I walked through the Restoration Hardware showroom in Charlotte on the way to my mom’s birthday dinner, and the entire floor was beige. Off-white sofas, cream throws, light brown tables, one continuous field of not-quite-white. You can order any of it in other colors. The swatches are right there on the wall. Nobody picked one.
Anyone asking how to make B2B marketing interesting is standing in that same showroom. Louis Grenier’s State of B2B Brand Distinctiveness 2026 scored 100 B2B SaaS and AI companies on eight assets, from color and typography to sound. Seventy-eight came out generic. Two were invisible. One cleared the ownable band, Wiz, at 19 points out of 24. Ninety-one of the hundred scored zero on sound.
Ideas were never the scarce part. Every marketer I know can list ten things that would work. Those ten things have to survive a room, and beige is what is left once everyone has had a say. That explains Grenier’s numbers better than a talent shortage does.
Below: why B2B went beige, why the beige keeps winning, fourteen things companies did that nobody forgot, and a test you can run on your own homepage this week.
TL;DR
- Grenier scored 100 B2B SaaS and AI brands on eight assets: one ownable, 19 recognizable, 78 generic, 2 invisible.
- AI, merged sales and marketing teams, private equity math and infrastructure-selling influencers all pull brands to the middle.
- Every one of those forces is easy to defend in a budget meeting, which is why they win.
- Distinctive work dies in approval, not in the brief. Count your approvers before blaming your team.
- Infrastructure is the gate, not the differentiator. We sell infrastructure and it is still true.
- Fourteen real plays below, sorted into free, costs money, and costs nerve.
- Run the logo-off test, then fix your deposit-to-withdrawal ratio on purpose.
Where 100 brands landed
One brand in a hundred is actually ownable.
Louis Grenier scored 100 B2B SaaS and AI companies from 0 to 3 on eight assets: color, logo, visual device, typography, tagline, human identity, product motif and sound. Twenty-four points possible.
1
Ownable
19 to 24 points. Recognizable out of context.
19
Recognizable
13 to 18 points. Distinctive inside the category.
78
Generic
7 to 12 points. Category defaults, start to finish.
2
Invisible
0 to 6 points. Nothing to retrieve at all.
Sound is the emptiest asset of all. Ninety-one of the hundred scored a flat zero. The average across every company in the study was 0.08.
Why does B2B marketing all look the same?
Four forces push every B2B brand toward the middle.
- AI goes to the middle. If your product is genuinely different, AI personalization and AI design drag it back toward the average. They do excellent work when a human with taste pushes them to the edges, and that takes more time, not less.
- The creative titles disappeared. Fewer people with brand, content, writing or design in their title. More RevOps, GTM engineering and growth specialists. Merging sales and marketing turned marketers into sellers who stitch tools together.
- Finance took the wheel. Private equity is buying everything from plumbers to vertical SaaS, and the first cuts land on whatever is hardest to measure. Josh Tessler compares it to the sandwich chain dropping from three slices of turkey to two, assuming nobody notices. People notice.
- Influencers sell infrastructure. The format never changes: cold email is dead, followed by a cold email platform. Meanwhile SEO, AEO and GEO content gets written for machines rather than people.
Don Draper arguing about an ad over a glass of whiskey belongs to another century. Most B2B advertising now is a short product demo. Every so often a newer company puts real effort into looking different, the way the AI CRM Monaco has, and it stands out because so little else does.
Boring is what survives approval
Nobody has to approve beige, and that is the whole mechanism.
Look at the fourteen plays below. A committee would have killed every one of them. The ones that happened got done by a single person before anyone could stop them. That is an approval problem, and it explains Grenier’s numbers better than a skills shortage does.
Level Agency, where I spent a couple of years, had a core value I still repeat: good enough isn’t. Expect one marketing manager to be an excellent copywriter, tactician and technician at once and you have already chosen good enough.
A fair challenge to all this: Outkeep sells email infrastructure, and here I am telling you infrastructure is not what makes you memorable. Both are true. Infrastructure is the gate. You cannot skip it, AI can stand most of it up for you, and there are endless guides on wiring it together. Once every competitor sends the same AI-written email off the same stack, the only variable left is whether anyone remembers who you are.
14 things companies did that nobody forgot
These are real, most of them mine or watched up close. Steal any of them. They are sorted by what they cost you, starting with the ones that cost nothing.
What each play costs you
Fourteen plays, three price tags.
None of these cost what a rebrand costs. What they cost is a decision, and the ones further down cost someone their comfort.
