Kellblog covers topics related to starting, leading, and scaling enterprise software startups including company strategy, financing strategy, go-to-market strategy, sales, marketing, positioning, messaging, and metrics
Every day I hear more and more about the “sea of sameness” from founders, CEOs, CROs, and CMOs.
The dialog goes something like this:
There are so many products out there,
They are getting more similar,
Customers are more confused than ever,
Unable to see the differences between them.
Thus, we are lost in sea of sameness.
I believe the first four statements are largely true, though I might challenge statement two. But the conclusion — that we are inevitably flotsam in a sea of sameness — is where I beg to differ most.
Somewhere along the way, we got lost. We’ve turned what should have been the problem statement into an invitation to a pity party. The correct response to differentiation challenges isn’t “woe is me,” but “that’s why we get paid the big bucks.”
That’s our job. That’s what we do here: differentiate similar products in the minds of customers. See Positioning. No, it’s not easy. But the day you think differentiation is impossible is the day you should turn in your marketing gun and badge. Differentiation is always possible. If consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers can differentiate rice or yogurt, then we can darn well differentiate enterprise software.
While we’re at it, none of these arguments are new. Thirty years ago, when we were building Business Objects, most customers couldn’t tell you the differences between Actuate, Brio, BusinessObjects, Cognos, Crystal, Discoverer, Essbase, Forest & Trees, MicroStrategy, OLAP@Work, Panorama, ReportSmith, Spotfire, TM1, and a dozen other business intelligence tools. (Yes, markets were crowded back in the day, too.)
It was not because those differences didn’t exist. It was because you had to be a connoisseur to see most of them. But most customers aren’t connoisseurs and don’t want to be. They’re just businesspeople with problems that they’re hoping to solve.
Differentiation is a key duty of product marketing [1]. You do it in three ways:
Essence distillation. First, you need to find the essence of what makes the product different. Sometimes those differences are general, sometimes they’re specific to given use-cases. The key questions are: What’s actually different? What’s not, but maybe the founders wished it were? What used to be different, but isn’t any more [2]? What’s different, but only in shades-of-gray and not in black-and-white [3]? You need to get to the heart of what’s both actually different and differentiate-able, in the sense that you can explain why pretty easily.
Emphasis of differentiated features. Once you understand what’s different, you need to build a message that emphasizes your differentiation. One standard approach is to “set the agenda” by turning your differentiation list into your buyer’s selection criteria. One way to do that is to write an Evaluation Guide that explains the key features buyers should be looking for and which prominently includes your key differentiators and why they matter.
Selling benefits and consequences. Every feature has benefits (the good things that happen when you have it) and consequences (the bad things that happen when you don’t). Great marketers market both. Think: alerting is critical to the successful deployment of your conversational intelligence system [4]. Or: God help you if your data governance platform can’t manage data assets from the modern data stack [5].
In short: if you’re shopping for a product in [category], then be sure to find one that includes features ABC. If you do, you’ll succeed and reap benefits DEF. If you don’t, you’ll fail and face consequences PDQ. See my post on how to build a marketing message for more.
Navigating the Sea of Sameness
So how do you navigate the sea of sameness? Good old-fashioned product marketing. But if the answer is so simple, one must wonder, why are people talking so much about the sea of sameness today? Why is the volume so high on this message?
Are products really getting so similar that customers can’t see differences among them? Or is it something else?
I think the sea-of-sameness conversation is less about changes in markets, and more about changes in marketers. That is, the staffing profile of today’s software CMOs.
Back in the day, nearly 100% of CMOs came from product marketing backgrounds. Today, that’s no longer true. Because pipeline generation is now the sine qua non of marketing, the vast majority of today’s CMOs come from demand generation backgrounds.
So, when faced with a challenging differentiation problem, it’s a little too easy for them to blame the market and tell the CEO that we’re lost in a sea of sameness.
When you’re only tool’s a hammer, problems that don’t look like nails are for someone else to solve. Many CMOs are, in effect, saying that the problem isn’t marketing’s lack of skills in finding and emphasizing product differentiation, but that such differentiation does not exist.
Hogwash. The fault lies not within our stars but within ourselves.
What’s a founder/CEO to do about all this?
Beware knee-jerk brand spending. If you follow this line of reasoning, you then say “well, since we can’t differentiate our product, we’re going to need to differentiate our company. Ergo, we need to spend a ton on branding.” While brand spend might be a good thing for your company, it might not be. But God help you if you think differentiating your company is going to be easier than differentiating your product [6].
Hire a strong product marketer. In most cases they should report directly to you — and not a CMO more interested in pipegen or a product leader more interested in roadmap. While board members might question this as unusual, you’ll find a better product marketer if they work directly for you and remove a potentially uninterested middleman.
Work closely with them. Great product marketers need to interact with (even, interview) the CEO, founders, and product leaders repeatedly, searching for nuggets, and structuring what they hear. The process is highly iterative and somewhat subjective. Hopefully with each cycle you improve both quality and consensus.
Support them. While the product marketer should be able to hold their own in debates with sales, product, and the e-team, there is no substitute for founder/CEO support when trying to standardize a company on a message. Think: “I know this may not be perfect, but it’s very, very good, and we’ve iterated ten times with Sandy. This is what we’ve decided to go with.”
