Nobody wears the sneakers for the founder

By Kurt Schröder

I never wear a pair of Nike sneakers because I lie awake at night worrying about Nike. Nobody wakes up in the morning, laces up, and wonders how the founder is doing. Whether he has bought a new house. Whether me wearing these sneakers today might nudge the share price and cheer everyone up at head office.

That is not how people use brands.

People use brands that help them. Sometimes the help is practical. Very often, if we are honest, it comes down to ego. The brands we wear, the gadgets we carry, the labels we let people see: we choose them because we want people to perceive something about us. To believe something about us. The brand becomes an extension of our own identity. I wear my Nikes because I want people to see me wearing my Nikes and think that I am cool. That is the whole transaction, and it is a perfectly good one.

The polite fiction in B2B is that none of this applies. That once there is a procurement process and a scoring matrix, buyers turn into rational machines and identity leaves the building.

It does not. The mechanism just changes clothes.

The suppliers we use, the brands we endorse, the businesses we choose to deal with are an extension of our own ego, our own beliefs, our own approach to business. When an executive puts a supplier forward, they are attaching their judgement to that supplier in front of the people who assess their judgement for a living. A CFO endorsing a payments partner in a board meeting is spending career capital. The choice says something about them before it says anything about the vendor.

Which means the halo effect runs both ways. Choose a supplier the room respects, and some of that respect lands on you. Champion one that stumbles, and the stumble is partly yours. In high-trust, regulated sectors, where the cost of a bad call is measured in more than money, this gets stronger, not weaker. The safe choice is the one that looks like it belongs in the room.

So in B2B, the sneakers question becomes a career question. Your buyer is asking, mostly without saying it out loud: what does choosing this company say about me? Will I be proud to have my name on this decision in eighteen months? Is this a brand I would defend in a meeting where things are going badly?

That reframes the job of B2B brand entirely. The task is not self-expression, and it is not looking impressive in the abstract. The task is being the choice your buyer wants to be seen making. Giving them a brand they can wear in front of their board the way I wear the sneakers: confident that it says the right thing about them.

Most B2B businesses build their brand facing the mirror. What we do, how we do it, why we are proud of it. The buyer is standing somewhere else entirely, asking what associating with you does for their standing, their credibility, their own story inside their organisation.

So turn the question around and sit with it. When your best customer defends you in a meeting you will never attend, what are they saying about themselves? If choosing you makes them look sharper, safer and more forward-thinking, you have a brand doing its real job. If choosing you requires courage, you are asking them to spend career capital you have not earned yet.

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