We Audited 100 B2B Brands. Here’s Why They All Look Alike (and How to Get Out)

Hello, humans. Thank you all so much for being here, and thank you to everyone who's already popped in the chat, where you're watching from. It's always just really nice. It's just really nice to hang out with lovely people who want to know about marketing stuff and look after each other. So thank you all so so much for taking the time. We appreciate you lots and lots. So let's get started with today's introduction. Today, we are blessed, to spend a little bit of time with one of my favorite people on planet Earth, Louis Grenier. Louis is a positioning and go to market expert for established b to b. He's the previous host of everyone hates marketers, which is where I got to know Louis, many, many years ago, famously for his interview with Seth Godin. Louis is someone I regard as a friend. He calls himself a troll, but I think I fundamentally call him something different, which is a good human being. A good human being who cares a lot about our industry and the people in it. And, today he's here to help us, which is a really lovely thing. Louis may also be a fundamentally human being, but he's also a sweary one. So please consider that your profanity warning for this session, that he may well swear and, that's okay. We're here to show up as as we would like. Today we'll run as a presentation, and then a q and a. So if you have any questions, Louis is like old hat at this. Like, we've both been doing this for a little while now. So he's already said that it'll pop into the chat throughout the duration of the presentation element, same with the q and a. But if you have chat comments, questions, pop them in the chat or the q and a feature as we go along, and, we'll absolutely make sure, to to focus on those throughout. Before we get started, I just wanna say a big thank you, to our sponsors because without them, I wouldn't be able to bring these sessions to you. The Marketing Meetup wouldn't be able to bring these sessions to you. And each week on rotation, what we do is we have a featured sponsor. So this week's featured sponsor is a company called Frontify. Now a lot of us are spending a lot of time, right now with AI on the horizon, not even on the horizon, definitely here, trying to bring together our brand guidelines, our company knowledge all into one space. Now Frontify are an organisation who have been doing this for years and years and years. And the advantage of that is that your brand guidelines, brand consistency, but also your company knowledge can be in one space everyone can access, but in a way which is controlled, measured, and means that everyone's singing from the same hymn sheet. So definitely take the chance to check out Frontify, probably more important now than ever as an organisation. Also, big thank you to Canva, to Wistia, so we're using Wistia for this webinar platform, to Frontify, Cambridge Martin College, Prismic, and Planable. We'll speak about each more on rotation as the weeks go by. So that's my introduction done. I'm just gonna say a big, big thank you. I've just seen the chat there saying hi to kids from Louie. So thank you so much, Louie. Thank you for being in the chat. You also to Nick, Chloe, Matthew, Chris, Catherine, Jillian, Leslie, Colette, James, Ash, Eileen, and so many more of you who've copied them in chat. Please do stay there throughout. Louis, it's over to you, my friend. Thank you so much for being here. Appreciate you lots and lots. I love you too, buddy. It's good to see all of you on this special day because it's the fourteenth July, obviously, but that's not why we're here. It's not to celebrate the Frenchness in all of us. It's to talk about how to stand out in B2B in particular. So yes, some of the lessons you'll hear are relevant to everyone marketing anything, but specifically today what I want to share is a study we've just done in the B2B market and by B2B we mean mostly B2B tech unrelated to SaaS, AI and stuff like that. I will use a couple of B words. It's not to sound super smart because I'm not. It's to be precise and specific about the terms I'm going to use. So instead of going straight away into graphs and beautiful things, I will define a couple of terms so that we are all on the same wavelength. So this is not my attempt to bore you to death, I promise, just to be specific. I will monitor the chat. I will spot questions or comments and whatnot, I will stop sharing slides to answer them if I found them relevant. If not, I will ignore them completely. So, as Joe said, I'm Louis Rainier. I've been doing this thing for a long time now and today this is specifically what I want to share. The there we go. Let me try again because now Joe but there you go. That's it. So the state of B2B brand distinctiveness twenty twenty six. Let's describe the key terms of this before we move on, right? While I have your full attention. So I'll be using three different terms in the next couple of minutes and I want to make sure we understand what that means. So first, an asset or brand asset. A brand asset is a memory retrieval shortcut. It's there to link a brand, your brand, to specific buying situations so it's easy to mine and easy to find. And assets win by building memory under a low attention context, which is the modern world. So a brand asset, I will give you a couple of categories. It could be like logo, shapes, colors, sound, jingle, characters, mascots and stuff like that. So that's what I mean by asset. By the way, I've just seen Lucy talking about my sauna. It is a sauna in the summer. It's an office in the winter. Differentiation versus distinctiveness. So a lot of people would talk about, you know, when you stand out they say I wish my brand was different or we need to differentiate ourselves when they mean distinctive and vice versa. So let me be clear about both. Differentiation is a very rational, very customer driven proposition. It's all about giving the right people a compelling reason to buy from you compelling reason by solving problems, struggles that people have that you are uniquely positioned to serve and to solve for them. So that's what differentiation is. So when you come up with a feature that no one else has that solves a proper need, when we talk about innovation, that's what it is. That's what differentiation is. Distinctiveness, which is the subject of this study, is about having I'm not going to say it. It's about having those types of assets that make your product easy to spot, identify and recall in a crowded market. So the best of both worlds is to have indeed both. The best brand out there managed to have true differentiation, meaning that they're a product that is clearly solving ignored struggles and distinctive, which means that they're able to stick out, to be noticed, to be remembered and end up in BioShortlist. So this is the boring ******* part done with, but I felt the need to describe, define them clearly because again, so many of us tend to confuse the two and it's bad news. So if it's not clear, please let us know. Joe had that covered already. Okay, so how it works. This is the study in a nutshell. First of all, we've used eight different types of assets. This is not my work. I stand on the shoulders of giants, mainly