It’s still dark outside as my iPhone chimes its painfully familiar tone at 6:00 a.m. I reach over to the nightstand, still half asleep, looking for the dopamine hit accompanied by the blinding light of a smartphone held inches from my face—a habit I promised myself I’d kick by now. I find the lock screen (as I do every morning) flooded with notifications, and the home screen littered with apps bearing red badges, numbered, quantifying my challenge for the next several minutes. Stronger than a doppio espresso, I begin my morning routine by clearing as many notifications as I possibly can before starting the day, working my way to the Mail app, where I know the real work awaits.

The red badge reads 124 unreads—how is that possible? It was only 34 when I went to bed the night before! I knew, however, that of the incremental 90 emails I received overnight, perhaps only three or four were actually of value and sent by a human being and not a marketing automation tool. Tapping into the app, I start my ritual of swiping left again and again, making split-second decisions on which emails are real, all before my feet hit the ground to begin my day.

I’m not proud of what I just shared, but my bet is that you’ve had a few mornings like this as well. This is our experience as consumers in today’s digitally enabled world—our contact information ends up on a list somewhere, and companies infiltrate our inboxes with pitches in hopeful anticipation of open rates and click-throughs that will generate interest in their businesses. It’s incredibly annoying. I get dressed, kiss my wife and daughter goodbye, and walk out the front door to drive into work, and instantly, I become that annoying marketer behind the email campaigns.

For the past several decades, B2B marketers like me have ignored the fact that behind every logo that we intend to market and sell to is a real human being—people with real wants and needs that aren’t left at the door when they get to work each morning. Perhaps “ignore” is a strong word, but the reality is that we use language like “bounty boards,” “hunting elephants,” and “closing logos” rather than considering the people behind the companies that we market and sell to. Meanwhile, in our consumer lives, we reject the very same tactics that we deploy at work and are drawn instead to emotive companies that speak to our humanity and serve us in our journey through life. Perhaps it’s taking that Virgin Atlantic flight rather than the United long haul. Maybe it’s the confidence in paying full price for the Tesla Model 3 rather than haggling with that Audi salesperson on the A5. Our friends in the B2C world define this concept as brand—and in B2C, brand is everything.

Brand is more than just visual design, creative and advertising campaigns. Seth Godin, author and recognized brand expert, defines it as “a set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” By that definition, the imperative to prioritize brand in B2B marketing cannot be debated—but in practice it has been marginalized, disconnected from growth, and deprioritized in favor of automation and scale. In short, we’ve taken the humanity out of marketing, and customers have started to take notice.

The Imperative of Brand in Category Creation

A common attribute of category creation—regardless of vertical, industry, or region—is a human being with an unmet need. In Chapter One, we referenced a “marginalized buyer no company is paying attention to in a meaningful way” as a potential signal of category creation. One of the primary objectives on your journey will be to develop a brand that authentically recognizes and serves your audience as heroes, stokes conviction behind the problem you aim to solve together, and equips them with the tools, resources, and opportunities to self-actualize within the new industry you are creating.

A disruption-oriented marketer would take a product marketing approach to building that brand—creating content around product feature benefit, building competitive landing pages, and hosting a user conference to give customers an exclusive look at the upcoming roadmap. A category-oriented marketer, on the other hand, would create content on how to solve complex problems that the audience is challenged with, ignore the competition, and plan an industry event to bring the community together to learn and grow. The marketer in the former example is focused inward on the company and product, while the latter is focused outward on the market and customer. Table 2.1 gives a few more examples of the difference between disruption and category brand programs.

As the market starts to interact with the various programs and campaigns you’re running in the second column, they’re getting value from your brand and enrolling into your thought leadership—all (typically) without buying anything. They become a captive audience listening to what you have to say, establishing trust in your point of view as an expert in the category, even if they’re not ready to buy anything quite yet. Your products and solutions are critically important in serving customers when they’re in-market for solutions, but make no mistake, your brand is where the real enterprise value resides in category creation.

