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Don’t Be Another Boring Business (Brand)
A strange thing happens when many startups begin marketing to businesses.
The color palette turns blue. The language fills with words like intelligence, transformation, and scale. The website features serious people staring at dashboards as if quarterly earnings depend on their posture.
The company may be innovative.
The brand looks like everyone else.
B2B buyers expect credibility, but credibility does not require conformity. They are still people, and people notice personality, remember stories, and respond to ideas that make them feel something.
Serious product. Serious problem. Serious buyer.
But your marketing doesn’t have to be seriously dull.
Abnormal Wants to Be Anything but Normal
Abnormal AI built its reputation using behavioral AI to protect companies from email attacks. Its technology has since expanded into identity and AI security, but its brand is still strongly associated with email protection.
That creates a familiar startup problem: the product has grown faster than the market’s understanding of it.
In November, Abnormal hired Don Jeter as chief marketing officer to broaden that perception. Jeter has said he wants the company to move beyond conventional feature-heavy B2B marketing and create cultural moments people naturally want to share. His stated ambition is to make Abnormal the most talked-about cybersecurity company in 2027.
That does not mean abandoning the technical story.
It means giving more people a reason to notice it.
At Jeter’s previous company, Torq, the cybersecurity brand sponsored Monster Jam, created a “Torq, not torque” platform, and brought a 20-foot inflatable skeleton and tattoo bus to a security conference. The executions were unusual, but they were not random. They were built around the brand’s name, personality, and desire to stand apart in a crowded security market.
That distinction matters.
Being bold is not the same as being loud.
Pictured here, Abnormal AI CMO Don Jeter is working to expand the brand beyond its email-security roots as the product moves into identity and AI security. His challenge is familiar to growing startups: helping the market’s understanding catch up with the business without losing the credibility that built it.
Distinctiveness Should Belong to the Brand
A giant inflatable skeleton may attract attention. That does not automatically make it good marketing.
Before pursuing any unconventional idea, ask:
Could this idea plausibly come from one of our competitors?
Does it reinforce something meaningful about our name, product, audience, or point of view?
Will people remember the company, or only the stunt?
Can the idea extend into content, sales conversations, events, and customer experiences?
The strongest creative ideas do more than interrupt people. They help encode the brand in memory.
LinkedIn’s B2B Institute recommends evaluating brand assets by two qualities: fame and uniqueness. Fame measures how many buyers connect an asset to your company. Uniqueness measures whether they connect it to your company alone.
A distinctive color, character, phrase, visual device, or recurring format can make every campaign work harder because recognition begins before the audience reads the logo.
Use the Distinctive Asset Grid to inventory your colors, typography, imagery, language, characters, sounds, and product-interface motifs. Then test the most promising assets with customers to learn which ones are actually associated with your brand.
Your team’s favorite asset is not necessarily a distinctive one.
Customers make the call.
Gong Made Enterprise Software Feel Human
Gong offers another useful example.
Revenue intelligence software could easily have been marketed through dashboards, algorithms, and predictive accuracy. Instead, Gong built a bright, energetic identity around helping salespeople become more successful.
Its bulldog mascot, Bruno, appeared across its website, advertising, social content, and events. As Gong moved upmarket, the company refined its visual identity but deliberately retained the personality and distinctive assets that had made the brand recognizable. Gong described its strategy as human-centered rather than technology-led, even though its product was built on sophisticated AI and machine learning.
The lesson isn’t that every B2B startup needs a mascot.
Please don’t order 10,000 branded stuffed animals before product-market fit.
The lesson is that your expertise and personality can coexist.
Customers need to trust that you understand the problem. They don’t require you to explain it like an instruction manual.
Gong’s refreshed ads preserve the bright colors, energetic personality, and human-centered spirit that made the brand recognizable. The company refined its identity for a larger enterprise audience without turning sophisticated software into another wall of technical jargon.
A Practical Distinctiveness Sprint
A lean startup can begin in one week:
Day 1: Audit the category.
Place ten competitor homepages, ads, and LinkedIn feeds side by side. Highlight repeated colors, claims, images, and phrases.
Day 2: Identify what you refuse to copy.
Choose three category conventions that make everyone blend together.
Day 3: Find your source material.
Look at your name, founder story, product behavior, customer culture, and strongest point of view. Distinctiveness should grow from something real.
Day 4: Create three brand devices.
Develop a recurring visual element, verbal pattern, character, campaign format, or recognizable content series.
Day 5: Test recognition.
Show the assets without your company name and ask target buyers what they associate with them. Tools such as Attest can help test creative directions with relevant audiences.
Then repeat the winners consistently. Distinctiveness is not created by having many ideas. It is built by making a few good ones famous.
Tools such as Attest can help brands test which creative elements audiences notice, remember, and associate with the company. Once you identify the strongest assets, repeat them consistently. Distinctiveness comes from making a few good ideas famous.
Final Thought
B2B buyers don’t become emotionless procurement robots when they open their laptops on the hunt for a new solution, service or tool.
They still notice. They still feel. They still remember.
Be credible enough to earn the meeting and distinctive enough to make the shortlist.
Because looking serious may reassure the room.
Looking exactly like everyone else ensures no one remembers you were in it.
Best,
Edwin
