BSMS 69 - Is brand strategy really dead?

If you are under 30 and your career isn’t skyrocketing in marketing, should you move to product or supply chain?

A recent episode of Scott Galloway’s celebrated podcast, Prof G Pod, made the claim that the true innovation and differentiators today for companies are on the product side and not on the marketing side. Galloway is an American public speaker, author, podcast host, entrepreneur, and clinical professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

In Episode 69 of the B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks Podcast, Brian and Stijn unpack the truth and the not-so-true behind this claim. 

Topics discussed include:

• The fast-evolving role of the marketer in view of AI and the fast pace of technological change
• Where the true value of marketing lies
• The symbiotic relationship between product and marketing to create truly legendary products
• What “brand strategy” truly means in software today
• How to “future-proof” your marketing career to stay relevant

B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks is one of the most respected voices in the SaaS industry. It is hosted by two leading marketing and revenue growth experts for software:

• Stijn Hendrikse: Author of T2D3 CMO Masterclass & Book, Founder of Kalungi
• Brian Graf: CEO of Kalungi

B2B SaaS companies move through predictable stages of marketing focus, cost and size (as described in the popular T2D3 book). With people cost being a majority of the cost involved, every hire needs to be well worth the investment!

The best founders, CFOs and COOs in B2B SaaS work at getting the best balance of marketing leadership, strategy and execution to produce the customer and revenue growth they require. Staying flexible and nimble is a key asset in a hard-charging B2B world.

Resources shared in this episode:

• The Future of Marketing Part 1 – Scott Galloway
• Unlocking the power of AI: Transform your content creation process
• SaaS SEO best practices: dos and don'ts
• T2D3 CMO Masterclass
• Submit and vote on our podcast topics

Brian Graf: Hi there, and welcome to episode 69 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. I'm Brian Graf. I'm the CEO of Kalungi, and I'm here again with Kalungi's co-founder, Stijn Hendrikse, who's a serial SaaS marketing executive and ex-Microsoft product marketing leader. 

For today's episode, Stijn and I take a look at a comment that Scott Galloway, a very successful and knowledgeable entrepreneur, professor and podcast host made recently regarding the decline of brand strategy and how people who are early to midway through their careers in marketing and aren't hugely successful yet should look to switch to a career in product or supply chain.

He opened up a really interesting perspective on the current marketing landscape. We thought it would be a good topic to unpack and look at how marketing has changed over time, where it's critical in today's business environment, and how to make the most of your career inside or even outside the marketing profession.

Let's get into it. Okay, we are back. Thanks again for joining me, Stijn. Today I'm going to switch it up a little bit and I don't know if you'd call this current events, but bring in a perspective of somebody outside the podcast and they had an interesting answer to a listener question and I thought it'd be worth talking about on here.

And so it'll still dive into theory and marketing and how to apply it, but just from a different take than what we usually do. The quoting question, I guess, comes from Scott Galloway. He's the host of ProfGPod. He's the co-host of Pivot. He has a few other podcasts. He's this business strategy guru.

I'm a big fan of his. I like to listen to his podcasts. I know Stijn, you like to listen to Pivot as well. I was listening to one of his office hours episodes, which is basically where he takes questions from the audience and answers them ad hoc. It was the episode on September 19th, in case anybody wants to listen to it.

And he was posed the question, what is the biggest fallacy in branding? And he basically discussed that in general, the death of old school traditional brand marketing and brand strategy. He says things like the sun has passed midday on brand strategy and talks about how You know, the heyday of brands was post world war two, where we'd wiped out a lot of our competition.

And really all you had to do to generate a lot of growth or shareholder value was to make a mediocre product and put a really aspirational brand on top of it, or a really solid brand on top of it. And that's what, that was the combination that worked. That's where we saw Madison Avenue and Mad Men and all those really the advertising heyday.

And he says that now things have changed. And because of. Innovations in supply chain and product. The true differentiator is now on the product side and not on the marketing side. As a result, he's saying things like the CMO is already dead and they just don't know it. And because the CEO is in charge of allocating capital, for the best return, they should really be looking to take money out of marketing and put it into product or supply chain.