One of the best examples of brand as a function of creating a category is Salesforce. In the company’s early days, they articulated and evangelized an “end of software” mission that sparked a global movement behind the Cloud Computing category that, according to Gartner, is a market projected to grow 17.3 percent in 2019 to total $206.2 billion, up from $175.8 billion in 2018.¹ While they positioned the brand around “ending” software, the company was actually in market with a CRM product for sales teams, punching above their weight and aligning their brand with a movement. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff details his approach to building the Salesforce brand in his now iconic memoir Behind the Cloud, including how creating a “NO SOFTWARE” logo helped articulate their differentiation in the marketplace. The company’s product portfolio (which has evolved over the years) is impressive, but their brand is the reason they’re the world’s most valuable public cloud company with over $120B of market cap and have been recognized on Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies List for six years in a row.

In Behind the Cloud, Benioff underscores the importance of brand on category creation with a master class for entrepreneurs and marketers inspired by the Salesforce playbook. Professionals were tired of using software to be productive at work—especially in increasingly mobile disciplines such as Sales, where they were constantly away from their desks. Benioff writes that Salesforce owns “NO SOFTWARE—not because [they] are the only one doing it but because [they] were the first to think it was important to customers” (Benioff, 2009, p. 32). While this fact can surely be disputed, Salesforce’s end of software mission effectively created the Cloud Computing category, which along with advances in mobile devices, hosted infrastructure, and communications technology has enabled an entire economy of working professionals to be productive from anywhere in the world, and from any device.

How Did We Get Here?

The concept of brand marketing can be traced back to the 1950s with consumer packaged goods companies like Procter & Gamble, General Foods, and Unilever. Madison Avenue and the American advertising industry were peaking in popularity, although advertising in America had already been around for nearly 100 years by that point. Brand managers were developing the art of giving products an identity that distinguished them from the competition—articulating both functional and emotional value. A binge session of AMC’s Mad Men on Netflix should provide all the historical context you need on the early years of brand (and maybe a bit more societal context to boot).

However in the late 20th century, the now globalized economy experienced a massive disaggregation of business that created industry around specialist providers in the value chain who could help enable end products for consumers. The two main focal points of specialization included product development (become an expert in manufacturing something) and logistics (become an expert in getting products from one place to another). Take, for instance, personal computers, which leveraged specialized components from product manufacturers around the globe, as well as logistics support, to get the computers in the hands of the customer. Supply was the scarcity of the time, which ushered in the era of B2B commercial transactions and, officially, B2B marketing as a discipline.

The early chapters of B2B marketing were quite traditional, with the company at the center of the marketing model with messages flowing outward through different channels, including TV, direct mail, fax, newspaper, outdoor, and radio. There were limited opportunities for input back to the company and cross-channel messaging. In this world, brand was indeed important, but completely disconnected from how B2B companies drove deals through the supply chain. This was, of course, until the Internet became mainstream in the mid-1990s and everything as we know it changed.

In the Internet era, it was no longer supply that was scarce, but rather customers. Companies recognized the land grab for customers in this new Internet gold rush as B2B marketers began to build websites, leverage early search tools, and create integrated marketing campaigns to re-aggregate consumer experiences across all channels. The economic premium shifted away from product and distribution, and toward creating world-class experiences for the end consumers. As businesses began to standardize on email as the primary means of communication, a new category was born in Marketing Automation to help companies amplify the impact of analog marketing by an exponential factor, provide air cover for sales, and create personalized campaigns that engaged the long tail of customers.