As a founder/CEO you’re likely to already be hearing about the sea of sameness from your sales and marketing teams. The question is: what are you going to do about it?
Blame the product, and set off on a endless quest for potentially irrelevant differentiation – all while investing more and more of your marketing dollars in branding? Or hire some product marketers who can distill the essence of what you’ve got today and build on it?
There is no sea of sameness. Only marketers who don’t know how to differentiate.
Notes
[1] Some product marketers think demonstrating value is the job. And in some situations (e.g., an early-stage startup selling an entirely new thing) you do certainly need to sell value. But in more developed markets, the game quickly changes from why buy one to why buy mine? The reward for successfully selling the concept is typically N competitors all selling something similar.
[2] Companies often cling to lost differentiators, well past their neutralization date. This is likely due to positive reinforcement from past success and, surprisingly, the fact that it usually still works for a while even though the feature is no longer differentiated. (A mind is a difficult thing to change.) But eventually customers learn that the differentiation is no more, and you lose both product differentiation and credibility with the customer.
[3] And is harder to demonstrate. So hard, perhaps, that it’s not worth trying. This is why I often refer to “graying-out” competitive differentiators. You don’t need to match them functionally; you just need enough to take their formerly black-and-white difference and turn it gray, changing their claim from “only” to “better.”
[4] And you should be able to explain why.
[5] And yes, you should explain in detail the exact problems that God will need to help you with. The rhetoric is fine, but only if you can back it up.
[6] If you think tech products all look the same to customers, try tech companies. They’ve all got hip founders who went to Stanford to MIT, tons of venture capital (and no, they can’t tell Redpoint from Sequoia), modern offices, ping pong tables, youthful energy, a “we’re going to change the world” vision, customer focus and integrity as core values (regardless of whether they actually practice either), and a strong conviction that their people is really what differentiates them. Think hard about really differentiating your company from a dozen others, in your space or not, and then you might find yourself in a real hurry to go back and differentiate your product.
I’m late with this year’s predictions post because I’ve discovered that writing while recovering from knee surgery, zonked on painkillers, is a surprisingly difficult endeavor. Onward, through the fog. And apologies for the delay.
I’m always humbled by the act of making predictions. A few months ago, I was in London, sipping champagne at the BAFTA, improbably discussing the mast on Mike Lynch’s superyacht. As I talked and sipped, with my mind already in 2025 predictions mode, I couldn’t help but think: I’ve made a few predictions about Lynch in the past, but how could anyone have predicted this?
On that note, let’s begin our eleventh annual Kellblog predictions post. As always, I’ll review my 2024 predictions (with my generous self-scoring) and then make ten predictions for 2025. This is neither business nor investment advice and this content is provided for information and entertainment purposes only. See my FAQ and T&Cs for disclaimers. See note [1] for my policy on political content.
2024 Predictions Review
1. Election dejection. Hit. The election certainly was distracting. The media generally did emphasize “odds, not stakes” in their coverage. My comment about “testing the once-veiled political neutrality of Silicon Valley,” was the understatement of the year with Elon Musk, A16Z, Sam Altman, the All-In Bros, and several others coming out in direct, vocal and fiscal support of Trump. Andreessen’s take was the most interesting, effectively saying they made me do it, accompanied by explanations (some might say rationalizations) to justify their position as self-declared, single-issue voters. In effect, to modernize an old argument, “what’s good for VC is good for America.” In the end, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that when the president puts a For Sale sign on access, that some come forward as interested buyers of power.
2. A slow bounce back in startup land. Hit. I correctly called 2024 as a transition year where the Silicon Valley system would purge itself of recent excesses. ARR growth rates continued to get hammered. ARR multiples hovered around historical means, around half of what they were during ZIRP. See these slides from Aventis.
While I was correct that 2024 would be a tough year, I was over optimistic in thinking we’d turn the corner. I now think the bloodletting will continue in 2025. AI will be a huge driver of the rebound, because of both the large VC investment it attracts and its ability to convert headcount budget into software budget (e.g., AI SDRs).
3. The year of efficient growth. Hit. Efficient growth was the watchword in 2024, with companies delivering increases in both profitability and Rule of 40 scores. Again from Aventis:
Rule of 40 scores increased more moderately than profitability, a reflection of companies’ struggles with cracking the code on efficient growth.
Investors did increasingly look at ARR/head as an overall efficiency measure. Bessemer’s new Rule of X gathered momentum as a key SaaS metric because it better accounts for the ~2.2x greater importance of growth over profit in explaining valuation.
4. AI climbs the hype cycle. Hit. While I’m not sure this requires explanation, I’ll share two observations. First, per Pitchbook, AI grabbed 36% of VC deal value in 2024 on its relentless upward march. Frankly, I’m surprised that figure wasn’t more than 50%.
Second, in the enterprise at least, I think Salesforce made the launch of the year by doing what they do best – neatly packaging industry evolution into a simple three-part message and broadcasting it to the world. I’m not talking about technology innovation; I’m talking about the service they perform for the market by widely broadcasting key positioning messages including (a) we are in the agentic era of AI (the previous two being predictive and generative) and (b) it’s safe for enterprises to get into the AI water.
