Getting noticed in B2B technology is no longer the hard problem. Getting remembered is. 56% of CMOs believe all tech vendors look and sound the same, according to the latest research from B2B tech PR agency Wildfire.
That is a growth problem, not a branding one. A brand nobody can tell apart is one nobody chooses or covers. Yet, much of the market has settled there because looking like everyone else feels safe and standing out doesn’t.
That was the starting point for a recent B2B Marketing roundtable, hosted by Kavita Singh, Head of Growth Solutions Content, in association with Wildfire, where Wildfire CEO Debby Penton and the agency’s Head of Marketing, Alex Warren, presented some of the findings from their CMO Decoded research.
How distinctive brands turn generic
Most don’t start that way. They launch with a point of view and a personality. Then they scale: funding arrives, the investor base widens and the brand gets sanded down to something safer at every round. By the time a company can afford serious marketing, there’s often nothing distinctive left to market. If you’ve sat through that process, you’ll recognize it.
The caution was identifiable to the room. As one attendee put it, “No one is going to get sacked for doing the same as everybody else, but to stand out, that’s the risk.” Marketers described having to earn the trust to take risks at all, on campaigns too expensive to gamble with.
The language gives it away: “Creative” tends to get dropped in the push for C-suite buy-in, quietly replaced by “memorable”. Memorable sounds like an outcome. Creative sounds like a bet.
The same flattening happens to the words brands use to describe themselves. “Powered by” was called out as a fad. “AI” is already being swapped for “SI”, just as “cloud” and “IoT” started fading a decade ago. Each meant something until every vendor used it without explaining what it did for the buyer.
Culture is what makes consistency work
However, not everyone has drifted. Salesforce kept being brought up in the conversation. One leader described the “cult following” it built, using a mascot, celebrity spokespeople and a Hawaiian theme as examples, and how they made launches exciting to people well outside tech.
What produces that is culture rather than campaign planning. Get it right internally first, then make it land locally, market by market, because a global brand that ignores local culture isn’t global – it’s just uniform.
Consistency is both the answer and the trap. “Success comes to the ones that look and sound the same every day,” as one marketing leader put it. But there has to be something distinctive to repeat in the first place.
AI will happily make you more generic
Holding that line is getting harder. The concern in the room wasn’t quality: “Lack of passion, lack of identity and no critical thinking” was how one person described what sits behind failed campaigns, and AI supplies none of the three. Calling AI inevitable was described as a lazy justification for overusing it. It was seen as useful as a thinking partner, but less effective when expected to handle ideation and production at once. In other words, a force multiplier, not a substitute.
So who has to fix it?
One pattern ran through the discussion. Very few of the obstacles raised were about buyers. They were internal: convincing the board, holding ground against sales, justifying spend, getting the market’s view heard over the company’s own. The hardest part of standing out isn’t convincing the market. It’s convincing your own business.
It isn’t the CEOs’ fault. Plenty of stakeholders shape a brand, and CEOs hold the final sign-off. But sign-off isn’t a strategy, and nobody signs off on a case that was never made. Making that case is marketing’s job. When nobody makes it, the brand drifts by default.
Look at how the rest of the business works. A salesperson who doesn’t sell gets fired. An accountant who mishandles the accounts gets fired. Marketing is the one function where delivering no growth can pass unnoticed, as long as nothing visibly breaks. That’s the imbalance worth fixing: hire people prepared to stick their necks out, and be prepared to stick out your own.
Doing nothing is the risky option
Playing it safe feels low-risk, but in a homogeneous market, a generic brand has no chance of cut-through at all. Doing nothing doesn’t protect growth. It rules it out.
If your brand isn’t growing and nobody is taking risks, start by asking whether the problem is the brand or the product. If it’s the brand, fix the positioning. If it’s the product, marketing should be the function that knows what’s wrong and says so, feeding back to development, then working with agency and PR partners to build a real point of difference.
That’s what a commercial marketer does. Marketing belongs at the heart of growth, not at the end of it.
PR can accelerate you. It can’t rescue you
This is the catch-22. PR only justifies itself if you have something unique the rest of the world wants to cover. Hand PR a diluted brand at its lowest point of risk, and there is very little they can do with it.
“It’s a good time for PR,” one attendee said. In a landscape of “growing exponential slop”, someone else vouching for you carries more weight than vouching for yourself.
That third-party coverage now has another job too. As AI tools become a bigger part of how people discover and research brands, editorial coverage is helping shape which companies appear in those answers. That gives PR a growing role in visibility as well as memorability.
One participant pointed out that PR also has to get through the gatekeepers of journalists. They are a tough audience. They won’t tolerate something boring, generic or already said a million times before. That creates a useful level of scrutiny before an idea ever reaches the public.
Other areas of marketing get that scrutiny too, but often later, through performance. If content is bland, audiences ignore it and the metrics show you. PR brings that test forward. If there is no fresh angle, strong opinion or genuinely interesting idea, the story is unlikely to get through the door in the first place.
That pressure can be useful. It pushes brands towards ideas that are sharper, more distinctive and ultimately more memorable.
So what do you do?
If you’re content to be one of several interchangeable vendors, that’s a legitimate choice. Oligopolies are comfortable. But then don’t spend money on PR, and don’t expect growth. Hand the writing to AI and accept the ceiling.
If you want to be different, you must do something different. This isn’t about taste and it isn’t about bravery for its own sake. It’s about having a point of difference worth someone’s attention.
B2B has drifted, the discussion suggested, moving too quickly to product because that’s what’s being sold. “Useful, relevant and entertaining” was one marketing leader’s definition of good marketing, and the reason anything gets remembered. Marketing is still the emotional side of the business – and that remains an asset, not a liability.
