Picture two scenarios. It's Friday afternoon and someone's thinking about grabbing coffee before a long commute home. They don't Google "best coffee near me." They just think and a brand appears. Maybe it's Starbucks. Maybe it's a local spot they love. Whichever one comes to mind first has a significant advantage in winning that purchase. Now picture a VP of Finance who's been tasked with finding a new treasury solution. She doesn't start by searching LinkedIn. She starts by

Most purchases don't start with an ad or Google search. They start with a memory. I spent nearly a decade at J.P. Morgan — Doing everything from building multimillion-dollar, global campaigns and managing sales enablement functions across some of the most complex B2B categories out there. And one thing I saw over and over again: Teams pouring budget into performance marketing while the brand quietly faded from buyers' minds. The research backs this up. Professor Jenni Roman