How You’re Dooming Your B2B Branding: Real Talk About Messaging

Branding is messy.

Brand messaging is messier.

Words are personal. Opinions are strong. And how you talk to your customers is one of the most important drivers of your business’s success. Yet too often, ego, inertia, groupthink, and a fixation on features derail what could have been a transformative messaging exercise.

Let’s get real about reasons your B2B brand messaging isn’t working—and how to get out of your own way so your brand can finally sound as good as the value you deliver.

You’re Your Brand’s Biggest Fan

I say this with love: Put your ego in a drawer. Forever. 

This one’s especially for founders and CEOs of SMBs.

You built something rare—a thriving business. That’s a huge accomplishment. You’re passionate about your company, your industry, your people, and your origin story. You’ve walked the walk. You are the expert. And none of that is up for debate.

But your expertise in running the business does not automatically make you an expert in brand messaging.

Your story may be part of the brand, but it is not the reason customers choose you. Your job in a messaging exercise is to set your brilliance down just long enough to see your business through the eyes of the people you’re trying to reach.

If you show up believing you’re the smartest person in the room, you will miss the entire point.

If you show up ready to learn, challenge assumptions, and trust the process—you win.

You Think It’s About What You Like (or Hate)

Whether you’re in marketing and working with an internal team or engaging with consultants, it’s easy for everyone to give in to, “I don’t like it.” The reason why it’s easy is that liking or hating something is easy. 

Politely, and with love, what you like or don’t like doesn’t matter. “Liking” isn’t part of the equation here. There are plenty of times when what you think will work and what you like hit at the same time. That’s a great day! In reality, you need to look at your messaging through your customers’ eyes. 

For example, let’s say you run a company called WidgeCo that sells software to factories to help them better produce widgets. You’re a little creative, and you come up with some ideas for a paid campaign called “WidgeCo is where it’s at!” You really love this and five other ideas you’ve brainstormed because you think they really pop.

Furthermore, you don’t like the ideas you got from your content and creative team, which are just so-so. You don’t like “boring” messages such as:

• Take the everyday stress out of managing widget production. 

• Produce more widgets for less—and faster. 

• Predict widget manufacturing problems before they happen. 

  
  

Sure, these definitely aren’t flashy or sparkly—to you. But your customers’ top needs are eliminating stress, producing more with less, and predicting factory-floor failure. Through the lens of your customers, these “boring” messages are like love letters. You’re telling them exactly what you can do for them, and that’s exactly what they need. 

Instead of invoking like or hate, reframe how you look at your messaging. Ban words such as like, love, dislike, and hate. You can hate a headline to the ends of the earth, but if it resonates with your audience, use it. This is not about you—it’s about them. 

Instead, every time you open your mouth to opine on messaging, start using these phrases:

• This works because [it aligns with our persona’s needs].

• This doesn’t work because [we already know our customers don’t respond to this phrase].

• This might work, but [let’s add one more element to the message].

• I’m not sure how this will work, but [let’s test it].

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Bottom line? It’s not about what you or anyone on your team likes. It’s about meeting your customers where they are, and using words they respond to. And believe me, once you start getting more prospects and conversions, you will also start to love the messaging that you once were kind of so-so about. 

You Have Too Many—Or Too Few—Voices In the Room

Gathering perspectives is healthy.

Crowdsourcing your brand messaging is not.

Here’s the thing: When you work in a vacuum, everything sucks. 

You need more than one person on your brand messaging committee. But, make sure the people in the room are there to add value, not because “They’re creative, they like to write,” or “If we don’t get someone from every department, someone will feel left out.”

Instead, bring together people in roles who know the customer and your product or service the best. That usually means sales, marketing, and product management. If the stakeholders from these areas want input from their teams and then synthesize it for the whole group, that’s great. But you’ll do the best quality work if you have a specific group with a solid plan. 

However, expect to talk to lots of folks to get a full picture. Interviewing a wide range of people—new hires, frontline staff, customer-facing teams, product experts—is essential. That’s where the truth hides. However, they don’t necessarily have to be decision-makers in the messaging process. 

I’ve seen it happen too many times: Decision-making by committee is where brand messaging goes to die. 

In short:

Leaders often invite too many people into the decision room because they want:

• Everyone to feel valued

• Cross-functional buy-in

• Political harmony

• To avoid hard conversations

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Then, what you end up with is a polite, well-intentioned Frankenstein—a message that tries to say everything to everyone and ends up meaning nothing to anyone.

Brand messaging works best when:

• Many people contribute input.

• Few people make decisions.

• One expert synthesizes, sharpens, and shapes the story.

That’s how you avoid a group project gone wrong.

The opposite of groupthink will get you even worse results. 

I’ll say it again: When you work in a vacuum, everything sucks.  

Also, if Stranger Things has taught us nothing else, it’s that the hive mind is bad for humans. 

During one of my agency lives, I worked with a midsize B2B company whose CEO had creative ambitions, and his company branding was where he channeled most of that creativity.

The company logo was artistic with large, dramatic fonts that were just plain hard to read. The website was a cornucopia of colors—like if Lisa Frank and Wavy Gravy had a baby. The effects on the website were cool and trippy. There was even pink glitter. 

I loved the website because I am a fan of the styles of Lisa Frank and Wavy Gravy. I wear tie-dyed pants on the regular, so I was into it. 