Great marketers remove fear from the equation in new technology adoption. While profit-motivated in the macro, enterprises are risk-averse in the micro because executives literally bet their hard-earned careers on the success or failure of new technology projects. Credible announcements from enterprise leaders do far more to grease the skids of enterprise adoption than the endless, ever-inflating prognostications from Sam Altman, whose views were summarized by one critic as, “we are now confident that we can spin bullshit at unprecedented levels, and get away with it.”
5. AI-driven GTM efficiency. Hit. There has certainly been an explosion in AI-powered, go-to-market tools from startups. Mega-vendors, keenly aware of the deadly potential of disruptive technology, have not been caught flatfooted, either. (That’s the often-ignored, second-order effect of everyone now having read The Innovator’s Dilemma.) While I don’t think we have yet captured Battery’s 30% increased efficiency target, I believe we will in 2025, particularly for more mature SaaS businesses. New and AI-driven SaaS businesses will likely be investing so much in growth that it will be hard to see those same-store sales productivity increases when they are mixed with the large investments in new capacity (which is a fundamental limitation of the CAC ratio as a growth efficiency metric). But, overall, I think we are well on the way to achieving the GTM productivity improvements promised by AI GTM tools. Keep investing in them and experimenting with them. What’s a competitive advantage one day is often table stakes the next.
6. Beyond search. Hit. To paraphrase REM, it’s the end of the (Internet search) world as we know it. This MIT Technology Review article does a great job of explaining the evolution of search and how conversational interfaces are replacing the search box and generated answers replacing lists of links. This will have a profound impact on businesses that rely on Internet search for traffic, leads, and customers, from publishers to e-commerce providers. And it will impact any business that relies on digital marketing, such as paid search, SEO, or content marketing. So, basically everyone.
Marketers should understand these impacts and get ready for a future of zero-click marketing. While HubSpot’s SEO crash recently made headlines, I agree with Kyle Poyar that they’ve adequately hedged themselves against this. The question is, of course, have you? Lest all this sound too scary, I offer this excerpt from Rand Fishkin.
I believe that this is not an apocalypse for digital marketers.
These are important things that we need to consider, and we need to, as a result, invest in zero click kinds of marketing and change our entire thought process around what we’re doing online with digital marketing. But influence has always been better than traffic. Traffic was always a vanity metric. I love my friend Wil Reynolds who posted this video about showing how their traffic, Seer’s traffic, his company’s traffic had dropped 40%, and it seemed like the end of the world, but sales were up 20% because traffic is not the same as conversions. Traffic is not the same as customers. Traffic isn’t even the same as fans.
So, like REM, I feel fine.
7. From RAGs to riches. Hit. I like RAG because it’s a practical approach that solves or mitigates key problems with LLMs (e.g., hallucinations, explainability, sourcing), all while leveraging their tremendous power. In 2024, I think RAG established itself as a cornerstone technology for enterprise AI. These twoposts provide a detailed review of RAG’s progress in 2024. Menlo’s The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise report shows RAG as the dominant and fastest-growing design pattern in enterprise AI.
8. Outbound finds its proper place. Hit. I think that companies, assisted by the rapid adoption of AI SDRs (e.g., Piper), are increasingly figuring out some key truths about SDRs.
Inbound SDRs are an extension of marketing and, due to their fairly rote work, are increasingly being replaced by AI SDRs.
Outbound SDRs are an extension of sales and, due to their relatively complex work, are not easily replaceable by AI SDRs.
Unfocused outbound is generally an unproductive activity. You are better off investing in inbound and partners if you don’t have defined, high-value targets.
Outbound SDRs are best used as part of targeted account programs, such as ABM, aimed at high-value customers. Think: is the juice worth the squeeze?
9. The reprise of repricing. Partial hit. The best data I’ve found here is in a report from Carta, which suggests that I was a year late: option repricing appears to have peaked in 2023. That said, this chart contains only one quarter of 2024 data. The 2H24 version of this report should be out soon, so we’ll know more in a few weeks. Either way, if your company is still digging out from valuation overhang, it’s never too late to consider repricing. Look at last year’s predictions post for more.
10. Peak podcasting. Miss. Podcasts continued their upward march in 2024. While I’d argued that podcasts would peak in 2024, both market forecasts and industry trends suggest that podcasts will continue to grow in the years to come. The demise of Internet search and the associated need for companies to build their own first-party audiences will drive podcasts to grow in importance. While I’d written that 2024 might be the last good year to start a business podcast, I think 2025 will be a good one as well. So, if you don’t have a business podcast yet, think about starting one. Just make sure you produce good content.
Kellblog Predictions for 2025
1. America gets what we deserve. We voted for it, both via the electoral college and the popular vote, so we’re going to deserve what we get. That will include:
A more brazen, more conflicted, and less constrained Trump. In short, we’ll see “Trump, Unbridled.” The unlikely bedfellows that elected him will discover exactly what they ordered and exactly who the administration is going to serve. Trump will face less resistance on both the internal front (i.e., intra-party, intra-staff) and external front (i.e. Democratic). Decreased internal resistance will result from fealty-based screening and fear-based leadership, making quick examples of those who step out of line. Decreased external resistance will come from a mix of advance obeying, a sense of futility, and continuous (if incorrect) mandate rhetoric. If the Democrats brought knives to a gunfight last term, this time they’re bringing cupcakes.