Jenny Romaniuk who's a professor in Ehrenberg Bass Institute of Marketing Science down in Australia. She wrote an excellent book called Building Distinctive Brand Assets. And what I've done is I've simply adapted those eight types for the online world. So if you can see for example number seven, Product UI. In the real world and in her studies tend to be about packaging, right? The retail sector, like the packaging of a product. So instead we are using the product UI as a means to describe packaging. Visual device as well, number three, slightly different but again pretty much on the same well length. So again, this is not my work. I'm simply rehashing it for my own benefit. Definitely follow her in particular for this. There's a lot of science behind it. It's really good and in-depth. So color, logo, visual device, typography, taglines, human identity, which could be a face like Joe, could be a mascot, also like Joe, could be an animal. As long as it has a human like appearance, as long as there is this anthropomorphic feeling to it, that's human identity. Product UI, so how the product looks like or how it's portrayed, and music and sound. So, the next part, and then I promise the boring part is over, we've scored each of the assets of each of the one hundred B2B companies we've audited across zero to three. So zero, they have none of that asset anywhere, all the way to three where they clearly stick out, not only in their category but also everywhere else. So I'm from Claremont, which is in France, as you know. Claremont is known for the Michelin Tire company, which also owns the Michelin Guide and the Michelin Stars and all of that. And they've been using the same human identity assets for more than a century, the Vivendum, right? This kind of scary person made of white tires. So that's an example of out of context recognition. And then if you add the eight scores, you can have a maximum of twenty four and we just created bands for each of those. So we were able to score companies on the back of those criteria. The last thing I'd say before I pause for a second is I've used Cloud Code to come up with a list of one hundred B2B companies because I didn't want to be biased and supply those myself. And it was assisted by AI. I can give more details about how specifically we've done it, but it's been reviewed and thoroughly reviewed by myself. I didn't let AI take the reign there, but it was helpful to save a ton of time. So, I'm going to stop sharing for a second, making sure we're all clear before we move on. I see people still slugging me off my office, so that's not helpful. I think so far so good. We've got Emma in the chat saying all clear. Thank you, Louis. But we've also got Josh saying stay alert, the Michelin man is called the Bibendum. I don't know why. It must mean tire in Latin. I don't know. Somebody can Google it. Josh is putting in English. Audio sounds extremely high for some Is it just me? I don't know. Alright, I'll figure it out. I'll figure it while I'm gone. Okay, so actually good question. Who scored makes it unbiased? So it is biased, let's be clear. It is biased in a sense that it's only a sample of one hundred B2B companies. Not too small, not too large. So we didn't go look after HubSpot and big, big, big companies. But we checked across, I show you the categories, think it is eight different type of industries represented. So yes, it's not a scientifically viable sample size that would hold up to scrutiny from a scientific standard, but it's good enough as a good sample to understand where roughly B2B is at when it comes to distinctiveness. I scored every single asset, every single brand myself, helped with Claude to get a start, but I've reviewed every single thing. So every single thing you're gonna see is based on my work, not anyone else's. Let's do this. Okay, top five findings. The first one, I started this research with a huge bias and it was, hey, in B2B everyone looks the same, barely any B2B companies seem to be taking any creative risks, but I didn't have really data to prove it. Now I do. As you can see here, essentially eighty out of the one hundred companies are either invisible, meaning Discord zero to six, or generic, meaning Discord seven to twelve. Only one out of the one hundred companies would be classified as honorable. And yes, you might argue that if we had used slightly different scoring techniques, slightly different criteria, You might have three or four or you might have zero. So don't read too much into the individual number. Don't read too much into, you know, this one is better than the other. That's not exactly what I'm trying to communicate here. It's more like this is the trend. This is the rough picture in B2B in general. Around eighty percent are incredibly invisible and essentially they blend the **** in. So that confirmed a lot of things for me and it was good to see actual results in Numbers. So let's spend more time on this one because it's even more important. So across the eight different types of assets, so color, logo, visual device, UI motive, typography, taglines, human identity and music. Color and logos are the top two assets that would be used by companies, right? So there's a clear indication that they've invested into developing those two things. So it could be their own set of colors that sticks out in the category or a logo that is really meant to be distinctive. So again, that's probably something that you'd expect, right? Out of the eight assets, those are the most common. When we think of brand distinctiveness, we think, yeah, logo, your color and all of that. But I think it's a mistake to think about distinctiveness as just the visual device, as just tickling the part of your customer's brain that is responsible for processing images and processing colors. Because if you go all the way down to the last two, human identity and music, those two are triggering different parts of the human brain. I'm going to destroy the first part, I don't remember exactly how it's called, but there is a part of the brain that is dedicated to recognizing faces or, you know, look alikes, things that almost look like a face. There's also a distinct part of the brain that is there to process sounds. And so it's proven that the more you tickle the default parts of your customer's brains, the more likely you are to stick out, to be remembered, to be noticed. And yes, it's interesting to see that only fourteen percent of companies have scored two or plus on the human identity side of it. So it could be a founder that is very present on LinkedIn, could be a mascot. I've shown you a couple of examples. And zero percent. So none of the one hundred companies we've audited, none of them, were scored higher than a two or three on music and sound. I sat in my sauna for hours on end watching explainer videos on their homepage, listening to their podcast intros, to their YouTube intros if they had any. There is no evidence whatsoever that any of those one hundred B2B companies have developed a distinctive sonic asset. And to me that's a massive opportunity. So I'm going to pause here so you can digest what I've said so far. I can see a couple of comments, I'm just going to pause here and go back to it. Okay, so we have Tricia, yeah, I'm a