EXIDEA Inc., a company that provides category branding services designed to achieve top-of-mind awareness in the market, has conducted surveys of 200 purchasing stakeholders in each of 16 B2B business categories and has published findings on the state of brand recall. The company has now released the 2026 edition of its Category Branding White Paper, which compiles the full survey results, cross-category analysis, and strategies and concrete actions for becoming synonymous with a category. The white paper identifies four key findings across the 16 categories. First, the brand with the highest awareness is not always the brand with the highest recall. In multiple surveyed categories, brands were found to outperform the top-awareness brand in recall. The report classifies this structure into three types: aligned, reversed, and dispersed, and analyzes the pattern in each category. Second, purchasing decision-makers are influenced by brands they knew before sales discussions began. In many categories, a high percentage of respondents said that brands they already knew influenced their final decision. In expense management systems, the figure reached 78.5%. The leading reasons were that the brand became a basis for comparison and that it felt reassuring and easy to consider. The white paper calls this structure, in which the ranking of candidates is already formed before sales teams meet customers, the “zero-stage selection.” Third, highly trusted brands become the benchmark for their categories. In the business card management category, Sansan recorded an 81.0% top-trust rate, the highest among the 16 categories. The report notes that such brands have established themselves as the market’s evaluation axis, creating a structure in which competitors are constantly judged by comparison with them. Similar patterns were also observed in electronic contract services and corporate card categories. Fourth, there are still blank spaces in the market. In categories such as sales