A more divided country. I’d initially thought the more brazen approach would result in buyer’s remorse, but I now think it’s more likely to result in increased division, with supporters doubling down in response to each fresh outrage. Aided by a more fearful and less hostile media, Trump’s apologists may need to contort to new degrees, but they will invariably support virtually anything he says or does. Thus, the country’s divide will widen, with one side believing that we’re making the tough decisions needed to restore America’s greatness and the other thinking we’re destroying many of the things that made America great in the first place.
A more distracted country. I think of the government like plumbers. I have little interest in what they do and how they do it. I don’t view plumbing as a spectator sport. I just want things to work. But we have now signed up for four more years of stunts, boasts, bluffs, brags, parade jumping (e.g., Stargate), hyperbole, constitutional crises, and trial balloons. Trump is a master at centering attention on himself, has turned shamelessness into a superpower, and paralyzed the traditional media in the process. I’ve always been surprised that we haven’t seen clear opportunity costs associated with all this distraction. In 2025, I think we will.
Get used to hearing “unprecedented” a lot. It, as was once said, will be wild.
2. The broligarchs enjoy their 15 minutes of fame. For some, the agenda was preemptive defense. For others, a desire to deregulate AI, crypto, or big tech M&A. For a few, a chance to grab power and live in the spotlight. For many, the ideological pursuit of sci-fi-inspired visions.
We know who the broligarchs are and why they’re here. A surprising number hail from the PayPal mafia. We know that they’ll all get their 15 minutes of fame. The big question is how long will they last?
Given Trump’s mercurial personality, the revolving door of “best people” in Trump’s inner circle, the sizes of the various egos, and the fact that the broligarchs are all much smarter than Trump, I think the general answer will be: not long.
For every person who hangs on, I think we’ll generate several Rex Tillersons who don’t. As a reminder, while his “fucking moron” quote was never publicly confirmed, here’s what Tillerson did say about his experience:
“It was challenging for me,” he said, “coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented Exxon Mobil corporation, to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, ‘This is what I believe.’ ”
It won’t be easy for the data-driven tech bros to handle such arbitrary decision-making. But to steal a line from Airplane: “they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say let ‘em crash.”
I think the odds of any given individual hanging on will be an inverse function of their desire for power. The more they’re conducting business as usual and simply looking out for their firm’s or industry’s interests (e.g., Cook, Bezos), the longer they should be around. The more they’re trying to work in the inner circle (e.g., Musk, Sacks, Ramaswamy), the shorter.
Heck, Ramaswamy couldn’t even last one Scaramucci before getting blown out. While Musk’s $270M may have bought himself a longer tenure, featuring multiple lives, we’ll see how many times he gets to embarrass Trump before being blown out himself.
3. The startup ecosystem purge continues. As mentioned above, I think the cleanse that started in 2024 will continue into 2025. In many ways, startup investing is like playing craps. You play for a long time, accumulate bets on the table, and either win slowly as different bets pay off at different times – or lose a lot all at once when the shooter rolls a seven. Personally, I’ve never had more angel investments sell, cease operations, or return money than I have had in the past 12 months. There are two opposing forces in play: cash reserves and exit multiples. I think that many startups have strategically decided to sell, but don’t want to start a process in what’s clearly a buyer’s market. Look at these feeble M&A-specific exit multiples from Aventis:
Thus, many startups are tightly managing their cash reserves to buy time and hopefully sell into a better market. I believe that as multiples start to bounce back many of those in waiting will be able to achieve their exits.
4. Attention is the new oil. In 2006, Clive Humby, coined the phrase “data is the new oil,” to suggest that data would power the information economy in much the same way as petroleum powered the industrial economy. Today, I think we can replace “data” with “attention.” In his upcoming book, The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes argues that every single aspect of human life is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention. Attention is a kind of resource, he argues, it has value, and if you can seize it, you seize that value.
This harkens back to Jeff Hammerbacher’s 2011 quote, “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” Today, you might update that with “click anything,” as best demonstrated by the bizarre game Stimulation Clicker, which ends up part game, part real-life reenactment, and part parable.
We are moving, Hayes argues, from the information age to the attention age. The masters of attention, such as Trump and Musk, already understand this and are leveraging it to their advantage. The rest of us need to learn how to play the game, both on offense and defense. I think that will accelerate in 2025.
5. The world wide web, as we knew it, is dead. Born: 1989. Died: 2024. The original web vision was for an open, world wide network of hyperlinked content, freely accessible to all.
That worked until the information wants to be free crowd got (rightfully) squashed by paywalls to protect creators. Then Web 2.0 came along, creating a read/write web, with user-generated content, so that individuals could not just read, but publish and share content without requiring any technical skills. The mobile explosion extended connectivity but undermined the vision as applications and app stores (with their heavy platform fees) replaced web browsing and websites – resulting in oddities such as the inability to buy an e-book in the iPhone Kindle application.
In recent years, platform providers (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn) declared war on the hyperlink, unapologetically downranking content that included links beyond their walled gardens. Google’s ever more ambitious front-running (e.g., featured snippets, AI-generated answers) provided the final nail in the coffin, decimating search traffic, and replacing it with the zero-click search.
