The brand hype:when it pays off, and when it’s a distraction

Everyone is talking about brand right now.

And for good reason. AI has made it easier than ever to build software, and easier to copy it. Features that used to set you apart can be matched in months. When products start to look alike, being known and trusted becomes one of the few things that are hard to copy. For many teams, it’s starting to feel like something you need just to stay in the game.

So the conclusion many teams reach is: invest in brand. Tell a bigger story. Build awareness. Educate the market. Once buyers know who we are, demand will follow.

Sometimes it does. But brand has a limit that’s easy to miss.

Brand decides who buyers choose when they act. It doesn’t make them act.

If buyers are already trying to solve the problem, brand is one of the strongest advantages you can have. If they’re not, brand mostly makes you well known to people who aren’t buying.

We’ve been here before

In 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis, Simon Sinek gave a TED talk about what he called the golden circle: start with why. People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. It became one of the most-watched TED talks ever, and over the next few years “find your why” was everywhere. Companies rewrote their mission statements, rebuilt their websites around purpose and opened every pitch with what they believed.

The timing wasn’t a coincidence. Budgets were frozen, growth was hard to come by, and many products had become hard to tell apart. A story about why you exist felt like something you could still control.

The idea itself was sound. A clear why helps you stand out and helps people remember you. But it helped most the companies buyers were already considering. It didn’t make anyone buy who didn’t need to.

Today’s brand hype follows the same pattern. A different trigger, AI instead of a financial crisis, but the same instinct: when the product stops setting you apart, reach for the story.

What B2C has always known

None of this is new to consumer brands. In B2C, products have looked alike for decades. Most soft drinks taste roughly the same. Detergents clean roughly as well as each other. Bottled water is water. When the product can’t set you apart, brand does. That’s why consumer companies spend so much on it, and why it works.

But look at what brand is doing there. Coca-Cola doesn’t make anyone thirsty. People buy drinks every day, whether or not a single ad is running. The demand is already there, and it comes back every day. Brand decides which bottle ends up in the basket.

And when consumer brands have tried to create a category from scratch, it took years of heavy spending, and many didn’t make it. The ones that won did it with budgets that few B2B scaleups will ever have.

That’s the lesson B2B is now learning from B2C. Brand is a powerful way to win when products look alike. But it works because the demand already exists. B2C brands don’t create the need. They make sure they get chosen when it’s there.

B2B buying works differently. Most B2B problems don’t come back every day. Buyers can live with them for years, until something forces them to act. So before you borrow the B2C playbook, it’s worth asking which kind of market you’re actually in.

Not all urgency is the same

Whether B2B buyers act depends less on how well they know you, and more on how urgently they need to solve the problem. Every market sits somewhere on a spectrum.

• Inherent urgency
  The problem comes with a built-in deadline or consequence. Payroll has to run. Tax has to be filed. Mandatory compliance has a date. Buyers can’t put it off forever, so the need itself creates a reason to act.
• Event-driven urgency
  The problem can wait, but identifiable events regularly force it onto the agenda. A security incident, an audit, an outage, a new regulation. Buyers tolerate the status quo until something makes that impossible.
• GTM-dependent urgency
  Nothing forces action. Engagement, collaboration, innovation: the problem is real, but buyers can carry on as they are. So your go-to-market has to build the case for change, from scratch.

The further right you go, the more of the work falls on marketing and sales. On the left, the market brings the demand and you compete to capture it. On the right, you have to create the demand first, and only then compete for it.

Brand is powerful on the left and in the middle. On the right, it has to do a job it wasn’t built for.

Who brand works for

Brand works best for companies that already have product-market fit, in a market that already buys.

The demand is there. Buyers enter buying cycles whether you’re around or not. Brand is why your name is on the list when they do, why you’re trusted before the first call, and why you win when products look alike. It helps you win more of the demand that exists, and hold on to the customers you have.

Big players can go one step further. With enough brand, budget and patience, they can make a tolerated problem feel like a priority. They have the name that makes buyers listen, the money to keep the same message going for years, an installed base to sell into, and analysts, partners and events to amplify the story.

Even for them it’s hard. But they can afford to be wrong for a while.

And there’s a less obvious effect. When a market gets educated, demand doesn’t only grow for the company that did the educating. It grows for the category. And when a buyer finally decides the problem is worth solving, they often go to the name they already know.

That’s why creating demand is really a big company’s game. Whoever does the educating, the best-known name tends to win the deal.

For startups: solve something that can’t wait

A startup has none of those advantages. No brand to lend credibility. No budget to keep a message going long enough to change behavior. And a runway measured in months, not years.

Brand takes years to build. It grows out of proof, references and word of mouth, which are exactly what you don’t have yet.

That’s why early-stage companies need to stay on the left side of the spectrum. Not a broad problem that everyone agrees is important, but a very specific pain that a clearly defined group of buyers needs to solve now.

Specific, because focus is the only way a small team can build proof, references and word of mouth fast enough to matter. Urgent, because urgency does the work your brand and budget can’t do yet. Deals move faster. Buyers forgive gaps in the product. Budget appears. Every win makes the next one easier.

That can feel like thinking small. It isn’t. A narrow market with real urgency will get you further than a big market that can wait.

Your brand will come from winning there. Not the other way around.

For scaleups: adjacent, or back to square one

Once you’ve won your first market, the question changes. You’re not choosing where to start anymore. You’re choosing where to go next.

This is where adjacency matters. An adjacent market keeps the urgency you’ve already found: the same pain, the same trigger, the same reason to act, in a different segment, region or buyer. And your brand comes with you. Your proof carries over. Your references mean something. Buyers may already have heard of you. Your positioning needs adjusting, not rebuilding.

A completely new market is different. The urgency you found in your core doesn’t come with you, and neither does your brand. Buyers there don’t care that you’re well known somewhere else. They care whether you solve something they need to solve now.

In that market, you’re a startup again. Except this time you’re carrying a larger organization, higher growth expectations and a core business that competes for attention. That’s why urgency has to be the first question every time you expand, not an afterthought.

What marketing can and can’t do

None of this means brand or marketing don’t matter. They matter a lot. But what they can do depends on where your market sits on the spectrum.

• Inherent urgency: clarify and accelerate
  Buyers are already looking. Marketing’s job is to make it obvious why you’re the right choice, and easy to buy. Good marketing here speeds everything up.
• Event-driven urgency: be the known option when the trigger hits
  Buyers aren’t looking yet, but they will be. Marketing’s job is to know which events start buying cycles, reach buyers around those moments, and make sure you’re already on the list when the moment comes. This is where brand earns its keep.
• GTM-dependent urgency: build the case, at scale, for years
  This is where marketing has to create demand instead of capturing it. It can work, but only with the brand, budget and patience to keep going long enough. Without those, it mostly produces interest, not deals.

Marketing can speed up urgency. It can’t replace it.

When a market doesn’t feel urgent, the instinct is often to push harder: a bigger brand story, sharper messaging, more campaigns, another channel. But no campaign turns a tolerated problem into a priority. If buyers don’t need to act, better marketing just helps them feel better about waiting.

The question to ask first

Before you invest in brand to open up a market, whether it’s your first one or your next one, ask the question from the right-hand column of the spectrum:

If we do nothing, will they still enter a buying cycle?

If the answer is yes, you have a market that brings its own demand. Build your brand there. It will help you win more of it.

If the answer is no, and you’re not a big player, you can’t market your way into a market that can wait. Find the problem that can’t.

Where I can help“Why are you different?” is getting harder to answer