Thinking on B2B marketing, brand and growth.

I spent years as a journalist before I moved into marketing. The FT, men's magazines, sports media. A career built on finding the story in something and making it worth reading.

When I moved agency side the thing that struck me wasn't how bad the advertising was. It was how thin the thinking was upstream of the advertising. Specifically, how few businesses had done the actual hard work of working out what they wanted to say.

They knew what they did. That's easy. They knew who they did it for. Also fairly easy. But what made them different — genuinely, specifically, demonstrably different — that was almost always murky. And because it was murky internally, everything that came out externally was murky too.

The website said trusted partner. The case studies described outputs not outcomes. The about page was a timeline of company milestones that nobody outside the business would ever care about.

LinkedIn research this year found that while most B2B marketers feel confident in their differentiation, buyers frequently struggle to distinguish between providers. That gap — between how distinctive you think you are and how distinctive you actually appear — is where most B2B marketing budgets quietly disappear.

AI has made it worse. When everyone uses the same tools to generate content at scale, the output converges toward the mean. Safe. Competent. Forgettable.

The businesses that cut through have done something most haven't. They've done the uncomfortable internal work first. They've sat in a room and asked the question nobody wants to ask out loud: if we disappeared tomorrow, what would our best clients actually miss?

Not the category of services. Someone else provides those. What specifically about us would they miss?

The honest answers to that question are almost never what appears on the website. They're things like the way you ask questions nobody else asked. The fact that you say when something won't work. The speed at which you understand a complex brief. The person they actually work with.

Those things are the brand. Not the strapline.

The B2B businesses with the clearest positioning all lead with a point of view rather than a proposition. A proposition says we provide X to Y. A point of view says here's something true about your world that most people aren't saying out loud.

Good B2B marketing is rarer than it should be. That's a point of view. It tells you immediately whether what follows is for you or not. It's doing filtering work before any conversation starts.

Most marketing is built to appeal to as many people as possible. Which is exactly why most marketing appeals to nobody in particular.

Craig Hares is the Founding Partner of Fox + Hare, a B2B specialist creative and marketing agency based in London. foxandhare.co