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Compliance software made me feel something.

By Andy Jordan

That sentence shouldn't be possible. Compliance is the category every buyer needs and nobody gets excited about. It's checklists, audits and the quiet dread of a SOC 2 deadline.

And yet.

In my last field note I argued that most B2B companies let product messaging become the whole message, and that's why so many of them sound the same. This is the other side of that argument. These are companies I admire because they didn't make that mistake.

None of them skipped product marketing or growth. They run sharp demand engines and clear product stories. They just refused to let either one be the whole story. Underneath the funnel there's a point of view, a look you'd recognize with the logo covered, and a feeling people want to be part of.

The companies doing both

Compliance and trustVanta

The security compliance category has run on fear for as long as I can remember. Breach headlines, red warning icons, the implied threat that you're one audit away from disaster. Vanta took the opposite bet and made compliance about trust: the thing that lets a company sell faster and sleep better.

This year it doubled down. When Vanta promoted Sarah Scharf to CMO (opens in new tab) in August, part of her stated mandate was to make security compliance marketing "a little zingier," moving away from the industry's alarmist habits. That's a brand decision. It's also a growth decision, because buyers move toward what feels like relief, not what feels like a threat.

Go-to-market dataClay

Clay competes in a category full of billion-dollar data incumbents. The obvious move was to look like them: dashboards, blue gradients, "enrich your pipeline." Clay did the opposite. As Exit Five's breakdown (opens in new tab) lays out, it positioned itself as a creative tool for go-to-market teams instead of a data vendor, built an unmistakable visual identity, kept its creative in-house, and turned power users into creators who talk about Clay because they genuinely love it.

The product is powerful. But the reason people remember it is that it feels like it was made by people who enjoy their work.

PresentationsGamma

Gamma makes slides, which may be the most tired category in software. But using it doesn't feel like making slides. It feels like working with a creative instrument, and the brand carries that all the way through. This year Gamma added AI image tools and squared up to Canva and Adobe (opens in new tab), a move that only makes sense if you've already convinced people you're a creative company. You know a Gamma deck when you see one. That's the whole game.

Content engineeringAirOps

With Jess Rosenberg leading brand, AirOps made a technical category, content engineering for AI search, feel like a movement instead of a feature list. Jess has been one of the clearest voices on why AI content volume won't save you (opens in new tab), and the brand showed up in places a typical martech company doesn't, including Cannes Lions (opens in new tab). It gave marketers something to believe, not just something to buy.

Cloud securityWiz

When STFO scored 100 B2B SaaS and AI brands (opens in new tab) on distinctive brand assets this summer, exactly one landed in the "ownable" band: Wiz. In cybersecurity, a category famous for fear, padlocks and hooded hackers. Wiz built a look and a personality you'd recognize from across a conference hall, and it did it while selling to some of the most risk-averse buyers on earth.

FintechRamp and Mercury

Two fintechs, two very different moves, same principle. Ramp put Brian Baumgartner, Kevin from The Office, back in front of America in a Super Bowl LX ad (opens in new tab) as the world's most famous accountant. For a corporate card.

Then it went further. On September 25, Ramp staged Bill Pay the Musical (opens in new tab), a one-night-only original show at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre starring Billy Porter, Billy Zane and Jessica Vosk. It revived the mid-century tradition of industrial musicals, when big companies staged full productions about cars, appliances and soda. This one was about accounts payable. Reviews were mixed, and Slate called it (opens in new tab) a well-produced hour-long commercial. That's partly the point. Nobody reviews a feature page.

Mercury publishes Meridian (opens in new tab), a magazine for founders, in print. Neither company leads with a feature list. Both make you feel something about money, which is harder than it sounds.

Product marketing makes the case. Brand makes people want to hear it.

The stretch test

One more, from outside B2B, because it shows how far a brand with real conviction can go.

