“Brand is very, very important to get you in the room.” – Victoria Albert
What if your next customer has already decided who they want to work with, and your marketing team doesn’t even know they’re looking?
That’s the question I couldn’t stop thinking about after my conversation with Victoria Albert, CMO of Infuse and one of the B2B CMO Project’s Top 100 B2B CMOs of 2026.
Victoria Albert
I especially enjoyed this conversation because Victoria shares my fascination with research that challenges conventional marketing wisdom. She doesn’t simply study how buying behavior is changing. She asks whether the way we operate as marketers still makes sense.
Her findings should get every CEO and CMO thinking differently about where growth actually begins.
The buyer has moved upstream. The question is whether marketing has followed.
The Most Important Buying Day Might Be Day 0
Victoria introduced a framework developed by Infuse CEO Alexander Kessler that distinguishes between Day 0 and Day 1.
Day 0 is when buyers begin exploring possibilities, gathering opinions, researching solutions, and forming preferences before a formal buying initiative exists.
Day 1 is when budgets, buying committees, and active evaluations begin taking shape.
Here’s the problem.
According to Infuse’s research, 95% of winning vendors are already on the buyer’s Day 1 shortlist.
That means marketing teams waiting for intent signals may be entering the conversation after the most consequential decisions have already been influenced.
This reminded me of something GTM leader Allyson Havener shared on StrategyCast Episode 558:
“We are in a complete transition in terms of buyers’ expectations. They’re more independent; they want to self-serve all the information about your product. They want to talk to their peers… It’s so easy to do your homework now before you ever even talk to a vendor.”
Allyson Havener
Exactly.
Buyers aren’t waiting for permission to learn. They’re doing their homework independently.
And if your brand hasn’t earned a place in that early research, even the most sophisticated demand generation campaign may struggle to change their minds.
Brand Gets You Considered. Proof Gets You Chosen.
For years, I’ve believed that too many marketers underestimate the strategic importance of brand.
Victoria’s research reinforces why that matters.
Infuse found that 87% of buyers consider brand important or very important when shortlisting vendors.
But awareness alone doesn’t close business. Buyers want relevant case studies, credible reviews, evidence of successful implementation, and confidence that a vendor understands their specific challenges.
At Avocet, we talk about building credibility, confidence, trust, and ultimately belief. Those aren’t simply marketing aspirations. They’re the progression buyers need to experience before they’re comfortable making a commitment.
Recent research from Boston Consulting Group reinforces this principle. Although focused on consumers, its findings offer a broader lesson: trust must be earned through transparency, product quality, and evidence that people and AI systems can independently verify.
AI may help you make the shortlist. Evidence helps you stay there.
AI Is Making Everyone Faster and Far Too Similar
Victoria shared a revealing personal experience.
While searching for an SAT tutor for her son, she discovered a website that looked almost identical to a B2B website she’d visited recently, with the same layout, same structure, and nearly identical presentation.
Different businesses, but practically interchangeable digital experiences.
That is what happens when everyone uses similar tools to create similar content.
Victoria put the leadership challenge beautifully: “Did anything change on the buyer’s pane of the glass?”
It’s a question worth asking at every quarterly marketing review.Are we actually influencing perceptions, building preference, and creating meaningful differentiation? Or are we simply producing more?
Because efficiency without distinction doesn’t create competitive advantage. It creates a faster route to invisibility.
The Confidence Paradox: AI Finds Answers, Humans Build Belief
One of Victoria’s most interesting research findings involves where enterprise technology buyers turn for information.
Independent subject matter experts and internal colleagues lead the list. Vendor information follows, while salespeople and AI tools were tied in preliminary research for Infuse’s upcoming 2027 outlook, and that tells us something important.
Buyers may increasingly rely on AI to discover options, but relationships, reputation, and independent validation remain essential. And with buying groups averaging approximately nine stakeholders, marketers must help champions build confidence across an entire organization.
But that requires more than convincing one person. It requires making the evidence easy to find, understand, share, and defend.
Stop Measuring Activity. Start Measuring Influence.
Victoria offered a practical challenge for marketing leaders planning for 2027.
Start examining how AI represents your brand.
Ask non-branded questions about your category. Identify which competitors appear. Repeat those searches across AI platforms and then examine whether your website actually answers the questions buyers are asking.
Can AI find and cite your expertise? Can buyers independently validate your claims? Does your content provide original insights or simply repeat what everyone else is saying?
This isn’t about abandoning traditional SEO or demand generation; it’s about recognizing that discoverability, differentiation, and credibility must work together long before a buyer submits a form. And perhaps most importantly, marketing needs to measure whether those efforts are changing buyer preference, not merely generating activity.
Questions to Ask Yourself
- Are we influencing buyers before they formally enter the market?
- Would our brand appear on an AI-generated shortlist for our category?
- What independent evidence makes our claims believable?
- Are we creating meaningful differentiation or accelerating sameness?
- Are our marketing metrics measuring activity or actual buyer influence?
Victoria’s perspective left me thinking about one of her simplest observations:
“Humans serving humans is such an important part of our POV at Infuse.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Technology will continue changing how buyers discover brands, but it doesn’t eliminate the human need for confidence, credibility, and trust.
The brands that win won’t simply be the easiest to find. They’ll be the ones buyers already have reason to believe in. If you’d like to explore these ideas further, I encourage you to listen to my conversation with Victoria Albert on StrategyCast Episode 612, where we discuss Day 0 buying behavior, AI discoverability, brand differentiation, and why the next generation of marketing growth will be won long before the sales conversation begins.
