Andy Jordan
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Field note

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.

In this era, right or wrong, marketing a product increasingly means injecting the world with a feeling for your brand. Sometimes the best work has almost nothing to do with the product at all.

The companies doing both

Vanta

Compliance and trust

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 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.

Clay

Go-to-market data

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 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 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.

Gamma

Presentations

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, 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.

AirOps

Content engineering

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, and the brand showed up in places a typical martech company doesn't, including Cannes Lions. It gave marketers something to believe, not just something to buy.

Wiz

Cloud security

When STFO scored 100 B2B SaaS and AI brands 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.

Ramp and Mercury

Fintech

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 as the world's most famous accountant. For a corporate card.

Then it went further. On September 25, Ramp staged Bill Pay the Musical, 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 a well-produced hour-long commercial. That's partly the point. Nobody reviews a feature page.

Not every swing connects. Ramp also put out a video of Tony Hawk, the most famous skater alive, doing what he does best on actual ramps. What does skateboarding have to do with financial software? Honestly, I'm not sure. This one felt like a stretch. But even a stretch sends a signal. At the very least it says something about the culture inside Ramp: playful, fearless, willing to look a little ridiculous. Not everyone will get it. That's the risk of marketing a feeling instead of a feature. Not every collab lands, and the ones that do are worth the misses.

Mercury publishes Meridian, 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.

Outside B2B: how far a feeling can go

A few from outside B2B, because they show how far a brand with real conviction can go when the work has nothing to do with the product.

Red Bull

The canon

Every conversation about this kind of marketing ends up here. On October 14, 2012, Red Bull lifted Felix Baumgartner about 128,000 feet into the stratosphere above Roswell, New Mexico, and let him fall back to Earth. He broke the sound barrier on the way down, and 9.5 million people watched live on YouTube. The jump had nothing to do with taste, caffeine or price. It was about what Red Bull wanted you to feel: that limits are negotiable. The company sells a canned drink and runs a media operation, and it has never confused the two jobs. The content builds the belief. The can is how you take part in it.

Tecate

The zeitgeist move

When the Gulf of Mexico was renamed the Gulf of America, and Google Maps started showing the new name, Tecate didn't run an ad about beer. It put a floating bar on a boat in the middle of the Gulf and named it Bar Golfo de México. It poured a special-edition Tecate Light made with salt from that water. The bar's Instagram pointed to the Gulf on the map, and the old name was back where Tecate believed it belonged. The work, by LePub Mexico City, won at the 2026 Clios.

It wasn't a beer ad. It was bravery, resilience and pride, served cold. Tecate read a moment that touched national identity and stepped into it within weeks. It was also live: you could stand on that boat. More and more, the work that breaks through is experiential first and content second. The event happens once. The story travels for months.

Liquid Death

The stretch test

This summer Liquid Death, a company that sells canned water, teamed up with goodwipes 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 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.

The case for more top of funnel

Here's the argument I keep coming back to. The best brands, B2B brands included, regularly make work that has nothing to do with their product. A skater. A space jump. A bar in the middle of the sea. It has everything to do with the feeling they want to leave behind and the values they want you to associate with them. That feeling pulls people in. Then the funnel does its job.

B2B doesn't have to be boring. It doesn't have to be technical. Sometimes it doesn't have to be about the product at all. Buyers are still people. They watched the Super Bowl, they know where the Gulf of Mexico is, and they remember how a brand made them feel long after they forget its feature grid.

Most B2B companies will never sell wipes or pour beer in the Gulf. 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 100 B2B SaaS and AI brands scored as ownable · STFO

WARC and the ANA's Multiplier Playbook, 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 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 feeling first, the product second. Red Bull sells limits being negotiable. Tecate sells pride. Ramp sells the idea that finance people deserve a spotlight. The product earns its place inside that feeling.
  3. A look you'd know with the logo covered. Wiz is the proof: distinctive assets compound, generic ones disappear.
  4. People as the channel. Power users, creators, founders and brand leaders who are visible in their own right. Customers sell Clay. Readers sell Mercury.
  5. 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.
  6. 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. Some stretches miss. The brands worth watching take them anyway.

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.

Sources

Originally published at Needle Space Labs ↗