The Bravery Playbook

Everyone wants to differentiate. It’s the request that shows up in nearly every brief.
Make people aware of us. Make us different. Easy to ask for, much harder to achieve.
Why? Because true differentiation means making choices. Picking a lane and saying no
to things that feel safe. That’s uncomfortable, which is why so much B2B work looks
and sounds the same. I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad here. But we all know that
we work hard on strategies, briefs, concepts and campaigns often to then make sure
that they not so different from the herd that everyone freaks out. It’s a thing.

But if bravery beats buzzwords (and it does), then the next question is how. What does it
take to actually be brave? Think of this as a playbook - not a finished one, but a few
moves you can start running if you’re serious about standing out.

People hate making choices that mean they might have to say no to someone or
something. Starter or pudding? It’s never easy. There’s bound to be a lot of very clever
thinking as to why people are like this. I shall put a summary of it into a list of other
blogs to write (along with the one on GEO) but for the purposes of this article, we’re all
just going to acknowledge the truth of it. People hate narrowing down their options and
being specific. It is hard to be brave (particularly if you’re the only one doing it).

In our recent webinar on demand creation, we talked about how bravery isn’t a random
creative spark. It comes from discipline. First, you’ve got to know exactly who you’re
trying to reach. Not a broad persona that could apply to anyone, but a sharp Ideal
Customer Profile you can design everything around. This helps enormously. It sounds a
bit boring of course. But I promise it isn’t, and it is in fact the perfect way to align your

teams and to start to take the subjective, people-pleasing, soul-destroying back-and-
forth out of your marketing. There are super famous examples all over the place of

brands that took choices (Nike anyone?) but still we forget this collectively all the time.
That’s what has made our work Hitachi ZeroCarbon effective. They didn’t try to
convince “the market” to electrify fleets. They broke it down by sector - logistics,
utilities, public transport - and spoke to each with precision. That’s a brave choice,
because it means narrowing focus. But that’s how you make an impact. If you do this,
you’re quite likely to be able to demonstrate that impact to your increasingly cynical
(and increasingly doing it themselves via the latest martech platform du jour)
Salesroom colleagues.

Second, bravery means building a story that sparks belief, not just explains a product.
Not everything can be Dove’s campaign for real beauty, but there is loads to learn from
this approach for us in our sector. Too often, B2B marketing gets lost in features and

spec. That’s safe, but it doesn’t make anyone care. A braver approach is to step back
and tell a bigger story about why it matters - the change you’re enabling, the shift you’re
leading, the progress you’re unlocking. And then to think about how your brand does it
and what makes it unique. There’s usually something about your people and the way
they go about what you do that is yours, and yours alone. You just have to strip away the
layers to find it.

Third, bravery is about consistency. The temptation in B2B is to keep adding - more
audiences, messages, more themes, more reasons to buy. But when you do that, you
dilute the impact. Buyers rarely remember lists of things, they remember how they felt
when they read something or saw something. The hardest thing is often to hold your
ground and keep a story simple, even when stakeholders push to add complexity. In the
end, bravery isn’t about adding layers. Like we said, it’s about stripping them back.

And finally, bravery is about tying your story to results that actually matter. Tetra Pak
didn’t chase empty reach. They invested in useful content for their hospitality
prospects, delivered it across channels that sector already trusted, and kept showing
up. The payoff was consistent engagement amongst the right audience. That’s impact
that you can take to the bank (fingers crossed).

So how do you achieve differentiation? Not by shouting louder and not by cranking up
the AI machine. But by making deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable choices. Be brave
enough to narrow your focus and brave enough to try and tell a story only you can tell.

Differentiation isn’t easy. But if you’re taking it on and putting it in your strategy, you’re
barking up the right tree. So godspeed and give us a call!