Why the rules changed, and why they changed so fast

What Hiscox tapped into, whether they framed it this way or not, is the idea that every business decision is made by a human being, with the same instincts, anxieties and need for connection they carry everywhere else in their lives.

B2B and B2C were always convenient labels. The person signing off on an agency appointment and the person choosing a holiday are operating from the same emotional wiring. This is what people mean by H2H — human to human — and it is less a marketing trend than a long overdue acknowledgment of how decisions have always actually been made.

Understanding that is one thing. The more interesting question is why it has become so commercially urgent right now.

Two things happened in quick succession that changed the landscape significantly. Covid stripped away a great deal of the professional formality that used to pass for relationship building, and left buyers with a much sharper sense of what they actually wanted from the businesses they worked with — authenticity, genuine understanding, the feeling of being dealt with by a person rather than a process. Then AI arrived and began producing polished, technically accomplished content at scale across every sector, which has quietly made human warmth and specificity rarer and more valuable than they have ever been. The appetite for something real has never been higher, and the businesses that recognised this early have built meaningful commercial advantages as a result.

What leading with ‘humanity’ actually looks like in practice

Wealthsimple understood this early and built an entire brand around it. Their ‘Investing for Humans’ campaign, directed by Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, gathered hundreds of unscripted real people and asked them to talk openly about money — their fears, their confusion, the complicated feelings that most financial services businesses had spent decades carefully sidestepping. The films were raw, funny, and occasionally moving. The product barely appeared. What Wealthsimple built instead was something far more durable in a crowded financial market — the genuine conviction that they understood human beings.

Hiscox arrived at the same destination from the B2B side of the fence, which is what makes their story particularly relevant for professional services and fintech businesses. Their Global CMO Russ Findlay, who came to commercial insurance from Unilever and PepsiCo, has long argued that B2B purchasing is among the most emotionally charged decisions a person makes — precisely because the stakes are personal as well as professional. Small business owners know this better than anyone. ‘The Most Disastrous Campaign Ever’ resonated because Hiscox had the confidence to be funny about something their competitors were too nervous to mention at all, treating small business owners as people who could take a joke about their own chaos, which, it turns out, they very much could.