Nobody has to approve these
Time and honesty are the only inputs. You can start one of these this afternoon.
▼
Someone signs a check or loosens the guidelines
Often less money than the boring version. The store takeover came in under the ballroom.
▼
One person accepts that part of the room will object
This is the tier people still repeat years later, and the tier a committee kills first.
Free
1. Write for 15 minutes before AI touches it. Get the story out in your own words first, before AI annihilates it into oblivion by accident. Then bring AI in to tighten. Hand it the whole job and you land in the 78.
2. Spend your personal stories. They are deposits. The beige showroom is one, and it cost me a birthday dinner I was going to anyway. What happened in your week works inside corporate outreach, because it puts a person behind the sender name.
3. Show the inner workings. Everyone loves watching a company get built in public, the good and the ugly. Publish the real numbers, including the twenty-three VCs who passed and what actually happened in the office that quarter. People read that closely, and almost nobody finds it boring.
4. Name the boring out loud. If your category is dull, say so. Make the process or the software the punchline and never the people using it. Josh’s caution is the right one: the moment a reader feels like the joke, you have lost them.
Costs money
5. Take over a store instead of renting a ballroom. In Boston, Denver and New York, a Convene meeting space runs $10,000 to $30,000 for a half day of pipe and drape. For the same money you can close a Nike or North Face store for two hours, with no rental fee, just a minimum spend inside. We took over the Nike running store in the Flatiron: sixty guests, a caterer, wine and tasting platters, a one-hour panel, and thirty minutes to shop in a fully staffed store with a gift card worth over $100 each. People left saying this is a company that invests in its people. It cost less than the ballroom.
6. Film something live and let people in the room. Xceleration, here in Charlotte, recorded a podcast in their own office with a guest host. Invite-only, you plus one, a room of local business people, real lights and cameras and mics, and some back-and-forth with the audience. I still bring it up.
7. Open-source your own logo. At Level we let in-house designers and outside agencies build their own variations. The primary marks stayed primary, and around them grew a sunburst version, a grayscale version, a Mexican flag version for our office in Mexico, and a black-on-black version you could only get by winning a core values award. You lose some control and gain a hundred people playing with your mark.
8. Make swag worth keeping. It stands for stuff we all get, and most of it is a throwaway charger. Spend thought instead of money: a plush of your mascot, if you are one of the very few B2B companies with one, or a Rubik’s Cube if complexity is your argument. Remember plenty of it ends up with kids and spouses.
9. Steal from consumer brands. If your founder was a skateboarder or a metalhead, build something around it. Consumer brands have permission that B2B never took. If a spouse tells someone to take your shirt off, you have your answer about the shirt.
Costs nerve
10. Wear the argument. When Tradeshift was the newcomer in procure-to-pay, the incumbent was Ariba, later acquired by SAP. Tradeshift’s CEO wore a t-shirt to every conference that said Ariba sucks. A Tradeshift shirt would have pulled in nobody, because nobody knew Tradeshift. The Ariba shirt meant people had to walk over and ask. It is bold, it is not a move I love, and I laughed when I saw it and remember it years later.
11. Show up wrong on purpose. At Money20/20 in Las Vegas, one attendee with a payments product walked the floor with a marching band drum, everything branded, until security told him to stop. That one crosses a line, because it breaks the rules of the room he was a guest in. It also worked, and I have stayed in touch with him since. Cost: one drum.
12. Be the anti-category. Drew Burdick’s StealthX here in Charlotte positions as the anti-consultant while being, unambiguously, consultants. You immediately want to know what that means, and that reaction is the asset. It is the same lever as who you stand next to, pointed in the opposite direction.
13. Publish your worst reviews. Every company with enough reviews has bad ones, and most reply to them quietly. Take your ten favorite one-star reviews, publish them, and reply to each one straight, with a little snark where it is earned. Nobody does this and everybody would read it.
14. Say what you are bad at. Skip the humble-brag version. We are not good at this, and if you need it, use these people. That buys more credibility than any case study.
How to make B2B marketing interesting this quarter
Two tests, both cheap, and neither one needs a meeting.
Score your own eight
The scorecard, and where most B2B brands sit.
