I've been feeling very good about B2B Marketing recently. Not the magazine, or the website (though they are both fantastic) but the genre. Until today that is. Rushing down the stairs to the tube at Waterloo station I was struck by a monstrosity of a poster ad for Brother printers. It felt like a throw back to the 1990s. Shame on you Brother, and your agency.

I know it's just an poster campaign and I should be recognising what is a great bit of media buying, but I'm willing to bet that I and perhaps a few other of you sensitive marketers are the only people that remember it and for that reason it's depressing. Not only is it a brand (or possibly a product range) ad focusing on a feature that is so generic (speed), but the execution is frankly insulting. A man hurdling a desk. A man hurdling a desk, of all things.

I thought we'd progressed beyond that. I thought we all recognised that we may select a product on it's features but we select a brand on much more subtle things. Things we don't necessarily consciously recognise but that are more powerful and more influencial than any product feature. Especially in such a mature market like office printers!

We have to do better, in fact most of are. The sophistication of planning observable across all B2B sectors is way above this, but just a few of you (and you know who you are) are letting the side down.

I recently sent my boyfriend to Tesco to buy some sugar. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. A bemused voice, verging on panic, said, “There’s 257 different types of sugar in front of me. Which one shall I buy, which one, which one?” Two hours later, he returned home with four different bags of sugar, all of varying shades, three of which are destined to go mouldy in my cupboard.

I feel pretty much the same about the amount of words that we are bombarded with. Every single day, columns and columns of news, features, information, advice, analysis, commentary, profiles and reviews are printed on reams and reams of paper. How do I know which ones to read, which ones to discard, and which ones to cut out and stick on my wall?

And that was before the Internet. Now, it’s a hopeless cause. Cyberspace is jam packed with words, and increasingly: videos, virals, podcasts, webinars, wikis and games - official, as well as unofficial - with bloggers (including myself) writing their own opinion on anything and everything to anyone that will listen.

So, how do you know where to look and who to trust – and where to express your own opinions? As the Internet matures and the information on it becomes increasingly unmanageable, it looks like niche communities will become its mainstay. In the world of B2B, where ‘niche’ is a key word, such communities are already springing up led by the likes of companies such as the Financial Times and Quark.

Hopefully, this will be the future of online. Once we’ve found our own niche, online worlds (and I’m sure each one of us will have a few for each area of our lives), we’ll find lots of the information we need in one place. So, if like me, you’re having trouble seeing the wood for the trees, don’t despair, your days of trawling the Internet for hours in a blind panic, or building a tower of newspapers to sift through at the weekend, may be numbered. Your own special community website will help to filter the information and give it to you straight – perhaps with a few opinions thrown in for good measure. I’m thinking of launching one called ‘Sugar for Starters’. It’s bound to take off.