Most CEOs will tell you their brand is well known in their niche. But there’s a difference between someone recognising your logo and someone thinking of you the moment a problem becomes urgent.
We all live in our own bubble. You think about your brand every day, which creates a distortion. You start to believe everyone else is thinking about you too. But they’re not. They’re thinking about their own problems, their own deals, and the hundred other things competing for their attention. Your brand doesn’t make the list unless you earn a spot on it, repeatedly.
As Dave Kline puts it: a founder will say “we have good brand awareness” and then show you their LinkedIn engagement — three likes per post, no inbound, and prospects who say “remind me what you do again” on discovery calls.
Recognition isn’t recall. Being vaguely familiar isn’t being top of mind when it matters.
What even is a brand?
Ask ten marketers and you’ll get ten different answers. But the best definitions share a common thread — brand isn’t what you say about yourself. It’s what other people believe about you.
A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.
A brand is not a logo. A brand is not a corporate identity system. It’s a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.
Or as Jeff Bezos famously put it — your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.
These aren’t fluffy definitions. They describe something concrete and measurable: do people think of you, unprompted, when the problem you solve becomes urgent?
Big B Brand vs little b brand
Most B2B companies get this confused. Ian Stephens of Principia draws a useful distinction between two very different things that both get called “brand.”
Little b brand is the tactical stuff — logos, colour palettes, typography, visual identity, and brand campaigns. Important for consistency, but not what wins deals.
Big B Brand is strategic — your reputation, your positioning, what you’re known for, and the gut feeling people have about your company. It’s built through every touchpoint, not just marketing materials.
When leadership teams discuss “branding,” they almost always mean little b. They want a new logo, a refreshed website, or a brand campaign. But the real work — defining what you stand for, building mental availability, earning a reputation — that’s Big B territory. And research suggests companies that get Big B right are up to three times more profitable.
As Elena Verna notes, echoing the Bezos quote: marketing can’t succeed if brand-building is a disjointed exercise, separate from the rest of the company. Brand isn’t a marketing department project. It’s an organisation-wide job.
Why this matters more now
The 95:5 rule tells us that at any given time, roughly 95% of your market isn’t actively buying. They’re satisfied with their current solution, or they haven’t yet recognised a better alternative exists. They’ll become prospects in 3, 6, or 12 months when circumstances shift.
Mental availability — being remembered before buyers start evaluating — is the real competitive advantage. According to Adam Goyette’s research, 72% of B2B SaaS CMOs begin buying journeys by consulting peers, not searching Google. And 79% say brand recognition matters when creating shortlists.
By the time intent shows up in your analytics, the work is already done. The shortlist was written weeks or months ago, and if you weren’t already on it, your demand gen campaigns are fighting an uphill battle.
A product is something made in a factory. A brand is something made in the mind.
The project management tools example
The project management tools market shows how this plays out. Kamil Rextin at 42slash breaks it down:
- Monday.com reportedly spends 90%+ of revenue on sales and marketing. They achieved ubiquity through YouTube, out-of-home, podcasts, and search advertising — hammering the PM tool positioning until it stuck.
- ClickUp took a similar approach, investing heavily to promote “All-in-One” and “Save One Day a Week” messaging repeatedly across channels.
- Basecamp took the opposite route. The founders maintain a prolific social presence with polarising opinions about software development. This organic approach builds Brand without traditional advertising spend.
- Trello remains top of mind for many buyers, even years after being acquired by Atlassian.
The lesson isn’t that you need to spend like Monday.com. It’s that buyers typically shortlist just 2-4 products before making a decision. If you’re not already in that shortlist — built through months or years of mental availability — you’re not even in the race.
Another example: HotJar dominates the heatmap and session recording category despite Microsoft Clarity being free and arguably superior. Years of consistent messaging created category synonymity. That’s what Big B Brand looks like in practice.
What to do about it
Start by assuming nobody knows you exist. Market like you’re starting from zero.
For most B2B companies (especially those under $100M in revenue), Kamil Rextin recommends an 80/20 split — 80% on direct response and sales activation, 20% on always-on brand activity. That 20% isn’t optional. It’s what ensures the 80% actually works, because it keeps you in the consideration set when buyers enter the market.
How to build Big B Brand without spending like Monday.com:
- Content with a point of view — fewer pieces, greater depth, distinctive takes. Stop publishing commodity content that sounds like everyone else.
- Founder-led presence — LinkedIn founder posts consistently outperform company pages. People trust people, not logos.
- Show up where your buyers already are — communities, podcasts, events. Not as an advertiser, but as a participant.
- Repetition and consistency — brand is built through repeated exposure over time, not a single campaign.
You’re not niche famous until prospects show up already knowing your point of view and what you stand for. If they don’t, nothing else you’re doing in marketing will work as well as it should.