🪑 The empty slot in your messaging

During my Tuesday workout, I was listening to a podcast with advertising icon and honorary-favorite-uncle-of-all-marketers Rory Sutherland. He spent a few minutes on a story about British Airways.

They used to run a transatlantic route from London City Airport, ten minutes from Canary Wharf. Tiny, slick, it beats Heathrow on almost every measure. Still, they could never make it profitable.

Sutherland’s take: CEOs don’t book their own flights. Their PAs do. And, like most B2B buyers, they aren’t rational.

A PA who books the boss on the standard Heathrow-to-JFK route has made a non-decision. If anything goes wrong, British Airways gets the blame. A PA who books the clever London City route has made herself visible. If anything goes wrong, she gets the phone call.

So the better airport stays mostly empty.

That story clicked because I’ve been circling the same reason-vs-emotion dynamic in client messaging work.

B2B buying is more emotional than we pretend

We like to talk about B2B decisions as rational. Requirements, shortlists, scorecards, procurement sign-off.

In practice, there are plenty of emotions in the room.

Stress about owning the problem. Indignation at the state of the work today. Pride in finally looking competent in front of the board. And fear. The loudest of them all.

Loss aversion is why fear runs loudest. A good B2B decision earns a nod and maybe a small bonus. A bad one can end a career. So buyers default to the blame-free option, even when something demonstrably better is sitting right there.

“Nobody gets fired for buying IBM” and all that.

And in 2026, with procurement scrutinizing every SaaS line item like it personally offended them, that fear is louder than it’s been in years. Every discovery call now sits on top of a buyer doing quiet math about what happens if this one doesn’t work. Blame-avoidance is in the middle of every shortlist conversation.

Highlight the emotions behind the job

A couple of years back, I worked on product messaging for a platform built for corporate event managers — the people who plan travel and accommodation for attendees at large corporate events.

The easy direction was efficiency. Plan events 50% faster. Cut your logistics workload in half. Same line every competitor was running.

In customer interviews, two things kept surfacing that had nothing to do with efficiency and logic. Stress, because when a VP’s flight gets canceled, the event manager is the one reacting at 2am. And quiet indignation: every other corporate function had proper software, while these people wrestled with Excel and email for work that mattered enormously.

The line that went on the homepage tapped into that emotion: We were promised flying cars. Event managers are still stuck with Excel and email. There has to be a better way.

It outpulled every efficiency variant we tested. It named an emotion nobody else in their market was naming.

The gap in most messaging work

The event managers example isn’t unusual. It’s the pattern I see across client work.

Most B2B copy is good at naming the functional pain. Event planning takes too long. Customer data lives in five systems. The old tool can’t handle the volume.

What it rarely names is what’s actually sitting in the buyer’s chest. Fear of being blamed when the plan falls apart. Stress of being the person everyone calls at midnight. Indignation at still doing high-stakes work in a spreadsheet that crashed twice yesterday.

Functional pain describes the process. Emotional pain describes the person doing it. I’ll admit, I catch myself writing first drafts entirely in functional-pain mode more often than I’d like.

How the framework I use handles this

This is why, in the messaging framework I use with clients, every pillar has both a Gain statement and a Loss statement. Emotions run in both directions, so the framework has slots for both. Fear, stress, indignation on the loss side. Pride, confidence, relief on the gain side.

Here’s the audit I’d recommend this week. Pull up your own messaging pillars. Read each Loss statement. Does it name an emotion your buyer would recognize? Fear of being the one who got the software decision wrong. Embarrassment of being the only team in the org still doing this manually. Or is it just a description of a broken workflow?

Same test on the Gain side. Pride, confidence, relief. Not just “faster.”

If you want to use the template I built, I’ll link it below.

***

None of this is new. Rory Sutherland is restating something the best marketers have always known. What this week’s listen did was put a fine point on how much of what we call addressing customer pain is really just describing a workflow. The framework has a slot waiting for the emotion. Most of us leave it half-filled.

Emotions matter,

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

​The Social Channels Driving 1.43 Million Referrals to Beehiiv​ | If you’re building a newsletter or SaaS with any referral mechanic, learn from the best. Foundation’s breakdown shows how Beehiiv drives 1.43M monthly social referrals, mostly from YouTube, X, and LinkedIn.

​​Taste for Makers​ | I know, “taste” is the buzzword of the moment. But Paul Graham is still one of the sharpest thinkers we’ve got, and his take is worth your time. Taste is a learnable skill, and cultivating an intolerance for ugly work is how excellence compounds.

​Costly Signaling and Unreasonable Hospitality​ | Unreasonable Hospitality is one of my favorite “business” books. Alex Birkett applies Will Guidara’s thinking to marketing in an AI-flooded world: the things hard to fake at scale are the ones that actually signal you care. Original research, in-person experiences, visible craft.

👀 Two for fun

​​This inside look into astronaut families​ | If you’re the type of person who sweats your spouse’s commute every day, you can listen to this to imagine what it’d be like if they went to outer space.

​This huge gallery of Artemis II photos​ | Continuing my space kick this week, here’s the full collection of photos from the recent mission.

🐈 Weekly cat

​Keep that tail ​in check​.