I must admit to being slow to the party with this marketing acronym: H2H Marketing, or Human to Human Marketing.
H2H Marketing is a representation that behind every business, consumer, non-profit, or government body, there is a living, breathing human being making decisions about your company.
Excuse me. But isn’t all marketing communication tailored to the aspirations and buying habits of people? Or have I missed something?
A building doesn’t decide which fire and security system should be installed. A dog doesn’t decide on pet food. A carpet doesn’t decide on the best vacuum cleaner.
People make these decisions. Of course they do.
My initial bewilderment was entirely genuine. And I suspect I’m not alone in having felt it.
How the term came into existence #
It turns out I wasn’t slow to the party at all. The party itself was relatively recent.
Bryan Kramer, an American businessman, TED speaker, and CEO of the social media agency PureMatter, coined the term and philosophy behind H2H Marketing in his 2014 book There Is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human #H2H. Kramer’s central insight is deceptively simple: businesses do not have emotions. Products do not have emotions. Humans do.
The concept was further developed and formalised by Professor Philip Kotler; one of the world’s leading authorities in marketing and the author of textbooks that have shaped marketing thinking in more than 150 countries, alongside professors Waldemar Pfoertsch and Uwe Sponholz, in their 2021 book H2H Marketing: The Genesis of Human-to-Human Marketing. Kotler’s framework integrates design thinking, service-dominant logic, and the thoughtful use of digitalisation to create value for all relevant stakeholders.
When the person who wrote the textbooks your marketing department studied endorses a concept as foundational, it is worth understanding why.
Why a concept this obvious needed naming #
The bewilderment, on reflection, points at something important. The fact that H2H Marketing needed to be formally named and theorised by serious thought leaders in 2014 and again in 2021 is itself a signal.
It wasn’t that marketers had never known that humans make decisions. It was that the proliferation of automation, algorithmic optimisation, and data-driven marketing had gradually shifted the emphasis away from the person at the end of the funnel and toward the funnel itself.
The H2H concept is rooted in neuroscience and consumer psychology, which show that purchase decisions are strongly influenced by emotions and personal connections; notably activated in the limbic system of the brain. Yet the marketing tools and frameworks that dominated the first two decades of the digital era were designed to optimise for behaviour rather than to understand the human behind it.
The result was marketing that knew what people did but not why. That could predict click-through rates but not frustration. That could segment by demographic but not by what mattered to the person in that segment on a given Tuesday morning.
H2H Marketing wasn’t a new idea. It was a correction.
What the data can’t tell us #
When we have access to data, the data in its most raw form doesn’t give us all the answers. We have to get under its skin by adding value to it.
It’s unlikely we will know what is going on beneath the surface just by looking at a company’s name, telephone number, principal contact, and address. It’s unlikely we will know when a company’s insurance contracts come up for renewal. It’s rare that we’ll know whether an organisation is happy with its online presence. It will be impossible to guess whether a business is satisfied with its entire supplier line-up.
Data shows us the map. But maps aren’t territory. A company name on a spreadsheet is not a decision-maker with a problem to solve and a budget to allocate and a risk to manage and a Tuesday morning that isn’t going as planned.
The most effective way to find these things out and to make our data genuinely more valuable, is to make direct contact and ask some questions.
We might be fortunate and receive responses via email or a survey form. In the long term, though, it will be better to create much more of our own luck, have more conversations, and speak human to human.
The reluctant marketer’s natural advantage #
There is a pleasing irony in the H2H framework for anyone who identifies as a reluctant marketer, someone who has always preferred building genuine relationships over optimising funnels, who was instinctively uncomfortable with automation replacing conversation, who felt that something important was being lost when marketing became primarily algorithmic.
That discomfort was not misplaced. It was the right instinct.
The reluctant marketer was doing H2H Marketing before it had a name. Preferring conversation over broadcast. Prioritising understanding over targeting. Treating prospects as people rather than data points. Being genuinely curious about what is going on in someone’s world rather than assuming the CRM record tells the full story.
In a market now saturated with impersonal automation, that approach is not a disadvantage. It is a competitive advantage that compounds quietly over time.
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” — George Bernard Shaw
Shaw wrote that observation decades before email, social media, or marketing automation existed. He was describing the same problem that Bryan Kramer named in 2014 and Philip Kotler formalised in 2021. The medium changes. The human on the receiving end does not.
My moment of bewilderment, in the end, resolved into something rather clearer: H2H Marketing isn’t a new concept at all. It’s a reminder of something that was always true, written down because enough people had quietly forgotten it.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
