B2B. B2C. Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question.

For years we have divided marketing into two camps: B2B and B2C. I’m increasingly convinced that distinction is becoming less useful, because whether you are selling legal services, accounting, cars, software, insurance or a pair of shoes, you are no longer really marketing to a neat category. You are marketing into a market.

And that market has changed enormously.

People now find businesses through Google, LinkedIn, recommendations, reviews, social media, AI, media coverage, Reddit, YouTube and a dozen other places. They can know a surprising amount about you before they ever speak to you, and in some cases they may never visit your website at all.

They also don’t move neatly down the marketing funnel we have all been drawing on whiteboards for the past 20 years. They jump around, disappear, come back, ask someone they trust, read something you wrote two years ago, compare you with three competitors and make a decision in a way that is far messier than the diagrams suggest.

The ways of measuring impact have changed too, even if the thinking of many marketers hasn’t. If I get another SEO agency peddling archaic methods of optimisation, I’ll scream so loudly you’ll hear me in New York. PS, that will happen, and it will most likely be today.

That is where my thinking around B2M comes from.

Business to Many.

I don’t see it as another marketing discipline or another acronym to add to the pile. It is simply a different way of looking at the problem.

Instead of asking whether we are B2B or B2C, I think the more useful questions are: what does the market know about us, what does it think about us, where is it getting that information from, and how much influence do we actually have over that?

Because SEO, content, brand, reputation, social media, PR, AI and even your own people are increasingly part of the same ecosystem. Yet most businesses still manage them as separate activities.

The website sits with one person. SEO with another. Social media somewhere else. PR goes to an agency. Sales runs its own process. And somewhere in the building, somebody has recently been told they need to “do something with AI”.

There is often plenty of activity, but much less clarity about how it all fits together and what the business is actually trying to achieve in the mind of the market.

That is the bit that interests me.

I want to work with businesses that know the old way is changing and are prepared to change with it. Businesses willing to question things that may have worked perfectly well five or ten years ago, but may not be enough for the next five or ten months.

Fall behind, and you may not catch up.

That means being prepared to experiment, challenge assumptions, pull things apart and occasionally admit that something we have been doing for years no longer makes much sense.

I don’t pretend anyone knows exactly where marketing is heading. The technology is moving too quickly for that, and anyone claiming to have the complete answer is probably about to sell you a course, another app or some new SaaS.

But the direction is becoming clearer.

AI is changing the way people search and discover businesses. Search itself is changing. Media is fragmenting. Content is becoming easier than ever to produce, which also means average content is becoming easier than ever to ignore.

At the same time, trust, expertise, reputation, relationships and genuinely useful ideas are becoming more valuable.

That is the territory I want to explore with B2M. And, funny enough, it is much the same sandpit I have been playing in for years: reputation, discovery and telling stories to the right many.

Over the next few months I’m going to write about what this new environment means for businesses, brands and marketing teams, and how we might build marketing systems better suited to the world we are actually living in rather than the one we learned about 20 years ago.

I won’t get every part of it right, and some of it will change as the technology changes. That is part of the point.

The businesses I want to work with are the ones prepared to change with it.