Happy New! New! New! Year

Ah, the irresistible lure of the new. Here comes 2026 like an unopened present, promising unanticipated treasures. 2025? That’s passé, discarded along with the empty Baileys bottles and scratchy Christmas jumpers.

What a difference a day makes, and the difference is ‘New’.

You don’t need to be an evolutionary biologist to know we’re all programmed to find new things alluring. Marketers have played on that predisposition for ever: it’s why so many consumer products are ‘New and improved!’.

In B2B marketing, where we can’t always point to new and improved versions of our industrial extruders or robotic process automation services, how can we introduce novelty into our communications?

New package

Let’s say your product offering has grown through a combination of acquiring other firms and developing your own products. It’s now a little straggly. Could you find creative ways to bundle up what you sell?

Maybe you could create packages that target different stages of a company’s maturity. Or if you’re selling HR services, perhaps bundles could be promoted for different employee milestones, from onboarding to retirement?

Your buyer might never actually buy from you in this way, but promoting interesting-sounding packages gives them a new reason to look at your offerings rather than your competitor’s.

New presentation

When I was head of marketing at a B2B agency, we exhibited at the B2B Ignite conference. We dressed our stand in hessian like a Victorian fairground stall. A hired actor posed as ‘Dr Mark Etting’, peddling tins of Magic Quack Lozenges (MQLs), which claimed to cure clogged funnels and puny pipelines. Set against the homogeny of competitors’ shiny modern stands, we had an advantage in the quest to waylay that notoriously reluctant conversationalist, the conference delegate.

If you’re a copywriter, you might not be involved in defining what an exhibition stand looks like. Instead, you can dream up other ways to bring a new style to an existing medium. Could your case studies be written like ‘Choose your own adventure’ books, where the wrong answer highlights the dangers of not selecting the right vendor? Maybe you could bring some interaction and (shock horror) fun into a creds deck, by presenting company stats as multiple choice answers.

New positioning

This is a simple one and something that as writers we can all do. Before you write your next blog, web page or LinkedIn post, pause. Ask yourself what the piece would look like if you flipped it. The answers might lead you to an interesting loss aversion angle. Or a better way of dramatising the problem before you introduce the solution.

Let’s say that the USP of the payments platform you’re marketing is that it works even in the most remote locations. Without it, then, how would a merchant launch their new Everest basecamp hot water bottle kiosk, or their Kalahari Desert ostrich-grooming station?

An obvious example of flipping the picture is looking at things from the customer point of view. So many B2B websites list out the services they offer. What would yours look like if you listed the customer challenges you’re solving instead?

Listen, these might all sound like terrible ideas for you and your organisation. The point is to think about different ways to add a feeling of newness, that fit your industry.

To perhaps state the - pardon my language - bleeding obvious, new things aren’t always a good idea in marketing.

Surprising your target audience with an ‘Oh! I hadn’t thought of it like that’ - yes. Launching new campaigns before the old ones have had chance to deliver results, or chasing after new tech at the expense of proven strategies - no.

On which note, I’ll finish with a - new! - video.

I’m Heather Barnett, a freelance B2B copywriter, creator of silly videos about marketing, and occasional comedy performer. This is my regular(ish) newsletter with tips on creating better B2B content.

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