly that they were cancelling. A viral, topical, entertainment-led tactic was aimed at an audience that included the company's own B2B buyers, and those buyers didn't read it as clever or entertaining, they read it as a signal about the kind of company they were dealing with.
What this means for you
For a CMO or a CEO, the question worth asking is whose attention you're earning, and what that audience needs to see in order to trust you. For a B2B audience, trust rarely comes from authenticity for its own sake. It comes from demonstrated judgment about the market you operate in, carried by the leader and structured through the business so that everyone tells a consistent story. What matters is choosing the right discipline, and B2B has its own.
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Blackwood Row is a production company and consultancy specialising in business storytelling for organisations and their leaders, delivered through published video and written assets, storytelling consultancy, and workshops.
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