TRACKLIST
This is the list of different topics. Click to skip to the one that interests you most.
The Edge of Differentiation
Differentiation often goes against functionality. The more differentiated a thing is, by definition, the more it strays from the standard, functional, proven way of doing something. Think of it like this: Ferrari could launch a car with 3 wheels. It would be crazy, it would be differentiated, and people would talk about it. But it would be useless from a functionality perspective. This is why I disagree with marketers who talk about differentiation as if it were some silver bullet for growth, and why I imagine differentiation as a spectrum. It looks something like this:
If you go too far on the differentiation deep end, you might end up with a gimmick that’s obviously differentiated, but useless and ineffective. A little to the right is the sweet spot: differentiated AND very effective. I think of this as The Edge of Differentiation. The Edge of Differentiation is hard to find, because there’s always a risk of ending up in the gimmick territory, or a less catastrophic scenario, ending just outside of the Edge of Differentiation, where you are differentiated, but still getting weak results. And on the far right, there’s the boring, undifferentiated, but predictable way of getting OK results.
Most things look, feel, and sound the same because they are proven to work. That’s the reason why they became best practices to begin with. The boring, undifferentiated practices are NOT the most effective way to achieve success — they are the safest ways to avoid ruin. That’s an important distinction. For example, if you follow the traditional path in life (go to college → get an internship → get a job), you probably won’t become a multimillionaire playboy, but you’re probably never gonna become a bum, either. The same applies to marketing.
Companies are wired to find predictably effective ways of doing things. Once we find them, we want to keep doing them so that we don’t spend mental energy and time in the future. If something happens to be differentiated today, and it’s very effective, it’s only a matter of time before everyone else discovers it, concludes that this is the best way to get results, and it becomes another best practice everyone else is doing, with all the differentiation superpowers sucked out of it. As much as marketers wished companies did marketing differently, the truth is, most companies prefer to be undifferentiated but get predictably mediocre results 8/10 times. From what I’ve seen in my corporate marketing experience, the effort to minimize the downside (achieve enough to not get fired) was always stronger than the effort to maximize the upside (get amazing results).
No Media Companies
This passage is heavily inspired by Ben Goldstein’s take on this, which I 100% agree with.
One of the most popular catchphrases circling B2B marketing LinkedIn these days is “Become a media company for your niche”. It’s one of those noncontroversial, obvious things that seem to have no flaws in theory. Like becoming an NBA player, who wouldn’t wanna become a media company? But unless you work at a rocketship, I don’t think the idea of becoming a media company is realistic. Here’s why.
1. Pipeline incentives make it impossible to act like a media company.
It’s hard to act like a media company when marketing has sales leaders breathing down their necks, putting pressure on them and asking them where the leads are. Even now with content marketing, many companies don’t have the resources or willingness to invest in content that’s valuable to their audience. They don’t commit to long-term programs. They put in a half-hearted effort to occasionally share thinly veiled sales pitches disguised as useful information, hoping they’ll get some quick leads.
So if you can’t even stick to one content program for a quarter, how can you expect to become a media company? Real media companies publish content for years with little to no expectations from their readers. They consistently entertain and delight. B2B companies can’t follow that no-strings-attached content model because they have different goals. Unlike real media companies, B2B companies’ growth isn’t based on building a large audience to sell advertising space, it’s based on generating pipeline.
2. Most B2B marketers aren’t built for it.
You can't just dump the “build a media company” task on your marketing team and expect them to deliver. It's like asking a plumber to fix your car. Marketers are creative people, but becoming a media company takes different skills and approaches to storytelling.
Just because a marketer knows how to write a clickbaity LinkedIn post hook, and knows how to write BOFU articles that convert, doesn’t mean make them cut out to produce media company content, which is far more interesting and creative than anything you see in everyday B2B marketing. To become a successful media brand, you’d need creatives with real media experiences, like special effects teams, cinematography directors, journalists, maybe audio producers who created popular podcasts, and so forth.
3. Many B2B companies don’t have the reach that’s needed.
If you pay closer attention to B2B companies that diversify their marketing across channels, you’ll see a pattern. A YouTube channel with 100 subscribers, a LinkedIn page with 5 likes on each post, a podcast they launched and cut after a month, and a dead Slack community. Aside from their customers, employees, and a fraction of their TAM, nobody is seeing this company’s content, and their reach is very weak.