social media manager. I want to understand the branding style and marketing strategies used by successful SaaS companies in the USA. Okay, can you explain how they build their brand, attract customers and grow their business? So you essentially want a lecture on marketing one hundred one, one hundred two, one hundred three from me. It's such a big question. I hope you understand it's one of the biggest questions out there. Today I can only answer the most specific questions, which is how do B2B brands stand out from a brand perspective in terms of distinctiveness in crowded markets? When it comes to all of those other stuff, please, my book is available for free on my website. You can also buy it on Amazon. It covers a lot of the stuff and I don't mean to self plug, but that's true and obviously the marketing so many recordings and whatnot that answers this question. But I hope you understand it's such a tough question to answer. Thank you. I ask a question then, Louis, which is jumping in a little bit. When you were sat down in your sauna to do your research, what were you hoping for? So for example, you listed a bunch of potential assets there. There has been research that not everyone will know that exists out there. But something like Sonic branding, for example, is often associated as one of the strongest assets. And the fact that that was sort of illuminated as zero percent to marketing purists would potentially seem a little bit like a big opportunity that is currently being missed, you said. Did you have any hopes or aspirations when you started the research and went through the one hundred when you were trying to identify them? Or were there any hands in head moments when you were going through it? I was hoping that I wouldn't be wrong. You know, after working for more than a decade in this space, I was hoping that the research would actually confirm my biases and they did, right? That's the honest, honest answer. The other honest answer and to be less smart about it, I was hoping to find opportunities to share with everyone frankly, hoping to say hey, this is a spot that you could own if you do things well. So I think that was also a great way to kind of relaunch my business because as we talked about before starting, I used to do other stuff like a paid community and whatnot and we just doubled down on consulting only. And so it was a good way to like make a statement and say hey, this is what we do now. So, yes, there's a few questions there from Kerry and Marco, if you don't mind, I'll just read them out. Did you see any differences across regions B2B brand desistiness? So, great question. I haven't looked into that. Actually that could be a very good research in the future where we maybe take top fifty per country of origin maybe or the markets they are in and see whether there is any difference. So great question and great idea for future research. So thank you for that. Marco, what's your best music asset example that you have seen out there that a B2B brand has developed? Obviously outside those one hundred which has none. So again, fantastic question. It's been very difficult to actually find a proper example. I know that there's a few companies, like the top company in the research that's called the highest was one of the only ones with a sonic assets and they had a tiny podcast intro that was like maybe two seconds that was like mentioning their name and stuff and that's it. That's how far it went. So you might be able to fill that in for me, but in B2B tech, aside from the big, big companies, some of them using a lot of product related sounds such as the Slack message, you know, when you receive a new notification, a lot of those really micro sound opportunities inside tools, inside software, I couldn't find that many. There's one that comes to mind which is Canva in their conferences and events where I think they wrote a song that was performed by their C suite or some sort. But that's as far as it went for me. More than happy to hear examples from some of you, if you have any. Nice, I like that from Christian who sort of says do we mention Intel here? Which would be the ident of the as soon as you go into the retail side of it, which you know, if you start thinking about the B2C world and what you hear on TV, you can come up with so many examples. I mean, the top fastest chain in the world, top pizza chain, at least in Europe, that uses it too. I mean a lot of those big companies are using it dramatically across all platforms. But in B2B, especially in the tech adjacent world, very rare. And I I before you carry on Lou, I I wanna just also loop back a little bit to what you were speaking about at the beginning with your intentions and like the spirit of this, the piece of research was to spot opportunities. And that feels just like properly good spirited. So I just wanted to pull up on that because like it's good spirited but as an opportunity and I guess with the study in general, it's less about the exact numbers but more about the spirit of the findings. And so, you know, even if it's one or two, then we have the opportunity to do so much more about it. So appreciate it though. Yeah, it is a generous way they were being too smart about it. It is a generous thing to do and I don't own the data and just use it for myself. I think it's important to recognize the opportunities for everyone. So just a caveat. It's not because you're to develop a jingle for your podcast tomorrow that you're going to grow market share and be successful. However, I think if you start thinking about it in terms of like a longer term investment of okay, if we show up now, come up with something that is truly ours, that could be a sound, could be a mascot, could be something else, and really go for it like full throttle for at least a year or two, we will see results. I'll share a few more details on how to do this in the next few slides, but yeah, to me it just means that as predicted, color logos were overused and over indexed, well there's so much more they could be doing. So I will share the specific industries and sector we looked at in the next couple of minutes as well as company examples for inspiration, Liam, because that was your question. So let me reshare and move on to top three finding. Thank you boss. Might not be as important as the other, but still interesting. Out of the one hundred B2B companies, I looked at, so there was forty one that were created during the AI era. So basically once ChargegyPT three came out in what, twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, something like that, that were AI first, that clearly led with an AI first proposition created then versus the ones that existed before. And you could assume that because those are like, you know, companies with very strong innovation going after market share that was for everyone to grab, they could have invested a bit more in distinctiveness and they didn't. Like there is no clear difference between the two groups. Again, the sample size is small. I'm sure that we can do a lot more in the future to grow that number, but from what we've seen there's no difference whatsoever. So again, it means that even the ones that are supposed to be the smartest or the most innovative or the most forward looking companies