When was the last time you saw an in-line hyperlink, particularly on a corporate website? Why are newsletters and Substack replacing blogs and WordPress? Why do people bury links in comments and replies? Why can’t WordPress auto-post to Twitter? Why did Seatguru stop updating its content years ago? Why are sites like SlideShare so ad-laden as to become unusable? Why, when I have 20K+ followers, do I have posts that get only 500 views? In a world with algorithm-driven feeds, what does “follow” even mean anymore?
These are the death throes of the world wide web. Why must platforms invariably undergo enshittification? It’s the tragedy of the commons all over again.
While web 3.0 and a Read/Write/Own paradigm is theoretically coming to save us, I’m not holding out much hope. As interesting as some of those ideas are, Web 3.0 strikes me as too much of a hodgepodge of agendas and ideas. I think the current web 3.0 (which is actually web 3.0 v2) has roughly the same odds of success as its predecessor, web 3.0 v1, aka, the semantic web.
So, for now, I think we’ll remain stuck in the Hotel California era of the web: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
6. Working for the algo. You hear a lot of concerns about AI replacing jobs. But I’m also concerned about something else: about us working for algorithms as opposed to algorithms working for us.
Then congratulations. You’re not working for the man. You’re working for the algo.
CAPTCHA is my favorite perverse example because you have a human trying to prove to a computer that they’re human. Or 2FA, where you have a human trying to prove to a computer that they are who they say you are. Ponder that for a second.
In 2025, I think we’ll increasingly be working for the algo. When I’m performing transactional tasks, I already feel like I’m spending as much time on CAPTCHA and 2FA as on the tasks themselves. And I definitely dislike the menial work I do to tune my content for maximum reach.
Working for the algo isn’t necessarily bad. But it does pose a lot of questions about who is making or tuning it. Bluesky’s custom feeds are one approach to solving one of the many problems here. Passkeys help with security. I’m sure we’ll see other solutions arise as well.
7. The death of SaaS is greatly exaggerated. Satya Nadella made headlines with a three-minute commentary during a recent BG2 podcast appearance which many translated to: SaaS is Dead!
While this is a somewhat fashionable thing to say these days, let’s first look at what Satya actually said:
“Yeah, I mean, it’s a very, very, very important question, the SaaS applications, or biz apps. So let me just speak of our own Dynamics. The approach at least we’re taking is, I think, the notion that business applications exist, that’s probably where they’ll all collapse, right in the agent era, because if you think about it, right, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic. The business logic is all going to these agents, and these agents are going to be multi-repo CRUD, right? So they’re not going to discriminate between what the back end is. They’re going to update multiple databases, and all the logic will be in the AI tier, so to speak. And once the AI tier becomes the place where all the logic is, then people will start replacing the backends, right?”
Translating the surprising amount of technobabble, he’s making an old-age argument that a business application is “just” a UI tied to a database with some business logic, the implication being: how hard can that be? Workday’s $70B, Salesforce’s $330B, and SAP’s $330B market caps all say “pretty hard” to me. Or, if not technically “hard” per se, that there’s nevertheless a lot of value in tying those things together.
Satya builds upon this to say that the business logic can now be handled by agents, again a repackaged argument that once was made about rules engines, business process automation, and low-code development tools and one that trivializes the domain expertise built into business applications. I think the quote says more about Microsoft and their worldview than it does about the future of business applications.
To bring some data to bear here, I found this interesting chart in this excellent deck from Aventis, which asks companies what inning SaaS adoption is in at their firms.
I think the best short answer I’ve seen to this question comes from Jason Lemkin:
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of SaaS have been greatly exaggerated.
8. An unlikely revival of branding. In an era of efficient growth and highly scrutinized marketing budgets, it’s surprising to predict a revival of branding. But I think one’s coming because I’m increasingly hearing statements like:
We’ve spent the past two years optimizing pipeline generation efficiency.
Now we need to focus on winning more deals.
SaaS products are increasingly lost in a “sea of sameness,” and we are thus unable to differentiate at a product level.
Branding is therefore the last bastion of differentiation
So, we need to win deals based not on product superiority, but on brand value and experience.
In short, since we can’t differentiate our product, we need to differentiate our company.
I have two problems with this logic:
As someone raised in product marketing: you can always differentiate your product. If you can’t, it’s time to turn in your marketing badge and gun.
As someone with a child who works in CPG: if my daughter can differentiate fermented milk (i.e., yogurt), then we should darn well be able to differentiate a complicated piece of enterprise software.
But I do understand how a demandgen-oriented CMO – as most are these days – could get caught up in this logic. So, before you embark on a branding program, ask yourself three questions:
Are you sure you can’t increase your win rate the old-fashioned way — through product marketing and market research (e.g., win/loss analysis, sales enablement, sales training)?
Are you guilty of Law of the Hammer bias? Is branding the right solution, or are you simply more comfortable working on branding than product marketing?
Do you have the time and money required to complete a successful branding program? Will your tenure as CMO be long enough to see the fruits of your labor, or will your successor send you a posthumous medal of honor for your contribution?
Whether done for the right or the wrong reasons, I think we’ll see a revival of branding campaigns in 2025. If you’re doing one, make sure you’re in the first group, by ensuring that you’ve exhausted product marketing solutions to the problem.
