A couple of weeks ago, I published the list of my ten most popular posts of 2025. I ranked posts based on cumulative total reads, which means that posts published later in the year were at a major disadvantage compared to those published earlier in the year.
Several posts that I published in the second half of 2025 have attracted a significant number of readers, but not quite enough to crack the top ten list. In a way, these posts are like the ugly duckling in the much-loved fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. They just need more time for their popularity to become evident.
Before I close the books on 2025, I wanted to highlight a few of these ugly duckling posts that, with time, will become beautiful swans.
So, in case you missed any of them, here are three posts from this year that are worth reading as you wrap up 2025 and move into 2026.
[Research Round-Up] 6sense Study Provides Critical Insights on B2B Buyer Behavior
This post summarized some of the major findings of the 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Study conducted by 6sense. The 2025 study is the third edition of 6sense’s B2B buyer experience research, with previous studies being conducted in 2024 and 2023.
All of the 6sense buyer experience studies have provided valuable, and occasionally counterintuitive, insights about the real-world attitudes and behaviors of business buyers.
My post discussing the 2024 edition of the study made this year’s top ten list, and I expect this post to attract similar interest over time.
What Has (and Hasn’t) Changed in B2B Marketing
A substantial majority of experienced B2B marketers would probably say that the last two decades have been a period of unprecedented change in B2B marketing.
Over the past twenty years, we have witnessed the proliferation of marketing channels, the explosive growth of marketing technologies, and the appearance of several new marketing techniques.
During the same period, we’ve also seen the introduction of an array of “new” concepts and models describing the B2B buying process and exploring the role of marketing in the revenue growth of B2B companies.
While it’s obviously essential for marketers to keep on top of significant changes in their profession, it’s equally important that they remember what things haven’t changed.
In this post, I used excerpts from a 1972 book by Frederick E. Webster and Yoram Wind to make the point that many of the core principles of marketing and buyer behavior have changed very little.
The 4P’s model of the marketing mix was introduced by E. Jerome McCarthy, a marketing professor at Notre Dame, in his 1960 marketing textbook. McCarthy’s model quickly became popular, and it’s been a core part of the marketing curriculum at virtually all universities for decades.
Despite its popularity and longevity, the 4P’s model has been criticized for a variety of reasons, and several marketing academics and other pundits have offered alternatives that are designed to address the perceived limitations of McCarthy’s original model. So, we now have the “7P’s,” the “7C’s,” and the “5B’s,” among others.
A recent salvo of criticism aimed at the 4P’s was fired by Joanne Seddon, the CEO of the Marketing Accountability Standards Board, in a article published this fall at WARC.
In this post, I used excerpts from McCarthy’s 1960 textbook to demonstrate that most criticisms of the 4P’s model, including Ms. Seddon’s, are misplaced.
Top image courtesy of Lando Mollari via Flickr (CC).