The problem? It was a tech company in the security and compliance business—which was a shock. At first glance, I assumed it was selling CBD products or maybe black light posters for dorm rooms. But definitely not a product or service that requires employees to have security clearance. 

The company was also in a complex and niche part of the industry that was often even difficult for other IT experts to understand. The messaging on the website did little to shed light on what the company actually did. The copy was more abstract than descriptive, and looked great with the design—it just made little sense. 

I’d love to say that we worked with the client and talked him into best practices for his and helped him find branding that his audience would take seriously, but I can’t. During the entire process, the CEO took any suggestions to change his company’s visual and message branding—which was what he was paying for—with heaps of offense. The only thing he loved more than his company was that incense and peppermint design. He couldn’t even pretend to care what the experts he hired were recommending. 

The people he hired to work with us to lead the new branding were sidelined and frustrated. They gave up and became “yes” people. 

In the end, we were able to talk the CEO into changing his logo font, and he finally agreed that the pink glitter explosion might not be what his audience wanted to see. 

You can’t win ’em all, so we opted for harm reduction.

Spoiler: The client is still in business, but it never reached its growth goals.

Lesson: Don’t be like this guy, getting in his own way by thinking he’s always right. The only person who is always right is Dolly Parton. If she’s not on your staff, then put the smart people you hire in the room together, open your mind, and let them be smart. 

And for the love of all that is holy, never put glitter on your B2B homepage, unless you are, in fact, the love child of Lisa Frank and Wavy Gravy. 

You Don’t Actually Understand What You’re Buying

This is a big one. And again—I say this with love:

Most leaders think they know what “brand messaging” means until the project starts. Then everyone realizes that expectations are wildly misaligned.

Here’s what a messaging exercise is NOT:

• A new tagline

• A visual rebrand

• Sales battle cards

• Copywriting new webpages

• Refreshing pitch decks

• A lead nurture sequence

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Those are deliverables that use messaging—but they are not the messaging itself.

So What Actually Is a Brand Messaging Exercise?

It’s the work of defining what your company stands for, who it helps, why it matters, and how to express that value clearly and consistently across every channel.

A solid brand messaging framework creates:

• A strategic narrative

• Clear value propositions

• Audience-specific message direction

• Proof points

• Differentiators

• Positioning pillars

• A voice and vocabulary everyone can align to

• Messaging matrices for your audiences

When done well, messaging is the source code for all future content, sales enablement, campaigns, and brand storytelling.

How to Actually Succeed at B2B Brand Messaging

Okay, now that we’ve talked about problems, let’s talk solutions. Here are four ways to ensure you build B2B brand messaging that works: 

1. Bring an Open Mind—and Expect It to Be Blown

A good brand strategist will ask questions you’ve never been asked, unpack your business in ways you’ve never considered, and give you a fresh view of your customers and your value.

Be curious. Be uncomfortable. That’s where clarity lives. You can’t reach your business goals if you don’t keep an open mind about how to reach them. 

2. Let Go of the Status Quo

Messaging that worked five years ago may not work today. Buyer behavior is different. Digital noise is louder. Your competition is evolving. AI has made everything go bonkers. The algorithms are nuts. “Best practices” are more like rolling through a stop sign than an actual destination. 

Success lies in getting as specific and as honest as you can. 

If you want different results, you need different words. You won’t grow with the status quo. 

3. Build a Clear Plan With Milestones and KPIs

Messaging isn’t a one-size-fits-all exercise. Every business, audience, and market is different. Each messaging exercise will have commonalities, but your business really is special and needs a unique approach. 

The right branding partner will:

• Set priorities

• Define goals

• Map milestones

• Align deliverables to your go-to-market motion

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This ensures the work is not just creative—it’s operationalized. This isn’t some “fluffy, creative, girly” exercise. (Exact words from a former colleague. Yes, those words came out of his mouth—in a meeting.) 

Messaging isn’t creative—it’s a business strategy. 

4. Don’t Take It Personally

Words are personal, but messaging is not. Well, at least not to you. Sure, you need to use words that make your buyers think, “Hey, they get me.” But you need to set aside your personal likes and dislikes about language and open your business mind to what language actually works.

Don’t panic. The point isn’t to not sound like you. Part of developing messaging is also determining your brand voice. This is where you decide certain specifics like, “We never use the word ‘transform’ because it’s overused and meaningless,” or, “We talk to our customers like they’re our favorite neighbors.” This is where we determine how you approach CTA language, specific industry language to use or not use, and even decide on whether to say “hello” or “hi” when starting an email. 

Beyond that, getting hung up on grammar hills to die on—the Oxford comma, sentence starters, stylistic preferences, personal rules—can derail the entire process.

Your job is not to defend your favorite phrasing. Your job is to make sure the message speaks to the right people, with the right value, at the right time. 

If it does that, the work is successful, even if it’s not how you would have written it.

Ready to Build Messaging That Actually Works?

If you’re tired of brand exercises that go nowhere—or messaging that sounds like everyone else in your space—it might be time to bring in someone who lives and breathes this work.

Unretained helps B2B companies:

• Clarify their story

• Align their teams

• Differentiate their brand

• Create messaging that actually drives revenue

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Let’s build a brand narrative that finally hits the right notes.

Connect with an Unretained messaging expert.