9. PR is the new SEO. It turns out that one of the best ways to optimize inclusion in ChatGPT results is, per Rand Fishkin, “getting your brand mentioned alongside the right words and phrases in authoritative media.
In other words: PR.
Here’s a link to Rand’s five-minute explainer video.
I guess that if you live long enough, everything comes full circle. This is good news for marketing teams that kept an active PR function and agency during the dark times. It’s bad news for those who turned off PR and will now need to restart from scratch.
There are numerous techniques that marketers must learn to build their LLM optimization skills while still running traditional SEO programs in 2025. Here are a few of the better articles I’ve read on the topic.
Emily Kramer’s post summarizing an interview with Flow Agency
10. LinkedIn enters the social media death cycle. LinkedIn is at a fork in the road. With users fleeing other social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) and trolls, bot-nets, and the like wanting to increase their reach, there is an increasing amount of non-work content on LinkedIn. For example, jokes, memes, snark, and political content. And that’s not to mention the gray zone content where business leaders are making political commentary.
This trend has not gone unnoticed by users, and I think they generally don’t like it.
LinkedIn can go down the usual path to enshittification, relying on engagement as their North Star metric. Because this content is highly engaging, the engagement scores are through the roof: look at the numbers in this screen clip.
The problem is, of course, by allowing and amplifying this highly engaging content, you get more engagement, right up until the point your site becomes a hellscape and nobody wants to use it anymore (e.g., X). Then the hapless platform provider finds that network effects also work in reverse: the more your friends stop using a site, the less incentive you have to go there.
Or they can make the tough decision and focus on their original vision, purpose, and positioning: a social network for work. While they have taken modest steps, such as a feed preference to turn off political content, the features simply don’t work. If they want to preserve their status as the social network for work, they’ll have to do much, much more. And that’s not to mention getting core work social network functionality, such as job seeking, to work properly.
While I think they’re a smart organization, the sirens’ calls of engagement are strong. I’m predicting that in 2025 they only take half-hearted measures to preserve their positioning and thus enter the social media death cycle. Some would argue they’re already in it.
Thank you for reading all the way through. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, and I wish you a happy and healthy 2025.
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Notes
[1] As described in my FAQ, I generally avoid political content on Kellblog unless I’m using politics to illustrate strategy and messaging. My annual predictions post is an exception because I like to start at the macro level and, particularly in recent times, that will likely involve some intersection of business and politics. Instead of attempting the impossible (i.e., pretending to be neutral), I will allow my views to leak out in the process but, rest assured, I’m not trying to change your mind about anything. Note that I’ll delete comments that try to engage in political conversation as opposed to comments about the predictions themselves. If you are interested in my broader views, you can follow me on Bluesky where I post on a broad range of topics (largely just sharing and commenting on what I read) including SaaS, VC, Silicon Valley, strategy, politics, current affairs, France, the Grateful Dead, databases, humor, and others.
I was thrilled to get together with Janessa Lantz (former CMO at dbt Labs) to join her and Amrita Gurney’s podcast, Standout Startup Brands, to discuss a topic that most people don’t even want to talk to me about — branding!
Yes, I’m known as something of a brandcurmudgeon, but I’m also very much a marketer and I do care a lot about branding — but approach it with pragmatism, caution, and healthy skepticism.
To me, branding is about trust. My definition is quite meta, but it’s trusing that you will be you. Trusting that you look like you. That you sound like you. That you act like you. That your execution is consistent with your vision. Basically, have you defined a clear character and are you staying within it? You be you.
It starts with hygiene factors: is your corporate image even professional? Is your copy error-free and mechanically consistent (e.g., via style guide). They’re called hygiene factors because you get punished if you land beneath the bar, but get no extra credit for being above. For example, you might not hire someone who arrives in very dirty clothes, but I doubt you’ll pick the top candidate based because they wore the cleanest. So any money invested in coming in above the bar is effectively wasted. Clear the bar, but by an inch.
Consistent messaging across deliverables is arguably a hygiene factor. I wouldn’t think your terribly professional if I heard a different story across SDRs, sales, the website, a live webinar, and in reviews from industry analysts. Consistency is key to communications effectiveness, but it’s also a hygiene factor. Some people notice. The smart ones, I think.
You can stay consistent by making a marketing blueprint deck, a deck that captures the answers basic questions (what is it, what are the benefits of using it, why is it different, etc.) in a master deck that you continually update and reference as you build marketing deliverables.
Consistency is hard with genius founders who often have too many great ideas. To manage this, you need to get their buy-in about their best delivery and then standardize on it. And then hold accountable for not changing it every day.
If there’s a technical story behind your product, you should make a seminal white paper that tells it in about 8-12 pages. You’ll be surprised how hard this is — particularly with platform software — and it will help you both tighten your story and tell it consistently. It’s literally the first thing you should at a zero-to-one startup on the marketing front. (Writing it will also help you get started on the style guide.)
Why do I say “wait until you’re $100M until you focus on brand?” or “if you want to build a brand, go sell some software?” Because capital-B branding — hiring an agency that has no intent on tightening product message or increasing pipeline, but instead helps you determine brand values, brand promise, brand platform, etc. — usually can wait. Some marketers want to do it too early. Heck, it’s fun. But don’t do it too early. Simply put, if you’re $15M and not growing, nobody actually cares what you stand for. So don’t spend $300K trying to figure it out. Get big enough to be relevant, then tighten up who you think you are.