Finally, he says something to the effect of if you're under 30 and your career isn't skyrocketing in marketing, get out of marketing and go to product and supply chain. So a lot to unpack there. And it's a really interesting take. I don't necessarily disagree with all of it, but I do think that there's some nuances that are.

You know, obviously I'm biased because I'm a marketer, but there are some nuances to unpack and to discuss. So here we are. Any initial thoughts from you, Stijn? 

Stijn Hendrikse: A lot of this starts with how do you define brand or marketing. For me, because I've always been more focused on what I call big M marketing, not small M being more the operationalization of demand gen and presence and automation and big and marketing more being about who is it for?

What's it for? Really? What's your value proposition? Do you have product market fit? And the ladder has definitely changed, but it's definitely not gone. If you have a product, you still need to make sure that product serves the needs and you understand who it's for. And why that product is relevant and all those things.

You can build all the supply chain you want, but if you don't have a product that people actually are looking for you don't need to supply them very long. And so, brand being a, for me, it's still part of marketing. It's false in the, in the same scope for what is the problem you're trying to solve.

If you're a marketing leader and if you're in your thirties, that's still true. Your main job is to change people's behavior, to change people's beliefs. Sometimes that's why I love behavioral economics, because a lot of what we do as marketers is about changing people's minds.

Nudging people to do something that they may not have done otherwise, or that they actually would love to do, but they're scared. And so there's all these things that go into the psychology behind marketing that for some people also are part of brand strategy and how you think about branding, how you think about making people comfortable betting on a certain product.

How do you make people feel that they're part of the same group? We are copycats. That’s the way we are wired from the Stone Age on. We like to be part of a group. We form tribes. And one of the behaviors that we have gotten very good at and don't think that's going to change anytime soon is that we copy what other people do.

So if marketing and branding as part of that is partly showing others what other people do, that is still extremely, extremely valuable and it works. But let's go a little bit closer to maybe where Scott was coming from. Is brand strategy a tool to make up for product deficiencies or for not understanding your customer and trying to push something into a market that may not have a purpose.

That no longer works. And there was a time when that worked actually pretty well. Where you could either, because consumers were not as well informed, or it took time for them to get informed. And since all that friction is gone. And also using words or imagery and visuals, et cetera, is less. You can't really monetize that anymore, right, with the AI tools that are available right now.

Almost everybody can write relatively good written content, right, can produce relatively okay visual content at a relatively high speed. They can do a lot of experiments relatively quickly to test what works. So, the advantages that you may have had In the past, by using visual instruments or words or language to, to make up for maybe product or positioning deficiencies, that's gone.

Nobody can really count on that anymore. And then back to the other comment. Get out of marketing if your career is not taking off. It might be. Very true for people who are trying to use those instruments to make a difference. If the reason you got into marketing is because you like copywriting or you love designing.

Right, you're even if you're an extremely good writer or a very good designer your ability to monetize that that craft and turn that into a healthy Way to make a living That's really not easy anymore, right if even possible But if you are willing to level up and become what I would like to call a big ad marketer and think about brand as in really understanding what customers need and be very good at asking the right questions and including using all the AI tools, but now learn how to write the right prompts.

And use those tools to do research on steroids and to test things faster than you could ever have done that before. And let AI do all the work on the actual writing and the actual designing. You're the creator behind the scenes who makes the pieces work together. There's huge value in that.

And especially because the tools are now so great, you can do 10x more than you could ever do before. But you have to maybe learn a very different skill set. 

I have more on this, Brian, but maybe that's a good starting point. 

Brian Graf: I think you're totally right, and that's where I'm coming from with a lot of this as well.

You know, what he's saying in a lot of respects isn't necessarily wrong. Like the old adage, and I'm going to butcher this, but you know, nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing. That phrase has been around for a while. And it still remains to be true. And honestly has increasingly become true.

I think that lines up with what he's saying. You really can't wrap a bad product anymore in a strong brand or it's almost like artificially creating a brand around a mediocre product. You can't do that and expect to get away with it, particularly with our focus in B2B SaaS.

When the revenue model is dependent on. retention and, and evangelism. You're never going to be able to do that just by throwing some pretty ads out there. That has to come from product alignment with the market. 

