The future of B2B marketing isn’t about doing more. It is about doing what actually moves the needle.
Marketing today is a sprawl of half-connected efforts.
Social media teams are fixated with engagement numbers that don’t translate into business growth. Sales teams work in isolation, unsure how to leverage the content being produced. Strategies form in silos, never quite linking together into something greater.
Harsha Manjunatha, founder and Head of Digital at Purple Turtle, has spent much of his career untangling this mess. He doesn’t do spectacle. He doesn’t believe in quick wins. What he is interested in is something far less glamorous but infinitely more effective: structure.
“I’ve never been one for short cuts,” he says, leaning back in his chair, speaking with the quiet confidence of someone who knows their craft intimately. “Marketing should be a revenue driver, not an expense.”
It is a frustratingly simple premise, one that plenty of businesses claim to follow but few execute well. Harsha is less concerned with selling a vision of transformation than he is with making sure the wires are connected properly in the first place.
From psychology to marketing to reinvention
Before he was designing scalable marketing frameworks, Harsha was studying psychology. The subject fascinated him — not just what people did, but why they did it. That same curiosity eventually led him to marketing, which, at its best, is less about pushing products and more about understanding behaviour.
“It was never just about getting someone to buy something,” he says. “It was about understanding what drives people — their motivations, their hesitations, the invisible triggers behind decisions. After all, people buy with emotions and justify with logic.”
Early in his career, he worked with multiple companies, where he quickly realised that marketing failures weren’t the result of incompetence or lack of effort. Instead, he says, the problem was fragmentation.
“You’d have strong products, good ideas, great teams working hard, but there was a huge disconnect,” he recalls. “Content wasn’t tied to demand generation, demand generation wasn’t aligned with sales, and customer retention was barely even considered.”
This frustration led him to Hachi-Bee, a boutique brand strategy and inbound marketing consultancy. There, he worked on projects that helped companies evolve their marketing from a series of disjointed efforts to something more cohesive. But even in that environment, he ran into a problem: businesses kept getting distracted by the newest shiny bauble.
“Most marketing teams operate in silos, chasing viral moments and instant gratification instead of doing the work that actually matters,” he says. “Budgets are thrown at trends with no long-term impact. It’s exhausting. And it’s why a lot of companies end up with high spends and minimal returns convinced it is the tools that are broken.”
The Purple Turtle approach
It was this frustration that led Harsha, along with the principals at Hachi-Bee, to build Purple Turtle. The name, a nod to Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, signals their intent: to make marketing functionally different, not just aesthetically distinct.
Purple Turtle is small by design — just eight specialists with decades of experience who embed themselves within businesses to rebuild marketing as an interconnected system.
“We could hire twenty people or even a hundred,” Harsha says. “But why? I’ve worked with agencies where ten people sit in a meeting to make a minor change. We're not breaking things but we do want to move fast and cut through inefficiencies.”
Harsha also believes that most businesses do want to do want to get their marketing right. It’s just that they’re being pulled in too many directions. Every month brings a new must-have tool, a new social media platform, a new demand from leadership. The result is reactive marketing with teams scrambling to keep up rather than build something sustainable.
Purple Turtle’s model is meant to offer an alternative. Instead of endless pivoting, the focus is on systems that compound over time. “We don’t just launch a campaign and hope for results,” Harsha says. “We build marketing engines that drive revenue predictably. We fix the core engine.”
Five fixes for broken marketing
Harsha has spent years diagnosing what goes wrong in marketing. Here are the core issues he sees, and the fixes:
Stop chasing trends, start building systems. Marketing isn’t about the latest platform or viral campaign; it is about creating sustainable systems that drive continuous growth. “We don’t build one-off solutions,” he says. “We design marketing machines that work long-term.”
Prioritise clarity over activity. Businesses waste millions on tactics without understanding why they’re doing them. “Why does your brand exist? Why does it matter? Why will people care?” Harsha emphasises that these foundational questions must be answered before any marketing effort begins.
Align marketing with business objectives. Most companies launch campaigns without tying them to actual revenue goals. “Marketing should never exist in a vacuum,” he explains. “Every initiative should connect directly to the business’s bottom line.”
Build momentum before scaling. Growth isn’t about throwing money at ads; it is about ensuring your systems are ready to handle scale. “First, create momentum,” he says. “Then, amplify what is already working.”
Measure what matters. Vanity metrics - likes, shares, impressions don’t pay the bills. Harsha is emphatic: “We don’t care about traffic unless it converts. Numbers that matter to us are customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, and actual revenue impact.”
What comes next?
Harsha sees the next few years bringing even bigger shifts in marketing, driven by AI, automation, and the changing ways people consume content. “The way people search for and consume information is changing rapidly,” he notes. “AI-powered search tools like DeepSeek, ChatGPT and Perplexity are reshaping content discovery, meaning businesses will need to optimise for these platforms, not just Google.”
Meanwhile, he sees a shift away from reliance on rented platforms like social media. “Newsletters and owned media are becoming more important than ever,” he says. “If you don’t own your audience, you’re always at the mercy of an algorithm.”
And then there’s community-driven engagement. “B2B companies, in particular, will need to engage with niche communities instead of relying on broad, generic outreach,” he says. Content itself is ever evolving. “Short-form video is increasingly dominant,” he says. “Even in B2B, people want quick, engaging insights so platforms like YouTube Shorts and TikTok will be key.”
The work that matters
For businesses exhausted by the endless treadmill of marketing trends, Purple Turtle offers something different: a return to fundamentals. Less obsession over quick wins, more focus on building something sustainable.
“The future of marketing isn’t about doing more,” Harsha says. “It’s about doing what actually moves the needle.” And if that sounds way less exciting than the promise of a viral moment, that’s exactly the point. The best marketing — the kind that drives real business growth — isn’t a spectacle. It’s a system that works.