Most $100M companies still don’t have tight product and corporate messaging. Get your priorities right. Fill the pipeline. Helps sales win deals with product, competitive, and corporate messaging. And when all that is working (and if you’re hearing about troubles due to a lack of branding) then go hire an agency to work on capital-B branding. And I am not universally opposed to this! For example, I recently had a great experience with Twenty-First Century Brand on a branding project. My argument isn’t never. It’s be sure you’re doing it at the right time and place in your evolution.
Building a strong leadership message will help you win more deals than capital-B branding, so do it first. If you can convince people that you are the technology leader, the market leader, and the vision leader, you are going to win a ton of deals in a growing category. Why wouldn’t you want to buy from someone who you thought was all three?
I view content marketing and thought leadership as demand generation, not branding. So that may be a source of confusion as well. Kellblog itself is demand generation and awareness generation for my serivces as a advisor or board member. It monetizes indirectly and is more demand generation than demand capture, but it works and I practice what I preach in this department.
Lot’s wife‘s law (don’t look back) — why you should never communicate externally about smaller competitors.
Why, in competitive, the rule should be, “if they go low, we go lower” and not, “we go high.” Enterprise software sales is a full-contact sport. You need to train and arm your sellers to go play it. In a perfect world, they’re so well trained that they’re eagerly waiting what used to be the toughest attack points.
The other rule is, “when they go low, we get on the phone.” Never try to resolve competitor attacks via email. Use the attack as an opportunity to get on the phone and spend more time with the customer.
Why you should allocate enough budget to measure your external demand funnel: awareness, opinion, consideration, trial, purchase.
How to combat the age-old, “if we just had more at-bats we’d win more deals” or “nobody’s ever heard of us” claims from sales.
Thanks again to Amrita and Janessa for having me. The episode is here.
I first read The One to One Future by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in 1997, four years after it was published. As a marketer, the book made a big impression on me. It was revolutionary stuff: we should make the paradigm shift from mass marketing to individualized marketing.
When the book was published in 1993, newspaper ads were $75B/year, TV around $60B, the web browser was a mere three years old, and there were 623 total sites on the web. There was effectively no web advertising market. It was nine years before the Minority Report popularized a future vision of one-to-one advertising. It was six years before Paco Underhill published Why We Buy revealing insights gleaned by manually tracking shoppers to understand in-store behavior [1].
Look at the subtitle: “Building Relationships One Customer at a Time.” You could use that in a webinar today. The One to One Future was not just ahead of its time; it was so far ahead of its time that it could have equally been categorized under either “marketing” or “science fiction.”
Why?
It turns out, as with science fiction, that it’s easier to envision something than to build it. Remember, “they promised us flying cars and we got 140 characters.” [2]
Building individualized marketing systems required layers and layers of underpinnings that were simply not in place. You can’t do good personalization without a clean, real-time, 360-degree view of your customer. Clean means a big effort into data quality and data profiling and typically either master data management or a customer data platform [3]. Real-time means real-time data integration [4]. 360-degrees means pulling relevant data from virtually all of your systems. Self-driving cars don’t work on cow paths. Building those layers of requisite infrastructure has taken decades.
Marketing’s focus on the perfect offer was flawed. Say I found an offer with an 90% chance that you’d respond affirmatively. Perfect, right? But it was for a product that was out of stock. The perfect offer has to be for the right product, in the customer’s preferred size or color, and available to sell. We can’t just find the set called {great offers}. We needed to intersect it with the set called {in stock and need to sell}. This made a hard problem harder by pulling inventory and the supply chain into the equation.
Marketers got trapped in a vicious downward cycle of communications. Email click rates have nearly been cut in half over the past decade. Marketing’s solution? Send more emails to make up the difference. Email vendors, who typically price by the email, were only too happy to accommodate. That, however, is a short-term mentality. More bad email with lower open and click rates isn’t the solution. The same holds for ads and promotions. Marketing needs to get out of this race to the bottom. We need to focus on quality, not quantity. And pay vendors for performance delivered, not communications sent, while we’re at it.
Finally, the retail industry needed to shift mentality from store-first to digital-first. Roots, as they say, run deep and retailers have long, deep roots in physical stores. Bricks-and-mortar supposedly changed to clicks-and-mortar, but really, it was mortar-and-clicks the whole time. The industry never really changed to digital-first from store-first. Until Covid-19, that is. While this meme, popularized in Forbes, was intended for many industries, it could have been custom made for retail [5].
So where does Bluecore fit in?
Bluecore is a multi-channel personalization platform. They’re building what marketers in the past dreamed of, but couldn’t build, because the infrastructure wasn’t there. Now it can be built, and they’re building it.
Bluecore is an AI/ML company focused on retail analytics and personalization. I’ve blogged before that AI/ML is best applied to specific problems and not general ones, and this is a great example. They are a closed-loop, retailed-focused application that gets smarter every day and with each new customer. If you believed in the increasing returns of marketing leadership in technology markets before AI/ML [6], you should believe in them twice as much after.