don't invest into that either compared to the rest. So again, big opportunity. Don't feel like because you are a fifty year old company that it's not your game. It is absolutely your game too. So it goes back to finding number four, what Lim was asking about the different industries we looked at. So this is where, in terms of verticals, this is where we've seen an interesting thing happening. In terms of the vertical that scored the highest on aggregate, it's the dev tools and infrastructure. So software, b to b software, geared towards developers and IT professionals essentially, mostly. So those are the ones that seem to be taking the more creative risks. In particular, they over index a lot when it comes to using mascot and mascot related assets. If you think of ages and stuff like open source coding database for example like PHP and Python or whatever, almost every single one of those open source technologies use a mascot of some sort, which is interesting. If you go all the way to the other side, data and analytics, which sells to like marketers and folks looking at analytics all day. The difference is quite high. It's nearly a three point difference between the two. So to be completely honest, I don't really know why. I could infer that this industry is less risk averse because they think of themselves as extremely, you know, structured and rational and precise kind of industry that delivers data and you need to be serious about it. But again, you might say that dev tools and infrastructure stuff and security, which is close enough to the first vertical, are also extremely serious industries and yet they seem to be taking more risks. So again, that was quite interesting. I'm gonna pause here again, see if you have any questions. The next few slides are actual examples for inspiration and to show you the fact that they don't, the ones that score well don't look the same, but yet they've applied the same principles. Nice. I can see a couple of questions coming in, Larry. So I dunno whether you want me on screen during these periods of time. Would you want me on here? Or should you I want to see you, yeah. Absolutely. Sounds good. Well, I'll let you take the questions. Ben, look, happy you were. Nice. Yes, great. Let's take the good questions from Christian and Daniel in the chat right now. And then I'll also make public the ones in the Q and A. So yeah Christian and Daniel have almost the same question about like essentially is it statistically significant, does it make any, does it make a big difference and what not. And again, this is not a study that would hold to scrutiny, scientifically speaking. But looking at those companies in each vertical, I feel like when you look at them individually, you do feel the difference. You do feel the difference between the dev tools and infra kind of type of companies versus the ones in data analytics. It's quite striking. And so yes, a three point difference doesn't seem like a lot, but three points is essentially the difference between having one asset that is extremely distinctive, even out of context, versus having not developed it at all. So you read what you want into it. What I read is that, yeah, the dev tools seem to care less about what people are thinking, seem to be a bit less into that because that's a culture inside the dev world. Again, you look at the open source ecosystem, so many are using very wacky, weird, distinctive branding. That's not the case in data analytics. So yes, again, don't sue me for statistical inferiority or whatever it's called. I can only share what I'm reading and I'm reading that there is trends there, there's something we can learn from it in terms of inspiration at least. Nice. Perfect. And then there's some very good questions in the Q and A, so I don't know if there's any that you would like to pick up or I can pick them up for me. So yeah, Muriel, controversial question on purpose. Fellow contrarian. Feel free to ignore. Well, that's the wrong thing to tell me. If no B2B company invests in branding, could it be that it's just not worth it? Having a strong brand personality could be seen as too much risk, too little benefit. Absolutely. That's a great, great point, something that's been raised before. So the way I see it is that I'm not trying to say that if you don't have a distinctive brand, you're going to crash and burn. All I'm trying to say is that scientifically speaking, when you look at the way people think, the way people remember stuff, the way people process ads and assets, you give yourself higher chances of being noticed, being remembered and stick out if you develop distinctiveness alongside a true differentiation. But there are forces at play that are far beyond our control as marketers unfortunately. The growth of the category, for example, the market share of a specific company. So the higher your market share, the more likely you are to be picked by customers and the lesser the churn. Vice versa, the smaller the company, the smaller the market share, the less the loyalty the less they stick out with you. So there's a lot of forces that interlink with each other. So it's not meant to say that all those hundred companies are absolutely stupid. They clearly are doing something wrong and I'm the only one who's right. No, they're clearly doing a lot of things right. They clearly have differentiation to be able to go that far. They clearly have forces that they can control that are pushing them in right direction. However, if you want to give yourself the best probable chance of standing the **** out, my message today is don't ignore this because you shouldn't. The best companies in the world do both. So that's my message. But you're right. They are doing well despite it. Could they do better with it? I think so. I think so. It feels like the key thing I take away from your answer there is like, you know, within our control as marketers, right? You know, and so the opportunity is to precisely what we own and we should and we can. So love that. No, but that's just so sorry to cut you, but that's the control piece is important. Like there isn't that many levers that we as marketers can pull that is completely inside our control. The only one is the big C. It's creativity, the distinctiveness play, the branding thing. Pretty much everything else is either completely outside of our control or not so much in our control, including product differentiation innovation and whatnot. So, yeah, if I were a head of, you know, a CMO, a CEO of a SaaS company, an AI company looking to start out into this world, I would invest into that too to give us the highest chance of success. Nice. I love it. Natasha, how would you advise to strike a balance between building consistency and rebranding? I've made several updates to rebranding over the past few years. I'm conscious I'm changing it too frequently. Well, Natasha, I think you're answering your question. It's super hard, right? I think there's a saying that I'm going to butcher because I tend to butcher sayings. It's like don't change anything even if you're sick of it, even if your colleagues are sick of it, even when your accountant is sick of it, sick of hearing it or sick of seeing it or whatever. That's why I gave you this example earlier of the