There are plenty of the big movers of the last decade or two that have used things like product innovation and supply chain to really create their moat and create that true differentiation. Amazon, Google, ChatGPT, NVIDIA. Those are all came, those differentiation and that growth really came from a new product or supply chain innovation that really set them apart.

And to Scott's point, with the consumer being more educated than ever, virality is something that can come much more organically than it used to and can spread much faster. And so I do see what he's, what he's saying with a lot of that, but where I disagree is that there are some brands that are still really strong and really companies have depended on them to grow.

Even to put two B2B titans up against each other at Salesforce and HubSpot, both have really strong brands. Canva. Really went brand forward.In order to get their growth and their disruption of the market into play. And then there's things like on the, on the CPG side, like a liquid death is water and they had a huge brand push and we're really successful off of it.

So there's absolutely a time and a place for a brand. But the nuance really here is. What is brand strategy? At the end of the day, a brand is a point of social credibility and dependability almost. It's like, what you're going to get with a Coke or a McDonald's.

Because the brand has been established across both advertising and product.You know, when you see that brand what's going to happen. That's why you buy that product that is still extremely important. It's just not going to come necessarily just from advertising alone.

And then the distinction between brand and marketing is really important to make, right? To your point. Just because creating a brand through ads is less important than it used to be does not mean that marketing itself is less important. I would say actually that marketing itself is more critical than ever just because of the landscape that we live in.

We were talking, I was talking about consumers being more educated than ever. That means, and that combined with Google and the ease of entry to creating content and blogs and ads. That means that there's more noise than ever. You can't afford to not have really strong marketing anymore.

You'll just never make it to the top. You'll never get found by consumers. And I guess you could go the purest route and say, I'm only going to grow by word of mouth and do the pure pure inbound play and that could work right if you have a really strong product.

But often companies don't have the bandwidth or the budget right or the runway to be able to support that and so you really do need to push it forward and the way that you push it forward, unless you're in an enterprise sales play is marketing.

That piece is critical. I think it'd be interesting to hear from you. We can talk about the role of the CMO is dead, but honestly, from my perspective, it's just evolved. As the business landscape has evolved. So I'd be really interested to hear from you about that.

Change has occurred over time and just like how you see, again, the role of marketing is changing from, from where it was maybe at the beginning of your career to where it is now. 

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, it's interesting you used the liquid debt example. People love to be part of something. Affiliate with a group, with an image, with a belief system.

Liquid, that's a great example where that's really all that it is. Because the rest is just water. And it's funny that Scott is one of those people who I believe has a brand himself. Pivot is a brand. And he comes from brand, too, so it's very interesting. 

Stijn Hendrikse: He talks about Apple all the time, or his Rivian SUV.

So clearly those companies did something to influence him.So, so that's, it's not that by any means, but his point is well taken that the way to think about it and how to make a difference in that field is completely evolved. So let's talk about your question. The CMO role and how it has changed.

I think about a modern company. So a company really does only two things.It builds something and it wants people to actually pay for what they built. Either in, and ideally in a, in a service model, they get paid for a long time. That last part, well, the first as well, they both have huge marketing components.

How can you build something that people need without knowing what they need, without knowing those people.You need to understand them. That's the CMOs job. And then after you've built something, you need to make sure people know about it. And then you want people to want to use it. Want to keep using it.

All those things are the CMO's job and then building the product you can argue includes things like supply chain. You can argue that's part of the product almost.It's part of the ability of the company to actually give their customers what they need, give it to them on time, give it to them in a predictable fashion, in a highly efficient operational excellence, etc, etc, etc.

The CMO's job hasn't changed that much, they still need to help a company understand what their customers need, who those customers actually are, and then help them be aware of what the company is solving for, and that that's something they care about, and then help them along their journey to both pick the company at the typical journey, and why should they care, why you and why now that they end up becoming your customers and ideally your subscribers who stay customers forever.

That hasn't changed, Brian. The tools, of course, to do those things have dramatically shifted. Where it used to be a lot of pencil and paper and go talk to people and do all kinds of more analog ways of both market research and then communication. A lot of that now with digital and AI is extremely efficient.

And you can do things in seconds that used to take months. So that has changed, but so the, the CMO, and it's also partly, I'm working on a new book if you're very aware of, it's why it's so important for CMOs to evolve their, their skillset into using those tools to the fullest advantage more than ever before.