Marketing Automation is arguably one of the most successful new categories in B2B for both vendors and consumers. On the vendor side, Eloqua (the category creator) had an incredible outcome by going public in 2012 before getting acquired by Oracle later that year for $810M. Marketo, one of the fast followers behind Eloqua, went public in 2013 at a $724M market cap before getting acquired by Adobe in 2018 for a whopping $4.75B. There were several other winners in the category, including HubSpot (IPO), Silverpop (acquired by IBM), and Pardot and ExactTarget (both acquired by Salesforce). Customers won and the category became inevitable, as chief marketing officers evolved from corporate marketers to demand generators, earning a seat at the executive table and the majority share of operating budget in B2B businesses. Marketing became widely recognized as a critical part of the growth equation. However, as marketers built demand gen organizations and implemented marketing automation systems in their businesses, the email channel became incredibly noisy, fracturing once again the end consumer experience that the promise of B2B marketing hoped to optimize. That’s the world we find ourselves in as a profession today—eager to find better ways to rise above the noise, deliver meaningful value, and stand out in the marketplace.

Enter Business-to-Human (B2H) Marketing

In the mid-to-late 2000s, the workforce became mobile as the launch of the iPhone put the power of a supercomputer into our pockets. Consider this—the whole idea of “leaving work at the office” was never really a choice until smartphones broke down most barriers to connectivity. Today, work-life balance and integration are foundational mental health disciplines that, according to the American Psychological Association, can affect organizational outcomes such as productivity, absenteeism, and turnover.

However, we do benefit from this connectivity and digital awareness in our consumer lives on an almost daily basis—the ability to watch movies or listen to music with the touch of a button using Netflix and Spotify, connect with friends and family across the globe with social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and purchase almost any product in the world and have it arrive on our doorstep in 48 hours or less with Amazon Prime. This is the expectation in the marketplace that speaks to the very essence of our humanity—to be entertained, to foster community, to save time and money. Yet when we step back into the office, we forget these things and the humanity of our audience and are instead back into the familiar rhythm of email cadences, cold calls, and marketing funnels.

What would it look like instead if B2B marketers could realize that the people listening to music on Spotify and buying products on Amazon at home, are the same executive sponsors or power users of the opportunity record in your CRM currently forecasted to close at $200K? What if the same tactics and channels that B2C brands leverage to drive acquisition and engagement can be used to build affinity with a B2B audience? Perhaps the craziest statement of all, what if this new way to market actually helped close that deal, drive growth for the company, and align your brand with the category you’re creating?

What I’m framing above is an argument for a new way of thinking about marketing and selling business services called business-to-human (B2H)—a human-first strategy that seeks to drive business growth by serving the individuals behind the logos. The underlying belief of B2H is that customers will choose to work with companies they trust and admire, especially if they are the market leaders. There are several trends that have established B2H marketing as less of a platitude, and more of a viable business strategy:

• Proliferation (and Commoditization) of Digital Products. With most new products coming to market as “born in the cloud” services, it’s becoming easier to launch new technology into the marketplace. Therefore, customers now have more choice than ever before and can likely find an alternative viable solution to migrate to if a specific vendor cannot meet their needs. As an example from Chapter One, if you need to share a large file online, there are an overabundance of vendors in the file sync and share market who can help you with that.
• Subscription (or Pay-Per-Use) Business Model. Freemium and free trial motions have made it an order of magnitude easier for vendors to acquire new customers, now that the threshold for trying new services has been lowered. Solutions like Uber and Lyft, or even Amazon Web Services, only realize revenue on a pay-per-use or consumption basis, moving all of the power in the economic equation away from vendors and toward the customer.
• Voice of the Customer on Social Media. It may sound obvious, but customers now have more voice than ever before. If they feel any sense of dissatisfaction with a brand, they will happily take to social media to voice their displeasure. Online review platforms such as Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius are creating platforms to centralize customer voice for software purchase decisions.
• The Digitally Empowered Buyer. A trend first observed by HubSpot, prospects are spending much more time researching your brand online before ever engaging in a sales process. According to Forrester, 60% of today’s business buyers prefer not to interact with a sales rep as the primary source of information, 68% prefer to research on their own online, and 62% say they can now develop selection criteria or finalize a vendor list based solely on digital content.²
• Content Creation and Distribution Capability. The technology needed to create high fidelity content has become more accessible and cost effective, arguably with iPhone leading the way. This has resulted in new channels and programs that are relevant to both B2B and B2C brands, including podcasting, live streaming, social “stories” and several others.