Michelin Man that has been there for one hundred and twenty five years. When you develop a or a set of strong distinctive brand assets, you must resist the urge to change it every six months just because there's a new CFO or just because someone else says I'm sick of it. Again, it goes back to scientific evidence of how memory works and how people notice and retrieve things from their memories and how they tend to like things just because they see it more often. The more you see something, the more you're going to like it, unfortunately. And that's why you must resist the urge to do it and it's super hard because you feel like every three months it's a whole new company, a whole new world, a whole new market and whatnot. But the ones that are succeeding the most are the ones who stick to something even if you feel like everyone has seen it before. That's only when it's starting to work. I love it. Thank you by the way Louis for jumping into the questions and thank you everyone who's asking fantastic questions as well. There's some fabulous ones that are just coming from Kerry, from Alice, Natasha, Dani, like seriously brilliant. Fabulous. It's really appreciated. It helps so much for me like to think deeper about stuff and see if there's any empty like white space, like some stuff I haven't covered and I need to cover in the future. So it's super helpful. Okay. So we have Chloe as a smaller business in marketing. Human relationships go much further for us than by branding. I expect that to change as we grow and I have a larger team. How significant is human identity within all of these for all business sizes? Yeah, so human identity, I'll share a couple of stats in the future in the next few minutes, but human identity alongside sound are the most potent type of assets, meaning that they tend to be the most noticeable, the most memorable, the most the ones that we notice the most, etcetera, etcetera. So scientifically speaking, the way people remember and notice stuff, they huge. This is why, by the way, you hear a lot about like personal branding or a founder brand and whatever. It's that for small brands that don't have a lot of budget, one of the shortcut is to develop an asset as the founder to become recognizable and to become distinctive in their own right. The problem, I would say, is that unless you really create, engineer almost a persona out of this, or like almost a character out of this founder brand, personal brand, it's gonna be hard to be to truly be distinctive because you look like you probably look like a lot of other people too. You know, we're not that different. And so you really need to exaggerate a couple of features to make it a true distinctive asset. But that's, again, that's why this is used a lot. It works. Certainly. And the only thing I can add as additional context to that is about your aspirations for the business to a certain extent. And indeed the person sort of staying integral to that business in the long term. And so from personal experience, definitely tried to grow the marketing meetup outside of myself after sort of five, six, seven, eight years and tried to do that and been successful in some ways, but not in others. And so like that is definitely something else. And then I guess for those larger brands associating yourself, the obvious reputational risk if that human being does something Yes. Not great. And so, but yeah, I think you're right in identifying, Clari. The journey that a lot of businesses tend to go on from human to branding identity. Kerry, what's your position on the link between excess of voice and growth? I know there's been some debate on the ten percent excess share of voice equals zero point five percent growth stat. I have no position on this. I don't know enough about it. I haven't done the research on it. As I said, stand on the shoulders of giants, so I would need to look into that in more detail instead of saying something that is half true. Alice, do you have an opinion on the percentage of budget to spend on branding for LinkedIn less branding in general? It's easy to set the majority of budget to initiatives that drive short term pipeline, so how do you balance between short term campaigns and long term brand building? So again, we need to do a bit of research on this. I know I've seen very good material on that. I know that typically a lot of people quote the sixty percent, forty percent, sixty percent short term like a brand activation and forty percent long term. I know that it varies dramatically by industries and context. Rule of thumb is to get as much budget as you can for the branding distinctiveness side. I'll share in the next couple of minutes a few arguments you could be using, a few techniques, but I wouldn't be able to quote very specific numbers. I wouldn't go as far as that. Should we jump back to the slides, Louis? And then we can take remaining open questions at the end. Sure, boss. You like that way too much. Okay, so the top ten out of the one hundred. So those companies scored the highest and again, it doesn't mean that they are the best. It doesn't mean that the others are ****. It just means that the way we scored, those are the ones that bubbled up. You can argue that Mutiny could be better than Wiz, you could argue a lot of stuff. But essentially, we have at the top three to be Wiz, Mutiny and Linear. So I'll show you in my research, you can see on my site for free, I'm giving the reason behind the scoring for those top three. So Wiz is a security company. What they do very well is, so in terms of logo, visual device, color and the UI motif. So their logo is extremely distinct in their category, even though it's very simple. The star thing is something that they are the only one to use. They use a lot of the, like what you could call the node graph type of motif, which is like semi techy, but not so techy way to describe and show the product. They also have this crystal ball type of imagery and visual device that no others are using. They also have this like all star thing that they use like the scratch card. They have a custom intro on their podcast. They call it the Crying Out Loud podcast. And across every single surfaces that I looked at, so LinkedIn ads, company, like social media profile, websites, blog, founder and all like so called influencers inside the company, everything is one hundred percent consistent. They are using distinct blue and pink pastel color as well that is unique in the industry. And you can see their ads also very much in line with everything. So by the way, we've done the scoring. They scored the highest and because they took the liberty to actually develop a sound asset, right? That's what made them tip over the edge compared to everyone else. But even their tagline is quite interesting, if I'm not mistaken. I think it's build and run, which they use everywhere. It's not out of context so famous, but it's pretty good. They also use little gnomes, Garmin gnomes throughout, which is a human identity or human like identity. So quite coherent the whole way around. Let me just try to sorry, don't mean to scroll like that. There you go. Okay, the second one is Mutiny. Mutiny is my personal favorite. It doesn't hold anything. I just like them for their branding. I think what they