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For a long time, we’ve sorted content into two buckets: B2B and B2C.
B2B content has always been characterized as professional and buttoned-up, while B2C content was allowed to be emotional, expressive, and risk-taking. Over time, unspoken rules emerged about how each category was “supposed” to behave, shaping not just tone but also what brands talked about, what they showed, and how much personality they were permitted to display.
Those assumptions extended into format, too. B2B defaulted to whitepapers, ebooks, and gated assets, while B2C experimented with episodic video, storytelling, and brand activations.
The problem is that this divide was never really about people. It was about context.
It reflected how media was distributed, how buying decisions were made, and the distance between companies and their audiences. B2B content lived behind gated assets and sales funnels. B2C content lived in mass media and public culture. The human on the other side didn’t fundamentally change; the infrastructure around them did.
And now, that infrastructure has collapsed.
Today, the same person can be a consumer, a creator, a buyer, a recommender, and a decision-maker. They consume content across the same platforms, with the same habits, expectations, and emotional filters, regardless of whether they’re shopping for skincare or evaluating software.
This has given way to a new content model: B2H, or business-to-human.
A decision-making shift
B2H doesn’t mean a casual tone or forced relatability. It doesn’t mean memes, jokes, or personality for the sake of personality. It means recognizing that all buying decisions are trust decisions.
And trust is built the same way everywhere, through clarity, relevance, and feeling understood.
A B2H content approach doesn’t change how content looks or sounds; rather, it changes what content is responsible for and how editorial decisions are made. And companies can respond by making intentional editorial choices about what their audience needs help making sense of right now.
Today’s audiences don’t just want to be talked to. They want to be acknowledged. They want to see their questions reflected back to them, their feedback incorporated, and their realities understood. Comments, replies, inbound questions, and community conversations aren’t reactions to content. They’re editorial inputs, signals that show where understanding is breaking down, what language isn’t landing, and what deserves deeper exploration next.
As a result, content is moving away from one-way broadcasting and toward creating dialogue.
The backbone of consumer-brand relationships
Content used to function primarily as a delivery mechanism. A way to push information, explain value, or support a funnel. Now it operates more like relationship infrastructure, where people decide whether a company gets them, whether it listens, and whether it’s worth engaging with beyond a transaction.
The companies resonating most today aren’t obsessing over whether they align with their category or industry; they’re focused on whether their content helps someone feel clearer, more confident, or less alone in the problem they’re trying to solve.
That’s the real job of content now. To close the trust gap between organizations and people. Not through scale or volume, but through resonance.
This is why brands are starting to optimize less for output and more for coherence. Instead of asking how often they should post, they’re asking whether their ideas connect over time. Whether someone encountering their content out of order would still understand what they stand for. Whether each piece reinforces a clear point of view rather than competing for attention in isolation.
That’s what makes content feel human. Not because it’s casual, but because it’s considerate.
Building trust and relationships at scale
Audiences don’t need more information. They need help making sense of what they’re already overwhelmed by. They want to feel oriented, not persuaded. Seen, not sold to. That applies whether they’re buying a consumer product or evaluating a complex platform.
B2H isn’t a trend or a messaging tweak. It’s a recognition that media, content, and communication are no longer just marketing tools. They’re how relationships are formed and maintained at scale.
The question for brands isn’t which category they belong to—it’s whether their content treats the audience like a segment, or like a person.
The future belongs to the companies that understand the difference.