I get a specific feeling whenever I walk into a salon today. The same one I felt in restaurants early in my career.
An unspoken tension.
Either the owner thinks you are there to help them grow.
Or they think they are doing you a favor by letting your products sit on their shelves and want to extract whatever they can from you.
In B2B2C, this tension is what matters most.
The Great Misdirection
In businesses like salons, restaurants, or marketplaces, we often obsess over “Consumer Insights.” We build “Brand Essence.” We run ads to the end-user.
But you never actually sell your product to the consumer as is.
There is always a gatekeeper in between. Someone who serves the consumer on your behalf. Someone who decides, every single day, whether your product sees the light of day, stays hidden in the back room, and in what form it reaches the consumer.
The real question isn’t whether the consumer likes your product.
The real question is
Does your product improve the partner’s economics?
The Four Levers of the Gatekeeper
Partners don’t care about your “why” first. They care about their P&L.
A product only earns its keep if it pulls one of these four levers:
Charge More: Does your product allow the partner to premium-ize their service?
Retain More: Does the math work? Is there enough margin for the partner to actively push it over a competitor?
Attract More Consumers: Is your brand a magnet? Does it bring new feet through their door that weren’t coming in before?
Drive Repeat: Does it create a “regime”? Does it turn a one-time visitor into a repeat customer who comes back for the “habit” your product provides?
The Hierarchy of Survival
The math of B2B2C is brutal:
Solve one, and you might get listed.
Solve two, and you can build a business.
Solve three, and you become difficult to replace.
Solve all four, and you become part of how the partner runs their business.
The Hard Truth
Most brands think B2B2C is a complex problem.
Distribution. Training. Brand pull.
It’s not.
It’s an incentive problem.
If you haven’t made the partner’s business fundamentally better than it was before you showed up, you are just a guest in their house.
And guests eventually get asked to leave.
In B2B2C, the partner ultimately decides whether the consumer ever sees your product again.