They don’t have the established distribution channels and partnerships needed to reach a wider audience. Even if they were to produce some mind-blowingly good content, not many people would see it. This goes against the nature of what media companies are. Real media companies have established relationships with other media outlets, syndication partners, and content aggregators that allow them to reach a wider audience. Unless B2B companies can figure this out, it’s hard to become a media company. And if they ignore reach and try to push media content onto their small audience, is the effort of producing media content really worth it if they’re reaching people who already know the company, buy from it, and care about it? If it’s about growing the pipeline, then it sounds to me like “normal” content marketing would do the job, and all this media company stuff is ego-driven.
Blue Ocean Delusions
I think category creation projects are often pure vanity. Those who succeeded are the exception, not the rule. Many companies think they can invent a new category by slapping a fancy name on it, inventing a bunch of jargon, and then suddenly start dominating the market. But you can't force a new category into existence. You can’t manufacture yourself a blue ocean market with marketing tricks. Category creation goes hand-in-hand with buyers changing their demands, habits, thinking, and language…. and you got to have a good reason to warrant this.
Let’s run it back for a second. What’s the point of categories? When we're shopping for something, categories lump together products that meet the same or very similar needs. It helps buyers navigate the landscape of vendors easier. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry wanted to create a new category, and if they succeeded, then it would defeat the purpose of categories. We would have millions of categories. If it worked like that, why would anyone ever compete in established categories? Just create your own category and boom — just like that. Infinite money at your fingertips. This is where the category creation narrative that sells books and reality split up.
New categories emerge when there's a high demand for unique and novel use cases. Yet what I often see is companies trying to create a new category out of a product that does something slightly better than competitors in an established category. This is a mistake. Buyers can see right through it if your product isn't radically differentiated and doesn’t serve unique use cases — no matter how much new jargon you use and how much you try to brute force your way into being seen as a category creator. If anything, forcing a new category will just confuse buyers and make them even less likely to buy from you.
True category creation is more emergent than manufactured. It comes from factors outside of your control: changing buyer habits, demand, macroeconomic trends, media hype, and more. The key is to identify high market demand and figure out how to provide it in a way that radically sets you apart from your competitors.
Consider Salesforce, which is often cited as a CRM category creator. When Salesforce launched in 1999, it didn't set out to create a new category. It simply addressed a need that was already there: how to manage customer data more efficiently. The idea of CRM dates back to the 80s, but Salesforce became the biggest vendor by bringing CRM to the mainstream, which made Salesforce the de-facto owner of the CRM category.
In the end, it's mostly buyers who decide what category you belong to, not your marketing team. So instead of trying to create a new category out of thin air, focus on differentiating your product to the point where a new category emerges naturally. And if all these stars align for you, ensure you have the resources to claim the new category. Even Mark Zuckerberg is spending millions of dollars to make Metaverse a category that people associate with Facebook (Meta).
Shelf-Stacker Marketing
What does a layperson, maybe your grandma, think marketing is? Her idea of marketing is probably much different than ours. For her, marketing is about making a company famous. Maybe it’s about creating ads or memorable experiences that make people wanna buy your products. So when I was having a shower the other day, I realized that the nature of B2B marketing isn’t what your grandma thinks — it’s more like stacking shelves in a supermarket.
It feels like stacking shelves because the marketing we do is very utilitarian. For example, we produce content that serves to inform buyers about something they’re wondering about. Or it serves some other functional purpose. The bottom line is that it solves a problem. If there isn’t that utilitarian reason to consume it, they would probably never interact with your brand. Then we distribute that content on different “supermarket shelves” where prospects will interact with it (social, search, YouTube, etc.). Once we do that, then we make sure that our brands have the most real estate on these shelves. We do stuff like SEO to make sure that when people look at the Google Search shelf of the supermarket, our brand sticks out as the most prominent one. We’re competing on availability. We want to become the most available brand because the brand that’s easiest to find is also usually the easiest one to buy from. This is how consumer-packaged goods brands have marketed and grown for decades: by being available. Simply being on the shelf of every local supermarket is 80% of the battle, and this availability through distribution is what these brands invest in most. This is good marketing, and it applies to B2B, though there’s more nuance to how B2B buying committees buy, it’s still enough to get many companies in the consideration set.