This summer Liquid Death, a company that sells canned water, teamed up with goodwipes (opens in new tab) on limited-edition flushable wipes scented like its sCREAM Soda. They're in more than 4,000 Walmart stores, launched with a comedic brand film made in-house and a sweepstakes where the prize is a live-in butler.

It's no accident. Goodwipes co-founder Sam Nebel told Beauty Independent (opens in new tab) the brand limits itself to about three collaborations a year, chosen for real brand overlap and cultural timing instead of churned out monthly. His rule is "fewer, deeper and bolder." An earlier goodwipes collaboration with Olipop started as an April Fools' joke and became a seven-figure product.

Ridiculous? Completely. But notice what it proves. A brand with a clear enough point of view can stretch into a category that has nothing to do with its product, and people come along for the ride. No spec sheet ever earned that kind of permission.

Most B2B companies will never sell wipes. But every B2B company will eventually launch a second product, enter a new market or need its customers to trust it with something bigger. The ones with a real brand get to make that leap. The ones with only a product message have to start over.

Why most companies don't do this

If brand works this well, why is it so rare? The research points to a gap between what leaders say and what they fund.

19%of marketers say brand equity is treated as a driver of business outcomes · WARC & ANA
62%of marketers face flat or declining budgets · WARC & ANA
1 of 100B2B SaaS and AI brands scored as ownable · STFO

WARC and the ANA's Multiplier Playbook (opens in new tab), published in May, found that 67 percent of marketers say their C-suite recognizes the importance of brand, but only 19 percent say brand equity is seen as a driver of business outcomes. With most budgets flat or shrinking, the spend drifts toward whatever is easiest to defend in next quarter's dashboard.

Gartner's June survey (opens in new tab) of 401 CMOs shows the same pull: awareness and conversion take 62.6 percent of media spend, while retention has fallen below 15 percent. Companies are paying to be seen and paying to close, and spending much less on making anyone want to stay.

The companies above made a different bet. They treat brand and growth as one system, where the brand makes the demand engine cheaper and the demand engine proves the brand is working.

What they have in common

  1. A point of view about the category. Vanta decided compliance is about trust. Clay decided go-to-market is creative work. Each has an opinion its competitors don't.
  2. A look you'd know with the logo covered. Wiz is the proof: distinctive assets compound, generic ones disappear.
  3. People as the channel. Power users, creators, founders and brand leaders who are visible in their own right. Customers sell Clay. Readers sell Mercury.
  4. Brand and growth on one plan. None of these companies chose between a brand team and a demand engine. They made each one make the other better.
  5. Permission to stretch. A brand with conviction can launch, expand and take risks, from a Super Bowl spot to a wipe. A product message can only describe the product.

None of this is magic, and none of it is cheap. It takes a small team of people with taste and judgment, a clear story they actually believe, and the discipline to keep telling it while the dashboard pressure says otherwise. Agentic workflows can carry a lot of the volume now. The conviction still has to come from people.

Features get copied. Feelings get remembered.

If you want to build this

I started Needle Space Labs for companies that haven't figured this out yet but are ready to. Frontier tech that's genuinely hard to explain: AI, space, climate, security, infrastructure. Before this, I spent twenty years as a reporter at CNN, PBS and The Wall Street Journal, then built brands at Splunk, Expanse, Spire Global and Eightfold. Machine data, attack surfaces, satellites, agentic AI. None of it was easy to explain, and all of it deserved better than a feature list.

Here's what I believe: the more technical you are, the less reason there is to be boring. Hard technology is full of real stories. The problem nobody else would touch, the people who solved it, the customer whose world changed. Vanta found one in compliance. Yours is in there too. Most companies just never go looking.

That's the work. I report the story from the inside, build the brand around it, and set up the agentic workflows that keep it running after I hand it off. Start with a free 48-hour story audit. Send me your deck, and I'll send back one page: where your story is clear, where it breaks, and the sentence to lead with.

Sources

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