Because the way the system works now is for a large part dependent on how you use those tools and, and how you then master those better than who you're competing with. We're still competing for scarce resources. If that hasn't changed, our customers are going to only buy maybe one version of something.

From one company and they're going to buy four. So if there are a couple of alternatives, you still need to do the work of how do you stand out? And that goes back to why Scott talks about Apple and Rivian and doesn’t talk about the other brands he's not as interested in. 

Brian Graf: I'm sure Scott knows this better than anyone, but that marketing has a lot, a lot of times marketing gets kind of, people have a narrow view of it.

And because advertising is what people see, that's what they think marketing is. But to your point, right, marketing is more, much more about having a deep understanding of your target market and your customer, right. And making sure that you communicate effectively with that customer group.

Are you going much further up in the production cycle? Are we, do we have the right product roadmap to build a product that, that our customers love, that our customers really enjoy? You either said it in our pre-show discussion, or I don't think I heard it in your response here, but you equated the CMO to the chief product marketing fit or product market fit officer.

Which is exactly what they are. Their job is to align the product, help to align the product with the customer needs, and communicate that effectively. And then we also in, in conversations that we have with our prospects and our clients, right. We're always saying that marketing doesn't stop when marketing hands the lead off to sales.

So not only marketing on the pre production side, the marketing side, but also supporting sales. It's also supporting customer success. It's supporting upsells. It is throughout the entire customer journey and it is critical to making sure that especially something like a recurring revenue model is effective.

Stijn Hendrikse: The product market fit point. The product now is evolved as in, it could include things like supply chain, et cetera. But the fact that the CMO is in charge of making sure that the product is aligned with what the market needs, product market fit, hasn't changed. You can argue that's more important.

That's the primary job for a CMO now more than ever. If they spend their time optimizing the man gen by just cranking out more content or trying to beat the Google, Paid search algorithm. It's just not gonna be a great use of their time. 

Brian Graf: So do you think that there's any distinction in what Scott is saying. Maybe his comments have more weight for the unicorns of the world and the Fortune 500 than they do in the world that I definitely live in and you live in now, but you know, you were in Microsoft earlier.

Is there any distinction that is worth noting between adding shareholder value and marketing's role in that versus maybe just growing a company that is, is less than a hundred million in ARR? No, I don't think so. It just all happens at a completely different scale. But whether you're a couple of million in ARR or you're a hundred or 200 or a billion in ARR.

The best defense or the best guarantee for future success. is to constantly double down on what you think is your ideal customer profile.Your fans, the people that you're servicing, that are voting with their dollars, they're voting with their feeds. They don't leave, they, they want you to do more, etc.

Because those are the sources that you have that give you information that none of your competitors has access to. What are these customers really using, really valuing? What do they ask more of? What feedback are you getting from them? Which is one of the best inputs for your innovation roadmap.

And that doesn't mean, there's some of this that is about asking customers, what feature do you want us to add. How do you want this thing to look in the next version? There's value to that. So you don't want to ignore that. But even more important is that you try to constantly understand what our customers are really trying to do.

Why is that important for them? What's behind the initial ask that they have on like a certain button on a certain page. What is it really what they're trying to do? What would be the real valuable innovation? Where you then, with your engineering capability and your amazing innovation and creativity, turn that into solutions that customers wouldn't have thought of.

That might do something in a completely new way. That's innovation. And it still starts with your ideal customer profile. If you have a couple million in revenue, that journey starts there. You now have enough proof points that this is an important part of the market with a specific set of needs. But if that market, if you're now servicing billions worth of revenue, that's still, it's the same.

You still can make sure that you understand that group of customers better than anybody else. And that's really what nailing a niche means.That's how you nail it and that's how you defend it. And up to the point where sometimes you get into the innovator's dilemma. You get this customer group so well, and they pay you so much money that you forget about maybe other things.

Customer groups that evolved might be more important, that have really a different set of needs that could at some point displace your existing business. So there's that tricky trade off, but that doesn't mean you can't always grow by understanding your existing clients better. And maybe that's even where you would be inoculated a little against the innovator's dilemma, because a smaller group of your existing clients might actually be the ones who say, hey, the way we do things now doesn't work anymore.