Rate each asset 0 to 3. Zero means absent, 1 means category default, 2 means distinctive inside the category, 3 means recognizable out of context. The right column is the typical score across Grenier’s hundred.
| Asset | What earns a 3 | Category norm |
|---|---|---|
| Color | Named by buyers without the logo | ●●● |
| Logo | Readable as yours when cropped | ●●● |
| Visual device | A shape or pattern only you use | ●●● |
| Typography | Not the same grotesk as everyone else | ●●● |
| Tagline | A line a competitor would argue with | ●●● |
| Human identity | A face or mascot people can picture | ●●● |
| Product motif | A UI moment screenshotted on its own | ●●● |
| Sound | Any recognizable audio signature at all | ●●● |
Grenier’s caveat matters more than your score. The asset makes you retrievable. The positioning makes you worth retrieving. A distinctive asset sitting on vague positioning just makes you famously generic.
Start with the logo-off test. Strip the company name and logo off your homepage and show it to five people who know your category. Can they tell it is you? Then score yourself the way Grenier did, 0 to 3 on each of color, logo, typography, tagline, human identity, sound, visual device and product motif. Nineteen of 24 is ownable, and 19 was the best score in a hundred companies.
His caveat matters more than the number. The asset makes you retrievable. The positioning makes you worth retrieving. A distinctive asset sitting on vague positioning just makes you famously generic.
The second test is a ledger. A deposit gives something away, like a real insight or free value. A neutral is company news. A withdrawal asks and gives nothing back, like a demo request. Run four things a month and you might choose two deposits, one neutral, one withdrawal. Choosing the ratio on purpose is the part most teams skip.
The deposit ledger
Every touch is a deposit, a neutral or a withdrawal.
Tag last month’s sends and posts, then count them. Most teams find the ratio has drifted to almost all withdrawals without anyone deciding that.
Deposit
You give something away
A real insight, a number nobody publishes, a story that cost you something to tell.
Neutral
Company news
Releases, hires, round-ups. Fine in moderation, forgettable in bulk.
Withdrawal
You ask and give nothing
Demo requests, sign-ups, “quick call?” Necessary, and expensive if it is all you send.
The ratio is yours to pick. Two deposits, one neutral and one withdrawal works. So does 25 / 50 / 25. Choosing it on purpose is the part most teams skip.
Then pick from the list:
- Run the logo-off test with five people this week
- Score the eight assets honestly and push exactly one from a 1 to a 3
- Count how many people can say no to one piece of creative before it ships. That number is your ceiling
- Hire creatives or use an agency. GTM engineers and RevOps specialists were never meant to produce this work
- Track the mix inside a steady content workstream rather than campaign by campaign
There is plenty of bland work out there, which means the bar is low and the reps are cheap. So here is the question worth sitting with: what is the last B2B brand you remembered without trying? If nothing comes to mind quickly, that pause is exactly what your buyers hit when somebody asks them about you.
Context on Outkeep’s Approach
Outkeep builds infrastructure for B2B email programs, which is why this gap is so visible from where we sit. Teams arrive with clean authentication, warmed domains and good sending reputation, and still lose to the company that said something worth repeating. Infrastructure decides whether you reach the inbox. What you put in the message decides whether anyone remembers you were there.
FAQ for Modern B2B Email Programs
How do you make B2B marketing interesting on a small budget?
Start with the four free plays above: write before AI touches the draft, spend a personal story, publish a real number, and name the boring part of your category out loud. Budget decides which tier of plays you can reach, not whether the work is interesting.
What is B2B brand distinctiveness?
How recognizable you are from your assets alone, with the name removed. Louis Grenier scores eight assets including color, logo, typography, tagline and sound on a 24-point scale. In his 2026 audit of 100 B2B SaaS and AI companies, one brand scored in the ownable band.
Why is most B2B marketing so boring?
Because distinctive work has to survive an approval chain and generic work does not. Add AI averaging the output, fewer creative roles on staff, and finance cutting whatever is hardest to measure, and beige wins by default.
Is it risky to name a competitor in B2B marketing?
It carries real legal and relationship risk. Aim the edge at the category or the status quo instead: StealthX calling itself the anti-consultant gets the same attention with none of the exposure.
Does AI make B2B marketing more generic?
By default it does, because it averages what it has already seen. It produces excellent work when a person writes the first pass and then pushes the output to the edges, which costs more time rather than less.
How often should B2B marketing ask for something?
Treat every ask as a withdrawal and every piece of real value as a deposit. Two deposits, one neutral and one withdrawal per four touches is a workable mix. Pick a ratio and hold yourself to it.
Should a B2B company have a mascot?
Very few do, which is the argument for having one. You get a visual device competitors cannot copy, swag people keep, and one of the eight assets most of your category scores a zero on.