do so well was obviously because they're using a raccoon as a logo, as their human identity or human like identity mascot. But not any raccoon, a raccoon that leads a mutiny, obviously. And I learned recently that it's their CEO who decided to go with it because no other B2B companies would dare to use a raccoon anyway. That a Raccoon is super like a scavenger, you know, it uses any resources it has and at the time they didn't have the money, so they went for that. You see how far the argument is or they didn't overthink it, they just went for it. They are using massive, massive world mark across their website. Simplified it a lot, also quite distinctive. And the flag flying through, also quite distinctive. Their product UI is also extremely simple, but quite distinctive for their category. And their social and ads is quite consistent as well. Not only ads but also posts from their founder. They also do like partnership, for example the latest one with Amy Cramer. So that's why they are second. And the last one, and you see, you will see the depth, the width at which companies can stand the facade of the distinctive linear, which is like a dev tool in a sense, and they are very well known for their color, the shows of color and logos. So they use this very distinct wireframe sphere type of icon and their commitment to dark mode, like this kind of near black thing much they were pretty much the first to do it that way and they're extremely consistent throughout. So especially in that category and you can see their ads and everything is quite quite distinctive and quite similar. They don't really change too much. Their assets are around, they are super consistent with it. So those are the top three. Again, are the top three from scoring that we came up with across just one hundred B2B companies. You can disagree with a lot of it. This is just for inspiration more than anything else. So that's it for the top five findings. I have a few more things supporting material, I'm happy to answer more question now. I've been going through. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for speaking through. Before before we head to the questions, think, just as an opportunity to really point out the opportunity from today's session, right. You know, we've identified I think for a lot of us coming into today's session we wouldn't have even known about the eight. You know, the eight sort of things from Jenny Romanak that sort of points out as assets. So even the opportunity just to take a quick look and sort of sit down and do the exercise sort of next to your own brand and sort of say, do we have these? You know, and do we want to have these? Is a useful question to ask. But then secondly, with the research that you presented, Louis, I think there's such a lovely opportunity that you've presented us by just sort of highlighting where the gaps exist. And that in itself is very, very useful. So thank you so much, Louis. Very, very helpful and really appreciate it. You know that there's a bunch of open questions. There's ten. I almost feel like just letting you freewheel through them if you're up for it. I'll chip in where I can, but we've got twelve minutes. Let's do something else. I'm gonna just go through a couple of slides on what I'd do if I were you right now. There might be questions being answered through that and then a couple of more stuff around like typical objections. I'll go through that too and then if those questions are unanswered, I'll have to stay longer and answer them. Love it. Yeah, of course. And thank you, buddy. It's always such a treat to hear your beautiful voice. Even if it's coming through a bit high early. Here we go. There you go. Yeah. It's still ****, by the way. Ya'll do it still **** for me. Maybe it won't be me, but it's a bit Chloe said it was fine earlier in the chat. Okay. So it's my fault. It's okay. Yeah. It's What I do if I were you? So you might be a tiny business, you might be part of like a B2B SaaS or whatever. What I would do first of all is get your positioning right first. So a distinctive asset on top of a vague positioning that doesn't appeal to anyone makes you blend the **** in, right? So answer the answer the core questions first. Who are we for? What's the compelling reason for them to pick us? How do we compare to alternatives and whatnot? So that's the basis of it. Don't do anything else before that. The second thing is to pick an empty asset. So you know, look at your full category, try to do an inventory of the eight type of assets, who's using what, try to be truthful and not try to be too optimistic about it in terms of, you know, what you could be doing. But sound and human identity are extremely up for grabs. So to me it's a big opportunity and I would like over index into those two and find opportunities there, if that's the opportunity. There might be others, but yeah. Look into those two as an empty asset. And then hold it everywhere. It goes back to some of the questions. Pick a lane and then go full throttle with a discipline that feels boring from the inside. Like that's the boring part, right? You need to just keep at it and keep at it and keep at it and keep at it. And that's a hard thing to do nowadays, but that's why I think the ones that are staying at the top and will be able to survive crisis are the ones that understand the foundations and the way people think. So there's also a couple of questions people tend to ask me, so I will answer them and hopefully that will answer some of the questions that you asked in the chat. So how do you convince my boss or colleagues to do this and to develop distinctive assets or to be more creative? So I have three paths. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. So whatever is your role, develop something that you can fully own. Let's say you're a social media manager and you are able to run ad campaigns on your own, do that. If you're the CEO, can do pretty much what you want. But essentially develop a campaign or develop a thing that has some of those distinctive foundations baked in at one hundred percent intensity. So take summaries there and then look at the results. And then once you have done that you can say hey, I know I didn't really ask for permission about this, but I've done this test and look how those two compares. So that works well. Second is don't try to change people's minds, right? You only need to hear my daughter like trying to go to school every morning to understand that, know, trying to change the mind of one person is extremely hard. Don't try to change minds of your C suite and whatnot. Instead, understand where they're coming from. Try to really have deep discussion about who they are, why, what are they afraid of, what keeps them up at night and adapt your approach to it. So don't try to like push it down their throat and say hey, you're wrong, I'm right. Really, really try to be empathetic and understand their perspective before you start talking about this kind of stuff. And then show scientific evidence to some people that works well. So you can screenshot this. Those are the top three kind of research and meta research that has been done on why the brain likes brand assets and why they like brand assets that stay the same, stay simple and show up