There's a new way. If you're at least constantly listening to that, you shouldn't be missing out on that opportunity altogether. 

Brian Graf: Yeah, I totally agree. The true success with marketing and growing a B2B SaaS company is intuiting customer needs and just knowing them better than they know themselves in a particular area.

When customers ask for features, that's usually not where you get the breakthrough, the breakthrough realization or product development.It's about knowing the problems that they have the jobs that they need to do and understanding your product capabilities to an extent that you can divine a solution.

That really moves the needle for them. I think the only other thing that I have to add to this whole conversation that really applies to B2B SaaS. And maybe it applies a bit earlier in the company lifecycle stage, but it's equally as important later on. 

It's just that maybe they figured it out is marketing's role and ability to distill really technical product capabilities and features, particularly in the software space into non technical, simple, clear language that is easy to digest, easy to understand, and resonates with a target market. 

I would say definitely more often than not, probably about 70 percent of the clients that end up coming in Kalungi’s door are super capable founders and technical teams that have built a solid product, but do not know how to communicate that to their users. 

They're deep in the weeds and they can't necessarily see the forest through the trees in terms of how to. Really reach out to the right audience in the right way to generate growth. And that is another key area where marketing will never get old and is absolutely critical, particularly with AI and the mass of generic content that we're seeing out there today.

One more question for you. And just maybe to touch on that last point from Scott, and then we can put a bow on this. Do you have any other advice you gave a little bit earlier, but any other advice for the people who are early mid marketing career and a little scared by Scott's words, thinking about their next move.

Do you have thoughts on the jump ship versus stay the course? And you did have thoughts on strategy versus execution, but anything else that you have to add there? 

Stijn Hendrikse: I spent a lot of time talking about this. Maybe we even invested in almost every podcast episode that we've recorded the last two, three months.

When you're younger your time is maybe less costly and immediate direct cost than when you're older which leads you maybe to to be less concerned about your productivity and about how you use that time. And the reality is your time, actually, the younger you are, is actually far more valuable because there's something like a crude interest in a lifetime.

The time you spend learning something when you're young, let's say you spend a couple of hours learning something new, is actually far better spent then than 10 years later, because now you accrue the value of that skill that you learned for that period of time. It's like a good interest.

And so when you're young, don't make a mistake to muscle your way through doing things like mundane work, etc. Now with AI, you have so many tools at your disposal, so you don't have to do that anymore. Get a paid subscription to chat GPT or your other favorite tool.It's probably still the best one if you just pick one and use it for almost everything you do all day long.

Ask a question that you would ask someone else, like an individual, to give you advice on how to do something, to help you research something, help you write something, help you complete something, help you review something. In almost every task you do, there's an opportunity to let AI help you do it faster, more productive.

Not having to repeat it. And if you don't do that, you're really selling yourself short. Because other people will use those tools and they will basically get ahead of you. And it involves you also then learning how to use these tools in a really productive way. Learning how to prompt, learning how to question, learning how to coach, learning how to challenge, because those are the things that leaders do and managers do, and they've usually done it with the people they lead.

Now you're also leading these AI tools. And unless you want them to become the master over you, you need to learn how to master the tools. And that's also the book that I'm working on, Brian, it's about how coaching evolved into how you coach not only people around you, but also coaching the AI tools.

Because the things you do actually, when you coach people, when you ask questions, when you challenge them, when you nudge them, when you like, when you ask them to set the next step in their development journey, it's really not that different from coaching an AI tool that you're using. I liken this to now you have the luxury early in your career that you already have a team at your disposal.

There may not be people, there may be tools, but if you start to think about them in the same way, how can I delegate this work? How can I ask the bot to do something better? Hey, could you have made this any better? Why didn't you give the bot feedback? So it will learn.

Let it get to know you. As a coach, one of the things you're trying to do with someone you coach is build up rapport. So there's, you get a sense of trust, et cetera. When you use these tools, you also, you're trying to build them into an extension of yourself. So that's the one thing I would, if you ask me one thing, and then of course, there's all these other things that have been true for many years, like know what your goals are.

I still recommend people that I coach to watch the videos from Zig Ziglar from the, the eighties or the nineties, a very old set of videos. You can find them on YouTube. Just type in Zig Ziglar goals and think about where you want to go, where you want to end up. A year from now, two years from now, 10 years from now is a very good exercise because if you don't know where you want to go, for sure that you will not end up there.

