Coffee Conversations That Built a Marketing Revolution
with Tanya & Tony Thorson
The Corvus Effect / Episode 72
Released: October 6, 2025
Overview
Tanya and Tony Thorson are the husband-wife team behind B2A — Business to Anyone — and the book Get Off Your (M)ass! Tanya brought 20 years of consumer marketing across Lane Bryant, New Balance, and L.L. Bean into B2B SaaS and discovered that B2C principles slashed pipeline velocity by 50% — because buyers don’t actually transform at 8:59 AM into different people. This conversation is about reclaiming marketing’s nerve — about the smudge concept (the human fingerprint AI can’t replace), the Curiosity Creed (critical thinking in a world drowning in dashboards), and why the artificial divide between B2B and B2C never actually held.
About Tanya & Tony Thorson
Tanya and Tony Thorson are the founders of B2A — Business to Anyone — and the co-authors of Get Off Your (M)ass! Tanya runs Strategics Consulting after 20 years in consumer brand and B2B SaaS go-to-market work; Tony brings the engineering precision from his role as managing director of Litech US.
Listen to the Full Episode
Key Takeaways
1. B2C in B2B — the divide never held
Tanya tested consumer-brand strategies — omnichannel engagement, persona-led targeting, buyer-led journeys — inside a B2B SaaS company and cut pipeline velocity by 50%. The artificial B2B/B2C divide assumes the buyer transforms at 8:59 AM into a purely rational ROI machine; they don’t. Business buyers are the same humans buying sneakers on the weekend, and the playbooks that work for one work for the other when you stop pretending otherwise.
2. The smudge concept — the human fingerprint AI can't fake
Borrowed from an Andy Warhol documentary: the silk-screened pieces from his Factory carried imperfect human smudges that pure automation couldn’t replicate, and the smudges were what made them authentic. The Thorsons’ marketing version is the same — automation scales, but it scales hollow without the human fingerprint that makes it feel like marketing instead of mailmerge. The smudge isn’t inefficiency to remove; it’s the thing buyers respond to.
3. The Curiosity Creed — thinking in a world full of answers
AI handing you instant answers is great until it atrophies the muscle that asks better questions. The Curiosity Creed pushes back: ask why these metrics, what assumptions underlie our personas, what customer behaviors don’t fit our models — questions algorithms can’t ask. Marketing’s tech exhaustion is real, and the way out is reclaiming the nerve to question the orthodoxy instead of complying with it.