a lot. So the first one is processing fluency. In layman terms, the easier something is for your brain to process, the more you like it. The second is mere exposure. Seeing something over and over again makes you like it more on its own. So just because you're going to see a car more and more on the street, you're going to like it more. Just because you see a brand more and more consistently, you're going to like it more. And the last one is low attention processing, in particular ads. Ads build lasting brand memories even when people barely pay any attention. So you can find way more studies and research on this, but those are typically the three I use with clients to explain the choices. So keep it easy to process, show up time and time again, and don't try to be too smart about it, and don't worry if people don't pay attention to everything you do and say. Another one is this one, the likelihood of an asset to be remembered. As you can see, eight times more likely to remember sonic brand cues or characters. And another one that I hear a lot, sorry I'm rushing through this but I want to make sure you get it. A lot of folks would challenge me saying, oh, but we can't be like you. We can't just have a French accent and say **** every two sentences. And that's not at all what I'm trying to invite you to do. There are millions of ways to do this and it doesn't mean to be a contrarian French person. It just means picking a couple of assets and going at it full throttle, whatever is the intensity for you, whatever direction you're going to pick. So there's a big difference between polished and distinctive. Polished gets you a clean, competent, forgettable brand, right, that looks like everyone else. It's polished, it doesn't look bad, but it's not distinctive. And being distinctive, which gets you noticed, remembered and shortlisted. So there are millions of possibilities, you can play with so many different things. It's not about being a contrarian like me or say ****, there is two sentences, it's just about being distinctive, not polished. And finally, how to measure impact? Again, that I get asked a lot. Short term, if you are able to launch ad campaigns or anything that is like very short term based with a high level of distinctiveness, you can measure things pretty fast compared to ads that you've been running for a while, like CTR, obviously, lets people click through more. Engagement rates, if people engage more, if it reaches more people with the same amount of money, those are all good criteria for the very short term. Mid term, customer reactions is interesting. So like you'd have people emailing you or saying, hey, I noticed this animal or I noticed this thing or like unprompted reactions to the branding that you have. For example, in my very small scale, my little rooster Roger, when I launched my new branding two years ago, I wasn't expecting anything to stick that much. And like the reactions that I got out of it just with this Roger thing, this like chicken with a purple berry on, that gave me a lot of data points and confidence to double down on it. And then finally, long term, the brand impact. So branded search, meaning know, do you have a higher, an increase of people searching for your brand, meaning that they have shortlisted it in their brain. They've remembered it, so they are able to like search for you. Are you closing more deals because of it, because people see you and trust you more? And so therefore you're more likely to close them and then you know anything that is linked to revenue. So those are the three lands at which I would prove impact. And again, there is ways to prove it in the short term, you just need to take more risks. I feel like are gonna win tonight. That's the first appearance of a rooster in a beret in six years of webinars as well, Louis. So thank you very much. It shouldn't be unexpected from you. But certainly in terms of marketing meeting webinars. Appreciate you. A lot to me. Shall we head to the Q and A and do those things? Yes let's do it. Trivia. I've done a slightly weird thing which is I've popped in a question of mine as well. Okay. But I'll let you. Okay, so do you want to surface highlight one and we'll just Sure. Let's go to Christian who is fabulously So what struck me about top ten list is the actual company names. Very interesting, yes. Do you think that the form of an organization name is the brand asset? Yes. Yes, that is definitely one and I think it's related to taglines and stuff like that. So I'm not an expert in it. I know that there's a good book about it called Hello My Name is Awesome, which is all about naming. So it's an anti discipline. I'm not a specialist in it. I think it warrants for me to look into that and potentially do research on this. Nice, love that. Let's take the next one from Monse who, I know you're deep in AI as well. So like maybe this is part of the context for this question. Right. So with the vast range of tools out there, streamline and standardize everything from a faster and less expensive delivery, is the differentiation element becoming a real challenge? So again, this is why I was very pedantic at first. It's distinctiveness here we're talking about, not differentiation. So, yes, it's more difficult, there's more noise. So, it's easy to visualize. It's like you're drowning in a pile of **** and the pile of **** is going up and you need to gasp for air and go up the surface. So, I think nowadays, more so than ever before, whatever you choose to do, you have to do it with one hundred percent intensity. You have to push the limits on whatever is the direction you want to go to. It's not good enough to stay at twenty percent, fifty percent, eighty percent. You're gonna have to push much further than your comfort zone if you want to truly stand the **** out and set yourself apart from the AI slob. Nice. And to give an example of that, and it's, I'm pointing to ourselves here, which is generally an uncomfortable thing to do. But it's a turn of phrase which I used when we speak about positively lovely, which is that we try to go to one hundred and ten percent on positively lovely because we hope to set a culture if people are eighty percent positively lovely, then it's better than elsewhere where people are ten percent positively lovely, as an example. And so I feel like we've lived experience of that. And sometimes it can come across a bit twee and uncomfortable and sort of like feeling like you're dialing it up. But like, I think that's truly, you know, where you kind of need to be. So I guess I've got lived experience of of what you're speaking about there, Luis. Absolutely. You're a great example of that. And that's the key. You just said it. It's like even though it might feel a bit uncomfortable, even though, right, that's the criteria. If it doesn't feel uncomfortable, if you don't have those butterflies in your stomach before pressing publish, it means it's not one hundred percent there yet. Know, what would you do if you were not afraid? Right? What would you do if you didn't care about what others were thinking of you? And I honestly think this is the only advantage left. So yes, you do that so well. Push the boundaries. Thanks, dude. Right, let's take this next one from Helen. So Helen was singing your praises this morning, Louis, on LinkedIn, having read your book after finding you at the Marketing Meetup Conference. So part of the question here references the book as well. Louis, from the framework in your book, if you had a small amount of time to make an impact, is there one element you could do first to win colleagues over before expanding? Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, I think asking for forgiveness, not permission. Running a campaign that goes completely one hundred percent into one direction in terms of distinctiveness, comparing it with something that you're currently doing and showing different results, showing the list is the way to do it. Nice, love that. I'm going be selfish and put my question up the screen. Ritzon speaks about a customer having three brain cells devoted to your company in the mind of the customer. Do you think of it the same way when I'm speaking about doing all eight? Yes. I mean, you're asking a question, but you're essentially making a point. So yeah, it's not about doing all of them. It's like if you can take one go full throttle into it, absolutely. But it goes back to the science behind it, as I mentioned, like to use the actual word of it, the low attention processing kind of principle is that you don't need people to pay full attention to whatever you have to say or do in order to make an impact. So they don't care about you, they never will and that's okay. Cool, let's go for Mike. Is asking for You come across. Sorry, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say Mike is asking for examples and examples are brilliant, but they're also difficult words pluck out just like So, yeah. Have you come across any brands that are ten years old or younger that are great examples of building a brand and how they may have done this differently than some more traditional routes? So, yes. Post Hog is a great one in the B2B sector. They sell to product engineers and stuff like that, so you could say that they are quite boring or very serious people. I'm just sharing my screen there. No worries. So that's their website. Looks like Windows ninety five, but it's actually a website that you can navigate and stuff like that. They've really grown a lot ever since they've taken this route of distinctiveness. They have hedgehog a bit everywhere. So if I were to score them, I think they score pretty high. And if I'm not mistaken, but please correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm not mistaken, they are quite young. So, and I, again, this is something I need to dig deep into, but I think they were not created that long ago. So yeah, the little hedgehogs and stuff like that, I love them for that reason. If you want examples, again, I mentioned a few in my book. There is way more in the research as well that you can dive into. Perfect, love that mate. Thank you very much. Let's go to the next one from Guy. So I didn't actually see on your list whether language and sort of tone of voice was considered an asset. Taglines are, taglines are like the specific words because you can recall them. I think voice and tone is more difficult to describe because it wouldn't necessarily hold a specific space in someone's memory. Again, that warrants me to look into that more, the language part of it, which goes beyond just the tagline. So I haven't looked deep into that, but yes, my feeling towards the B2B world is that there's a lot of jargon too. Sometimes jargon is justified because people that you're trying to talk to understand the jargon. So it's not jargon for you or them. But yes, I think it's quite a cliche to say and I think it's pretty true. But yeah, I need to look into that more. Nice. Love it. Let's go to We'll go to James and then I think the the One of the other questions have been covered off. So there will just be one remaining question at the end which is more about you and yourself, Louis. So so question coming in from James. Is there a way of putting a value on the brand that has been created? Just think about the importance of reinforcing the brand being kept constant and linking it back to finance as an asset. So I think I answered that a bit when we talked about the different ways to measure impact. You'll never be able to say, hey, since we introduced that new logo, our revenue increased by fifteen percent thanks to it. You can't show like causal relationship between the two. However, as a whole, you can do cohort analysis and you can compare before and after in terms of branded search, in terms of win rates, in terms of how easy it is to get customers and whatnot. So you can't isolate an asset and say this is responsible for result but you can and should measure the long term, like mid term to long term brand effects of activities that you're taking. I appreciate that as a point, Louie, because I think sometimes as marketers we try to do causal relationships. And we strive for that and we grasp for that and it puts us on a slightly more uncertain ground. And so as you said, I know that you covered it off earlier to a certain extent, but just to reinforce that point, think is really strong and really important. We'll hopefully put people in a far happier place as a result of that advice. We've got this last question, which is really about you, Larry, from Will. And so maybe this is your opportunity to just direct folks to what you're doing and if they want to get in touch with you subsequently. Well thank you for that. So the top one hundred companies, no I haven't worked with any of them. So that removes some of the biases. But yeah, I haven't worked with any of them. We are working with companies, one in the PR sector. We've developed a mascot for them that is going go live soon. Using the findings, using the data. What you can do with AI nowadays is ******* tremendous. We are able to really go super far with clients now to develop things that are almost ninety five percent ready to go. Just needs to be slightly polished. So that's the beauty of it. I think the best next step honestly is, I'm going to put that in the chat, is my LinkedIn if you want and actually the distinctiveness report itself. I know you're going to share it elsewhere but that's the only thing to say here. Thank you so much for everyone's time, for all the great questions. As always, fourteenth of July, so middle of the summer holidays. It's great. It's great to be back home, Joe. As I said multiple times before, you were the first one to give me a chance, help me run a webinar with you six years ago at this stage when I was relaunching my new business and I will never forget how it helped me. So thank you, thank you for everything you do and thank you for folks listening and who stayed until the end too. It's a pleasure and you know, thank you for today and thank you for your friendship. It's really appreciated. Thank you everyone for your amazing questions. Thank you for being great in the chat. And Louis has finished his loop, so that will do us. We'll be back next Wednesday with Andrew Tindle speaking marketing fundamentals. You would be most welcome to return next week if you'd like to. Thank you all so much for a brilliant session. Appreciate you. Lots and lots. Take care, everyone. You're welcome. Love you all. Bye. Bye.