So spending time on really understanding what you want. Out of life, out of your career is a very good use of time. And then deciding whether learning a craft like marketing, which of course has evolved, so you learn different things now than you would have learned 10 years ago is an easier decision to make because you know, at least whether you will care enough to see it through, right.

And to put all the effort in it, you'll need to put in. 

Brian Graf: Yeah, I agree that that leads into what I want to talk about quite nicely. I feel like marketing versus product versus supply chain. I feel like you. As you're planning out your career, you really want to get into something that has a solid combination of your ability to do it.

So you are good at it and you like the work. Because if you're not good at it, you won't, you won't excel and you won't probably make it where you want to go in your career. If you don't like it, you're not going to learn as much as you can, or you will be miserable learning as much as you need to.

And it won't be a fun existence for you. So you need to find that combination. I think if you like marketing: the creative aspect of it, the customer focus of it. it's absolutely still a fantastic career path for you. But as to your point, Stijn. Like you need to evolve with the times.

And my advice to anyone is to become as strategic as possible as fast as possible. So get to reading, get to listening to podcasts. You want to be adding value at the strategy level, not at the brute force tactical level, because that is not a fun place to be right now.

I always like to say to people that work for me and for a lot of the Kalungi team members. Your job is to make your boss's job as easy as possible. And that in the immediate term, you as the employee should look at it that way. How can I take as much off of my boss's plate as possible?

By either just hitting performance as easily as possible or as effectively as possible. How can I take the strategy away from my boss? How can I lighten my boss's load as much as possible? And again, the days of the brute force manual effort, adding that value to your boss or just over with AI.

And so you have to, you have to think about it from how can I add that strategic value? That being said, right, all that being said, I am a marketer and I'm biased, but if you love coding and you love learning that language and spending hours a day doing that, then yeah, jump to product.

You don't need to be in marketing. I will say personally that I tried to learn R in a bootcamp one weekend and just could not keep my eyes open. And so clearly that was not the path for me. But it absolutely works for other people and there's tons of value to be found over there as well.

Stijn Hendrikse: The one thing that also hasn't changed is people travel along a journey. A journey comes with stories and a marketer is still a storyteller and a brand still tells part of that story. I love the whole trusted guide analogy. People who want to climb a mountain. They usually want to climb it because they saw someone else stand on top of the mountain.

They saw the photo. They aspire to do the same thing. That is marketing. That is branding. You brand the mountain. You brand the journey. And then telling the story of other people who've gone before them. It allows people to be less afraid and scared or to learn how to do it right and or to reduce friction on getting the right tools right and and you provide nudges as the marketing leader as the CMO.

So all those things haven't changed. So that's another I think, and the way to think about it, people's basic human Behavior is still driven by, by fears and dreams, by greed and their survival instinct.That's how we make most of our real decisions. And marketers have an amazing amount of tools still available, including how you brand something and how you make the brand become the story to influence how people then act on those journeys that they are on.

But to the point that we started with a mediocre product that you put lipstick on to figure out how to get people to, to, to almost do, to, to lure people into buying something they don't need. That doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work very long. And in that case, it's better. Those resources are better spent to make the product better.

And that goes back to the supply chain comment, make the product better, make the way the product gets delivered better. Make the way products get experienced better. But that doesn't change the fact that you still need to understand what your customers need, how to make sure they know about your product and then how to make sure they, they love it so much that they will buy it and they will keep buying it or keep using it.

That all still comes down to understanding your ICP, who's it for, and understanding what they need, what's it for. 

Brian Graf: Amazing how many things just come back down to the basics of a strategy and doing it well. Okay well thanks Scott for the fun thought exercise and thanks Stijn for being here with me again today.

Stijn Hendrikse: Thanks Brian.

Brian Graf: Thank you to Adriano Valerio for producing this episode and the Kalungi team for helping us make this whole thing work. And of course you for choosing to spend your time with us.

As a reminder all the links we mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes. And if you want to submit or vote on a question you'd like us to answer, you can do that at Kalungi.com/podcast. 

Every time we record and take one of the top three topics and jam on it. Thanks again.

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