Skip to content
Vendor reportMcKinsey, 28 May 2026

Personalization in B2B marketing is now standard practice, but leaders stand out in the level and precision of their personalization

Positioning & messaging

Reader Note:
Over 90% say they personalize marketing in some form, while only about a third call any single channel very personalized, so the gap between doing it and doing it deeply is where the report places the advantage. That claim rests on comparing self-identified leaders against self-identified laggards: the depth of personalization and the sense of being a leader are both self-rated, so which one produces the other is not established here.
Evidence:
Self-reported behaviour
Vendor interest:
High — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:
Survey of nearly 4,000 decision-makers across 13 countries and multiple industries; further sampling details not disclosed in the provided text.

Good for

A rough sense of size and direction, and deciding what to look at first.

Not for

  • Exact numbers, or saying that one thing caused another.
  • This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
  • The source never says how this number was measured.
  • The two groups were not split at random — they picked their own side. The difference may have been there before anything was measured.
  • The source talks about this as cause and effect — that is its reading, not a finding.
  • The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

Go deeper on this topic

Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers

Coming soon

This feature isn’t available yet.