This is just one way to grow. It’s effective, it works, and we should keep doing it. All I’m wondering is… is there more to B2B marketing than this? I don’t know.
Reduced To a Message
B2B marketing tends to hit a growth plateau because marketing gets reduced to a single purpose: communicating a message. When you think about it, it’s also why plenty of marketing playbooks feel the same. It assumes all that’s needed to create demand and grow revenue is for your buyers to stop thinking X and start thinking Y. The expectation is that your message will re-wire buyers’ brains.
Launch a podcast, to communicate a message. Post on LinkedIn, to communicate a message. Write articles, to communicate a message. Host an event, to communicate a message. Run digital ads that charge you every time you transmit a message. Etcetera.
Changing minds works. But it’s only one part of why people buy. People also buy because of great experiences with your product (PLG does this), the trust that you won’t screw up (“IBM effect”), convenience (“Monday.com is first on SERPs, so let’s evaluate them.”), and many more reasons.
When the message is your only tool, you commoditize yourself. And by the time you evangelized the hell out of your message and changed minds, but the revenue growth chart is still moving slowly, how does marketing drive more growth if communicating your message harder by hiring agencies or spending more money to scale channel tactics isn’t moving the needle anymore?
G.P.T. (Get People Talking)
ChatGPT (and GenAI in general) is changing marketing for good. I expect that in the future, it will also change how buyers buy (some speculate it might replace Google Search). It makes dozens of marketing tasks easier, more efficient, and even more effective. Ease is our favorite state as human beings. We learned from the wild successes of products like Uber, iOS, Netflix, etc. that put ease first.
It makes me sad when I see “purist” marketers (the Marketing Week columnist types) who think using GenAI is some kind of heresy to marketing. That’s a small-minded perspective in my opinion. Every other day I see marketers like these on LinkedIn sharing stories of how they asked ChatGPT to do something unreasonable, like create a quarterly marketing plan, and when ChatGPT didn’t give them a good answer, they used it as a "gotcha" to prove this technology is a gimmick. If it’s heresy to save myself hours of spreadsheet grunt work, or maybe have an on-demand consultant that can challenge my thinking, then call me the biggest heretic in the world.
Any tool is as valuable as the person using it and how you use it. You can use it to create more trash (e.g. soulless generic content, pitch-slap emails, and motivational quotes), or you can use it to make your creative work even more creative, your research even more insightful, and your memorable brand experiences even more memorable.
This is where I agree with “purist” marketers who have valid concerns with GenAI. Unfortunately, I think it’s more likely that more marketers will use this technology to take shortcuts rather than create better marketing. The reality is that those marketers are already doing it, and they would do it with or without GenAI. We’ll never get rid of SEO backlink farms, LinkedIn spammers, and generic content. This technology will just amplify them. It is what it is. But if you think you’re a good marketer, you should be happy about this. Your competition will get even more lazy and unimaginative. They’ll use it to crank out more trash faster, while your work will get better. With this technology + your expertise, strategic thinking, judgment, and creativity, your stock just went up 10x.
Remember that Generative AI isn't perfect yet. What we’re seeing now are its earliest stages of development. If it’s so valuable now for many marketing use cases, imagine how amazing it will be in 2 years, 5, and 10. As it stands, it's not meant to be a magic pill for all of our marketing problems. It's a tool, not a crutch. So let's give it a break.
As Louis Grenier said, instead of dismissing GenAI as a fad, we’re better off learning how to get better at using it to create better work. The change is already here, so we might as well embrace it. I’m not just saying that because I’m working for some GenAI vendor, but because I get value out of these tools myself. I use Midjourney to create visuals for my LinkedIn (which people often DM me about), and I used ChatGPT to give me feedback on how to improve this very article. It didn’t make my work a second coming of David Ogilvy, but it made my work a better version of itself.
That’s what this technology should be all about.
That’s all, folks!
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