Bluecore’s personalization understands both customer and product – and intersects them. Across a catalog of more than 250M products and SKUs, Bluecore can match customers and products at a 1-1 level. It automates what would have been the work of a team of in-house data scientists.
Bluecore is paid for performance, not volume. They back up their performance claims with a pricing model based not on volume but on success. This is a great example of superior technology enabling disruptive business model innovation.
Why am I advising Bluecore? Three reasons:
As a true, blue marketer this stuff genuinely interests me. I love working with marketing companies on marketing problems.
It’s always about the team. I’ve loved working with Fayez Mohamood (founder/CEO) and Sherene Hilal (SVP of Marketing). As a bonus, former Salesforce teammate Scott Beechuk is an investor and on the board. I like working with people who like working with me and appreciate my inimitable (I inadvertently almost typed inimical) style when it comes to feedback.
The momentum and market opportunity. Bluecore’s a highly successful company, having raised over $100M in VC with top-tier investors, and they are pursuing transformational change in a $4T market. The last 100 years in retail were all about stores, the next 100 will be about retailers meeting customers wherever they are. And that’s what Bluecore does.
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Notes
[1] And why, to this day, you can find still baskets strewn throughout many retail shops as opposed to only at the entrance. His work was kind of a manual predecessor to systems like RetailNext, whose founder I got to know through mutual investments in a prior life from StarVest.
[5] Apologies to frequent readers for using this meme again – but I just love it!
[6] Tech buyers, and particularly IT buyers, tend to face high opportunity costs and high switching costs and are ergo generally risk averse. This drives increasing returns for early market leaders. Think: no one ever got fired for buying IBM.
Decades ago I had the pleasure of watching a branding video, created by a San Francisco ad agency, narrated by an advertising executive with a familiar voice who’d narrated scores of commercials [1]. It was, I believe, entitled Staying in Character and while I’ve searched the internet for it many times over the years — and just spent another hour unsuccessfully trying again — I’ve never managed to find it.
The video talked about the importance of brands staying in character in their marketing and advertising. Sadly, nowadays, when you search for “brands staying in character,” you’re more likely to come up with an article about mascots than one about brand character.
All these thoughts were stirred up the other morning when I read this story about Hugh Grant.
Staying in Character used actors as one example, arguing that most actors’ worst movies are when they were (as the Hollywood expression goes) playing against type, such as John Wayne as a Roman centurion, Sylvester Stallone in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, or Macaulay Culkin playing a psychopathic murderer. While defying type entirely, or successfully playing against it, is undoubtedly a great accomplishment for an actor, most audiences don’t like it.
We want John Wayne as the tough lawman, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa, and the Home Alone kid as the Home Alone kid. We want actors playing in type, not against it.
It’s a straight conflict of interest between the actor/product and the audience/consumer. Hugh Grant wants to show the world that he can play a role other than the romantic Englishman. However, just as we want our coffees customized at Starbucks and the restrooms clean at McDonald’s, we want Hugh Grant to be a romantic Englishman. We don’t care if Hugh Grant is bored of being Hugh Grant. That’s his problem.
Musicians have the same challenge. They get tired of playing the same old songs and want to play their newer material, but the fans want to hear the classics [2]. James Taylor, ever humorous, put this well in discussing his hit cover of You’ve Got a Friend.
Taylor described the night he first heard songwriter Carole King perform the song. Taylor got so excited that, he said, “I literally ran to get my guitar and try to learn how to play it. Of course, I didn’t realize then I’d be playing it every night for the rest of my life.”
The other example I remember from the video was a discussion of Jack Daniels, who’s been credited with creating one of the longest-running advertising campaigns in history. Here are two of their ads from the 1980s.
That’s branding. It starts with the product and the packaging. But it’s also as much about who you are as how you talk. (By the way, isn’t that copywriting delightful?)
While storytelling is all the current marketing rage, and while these ads certainly tell stories, staying in character goes beyond the telling of individual stories to how you link numerous brand-building stories together over time.
Really, it’s about one thing: consistency.
Defining who you are (your essence) and how you talk (your voice)
Consistently communicating your essence in your voice — always, never playing against type
Sticking with that come hell, high water, or — much more dangerously — a new CMO
It’s about you being you. Or, for that matter, Hugh being Hugh. And it’s why:
Why most of us like Salesforce — and Bruce Campbell did the best job of branding in enterprise software that I’ve seen.
In the end, it’s about defining who you are, communicating it, and sticking with it. That’s staying in character. And it’s critical to any branding effort.
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Notes
[1] Yesterday’s guess was Hal Riney, but I don’t think it was him. The voice was too warm and not nasal enough.
I’m Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, blogger, and podcaster. I am an EIR at Balderton Capital and principal of my own eponymous consulting business.
I bring an uncommon perspective to enterprise software, having more than ten years’ experience in each of the CEO, CMO, and independent director roles in companies from zero to over $1B in revenues.
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over six years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues.
I love disruptive startups and and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, FloQast, Gainsight, Hex, Logikcull, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, Tableau, and Unaric.
I currently serve on the boards of Cyber Guru, Scoro, TechWolf, Vic.ai, and Widewail. I have previously served on the boards of Alation, Aster Data, Granular, Nuxeo, Profisee, and SMA Technologies.