A B2H marketing strategy is equal parts philosophy and practice—philosophy as it pertains to the narrative that you develop to engage with your audience, and practice as it pertains to the channels that you leverage to reach them. The underlying principle of the philosophy is defining the narrative in service of the individuals rather than the companies they work for: how can I help them solve problems, meet peers and mentors, and earn a seat at the executive table? These themes will undoubtedly come up as you develop a content marketing strategy. The practice can reflect many of the same content form factors that have become commonplace in the market to date—blogs, e-books, live events, webinars, direct mail, etc.—but can also be re-imagined to reach your audience in other channels where they spend time. At Gainsight, we came up with an admittedly crazy idea to record a hip-hop single about Customer Success and distribute through Spotify, Apple Music, and other major music publishers. I’ll explain the rationale behind the idea in Chapter Seven, but at the end of the day, our intention is to build a brand that does life with the people in our category, even if that means giving them a song to listen to on their way into work.

This whole approach intuitively made a lot of sense to me (maybe as a millennial in the workforce or something), but early in my time at Gainsight, I felt like my peers in the industry looked at me as though I was crazy. The conventional wisdom of the time around B2B marketing was to run the proven playbook—SEO/SEM, lead scoring, email nurture, and outbound calls. There were plenty of blog posts and resources on disciplines like sales development, growth hacking, and account-based marketing. These tactics were supposedly the secret to fast growth in B2B, not brand. Yet as our campaigns began to work, and our funnel began to grow, I concluded that rumors of the demise of brand had been greatly exaggerated, that the belief that brand was disconnected from growth was widespread, viewed as a complete distraction for startups. Here’s the usual argument:

• “We’re focused on growth now—we’ll figure out brand later.”
• “I can’t prove the ROI of brand.”
• “I’ve got an agency/intern/junior content writer on that.”

I’m not sure where this perspective came from, but it was everywhere. I found the exact opposite to be true about brand and its effect on our growth at Gainsight. The truth is, if you asked anybody affiliated with Gainsight where much of our success had come from, they would rattle off a number of items that would all categorically fall under brand: our thought leadership helped align Gainsight with the movement we were creating in Customer Success, our content drove organic traffic to our web properties and led the growth of our marketable database, and our community became a platform for the industry to connect together and advance the discipline forward. These investments have been instrumental to our ability to create the Customer Success category, and paradoxically has led to more than just revenue or logo growth, but even to follow-on rounds of funding, customer satisfaction, employee recruitment, and teammate retention.

In the end we may not all succeed in building the next Salesforce, but we can and should leverage the B2H strategies that they and other iconic brands have deployed in their category creation journey. By focusing on helping the humans behind the logos we sell to solve complex problems in an authentic way, we are no longer contributing to the noise that awaits us in our iPhone Mail app every morning. Rather, we are fulfilling the original intent of B2B marketing in the first place—to create integrated, world class experiences for our audience that champions their success in our category. If we focus on just that alone, two outcomes are almost certain to occur—we will be laying the foundation for a pioneering new category with our brand in the leadership position, and we will fuel our growth engine with prospects who will give us a shot at their business when they’re ready to start an evaluation.

At the end of the day, success in new markets will come down to execution for all companies, regardless of whether you’re an established brand or a startup. Your ability to build a brand that customers, employees, and investors will love is at the heart of creating new industries and realizing the economic outcomes of market leadership within them. The upside of creating a category is clear—exponential value, both quantitative and qualitative, when compared to companies bringing only incremental innovations to market. So why isn’t every company in the modern economy attempting category creation? Well, it turns out it’s not easy. In fact, it’s brutally hard when compared to the disruption playbook that we’ve been embracing as an industry for the last several decades. The intention of the rest of the book is to introduce a new playbook, influenced by some of the best category creators of our time, to support your business as you bravely go down this path. But before we get into the tactics, it’s important that you understand what you’re getting yourself into.