Win Hearts and Minds, Not Feature Wars

Paul Mellor

Every category has become a sea of sameness. Yep, even yours – the one that’s totally different and special. From SaaS tools to professional services, “ground-breaking” features and pricing pages blur together, until buyers can’t tell one solution from the next. And lest we forget, anything actually new and groundbreaking quickly gets copied, while overused claims like “AI-powered” have all but lost their meaning.

Houston, we have a problem

Yep, and it’s a biggie – because if buyers can’t see a meaningful difference between product features and specifications, then you, my friend, are being ignored. In this commoditized reality, no matter how good your product or how brilliant your sales team, if you’re ignored by your audience, everything else is academic.

The greatest search engine is still the one in their heads

When almost every offering is interchangeable, the battleground shifts. Brands can no longer win on product specs alone. Instead, they must win in the mind of the customer. In other words, the brands that win are the ones buyers think of first when they’re in consideration situations.

Why brands are drowning in a sea of sameness

True, one-of-a-kind advantages are exceedingly rare, and it doesn’t take long for competitors to catch up on the latest and greatest innovations. We saw it when ChatGPT ushered in the generative AI era in late 2022 – it wasn’t long before half a dozen similar offerings flooded the market. Today, almost everyone seems to be offering an “AI-powered” solution. Ergh.

Ask yourself: how many brands can you name that have a huge and enduring advantage with the roll-off-the-tongue distinctiveness that sets them apart? Chances are, the only ones you can think of are decades-old consumer brands. Dyson, with its patented cyclone vacuum tech, or Gore-Tex, with its proprietary fabric, are iconic because they’ve been around for years and built moats competitors couldn’t cross. For most businesses, especially in fast-moving B2B markets, that kind of defensible edge simply isn’t realistic.

So what happens when potential customers can’t see a meaningful difference between solutions? Often, companies fall into price competition – a race to the bottom that erodes margin (guaranteed to make your CFO a happy bunny). Others lean on generic claims like “great service” or “AI-powered,” or “customer centric” – guaranteed to get the Sales Director fired.

For Underdog brands, the bottom line is simple: if you’re at parity with competitors, doubling down on features or shouting generic claims won’t work. You have one option, and one option only, you have to change the conversation entirely.

It’s mental. Win the mind game with mental availability

Marketing science tells us that brand growth comes from availability – being easy to find and easy to think about at the point of sale. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute defines this as:

Physical availability: how broadly your product is distributed or made accessible
Mental availability: how present your brand is in customers’ minds

While businesses with deep pockets can buy physical availability with global distribution deals and huge advertising budgets, that’s not an option for most. Instead, your advantage will come from mental availability.

Only an idiot says “we just need to build brand awareness, mate”

But there’s more to mental availability than awareness. Really, it’s about how a potential buyer thinks about a brand during consideration situations. This has a profound impact in B2B, where 95% of buyers aren’t in the market for your product at any given time. You don’t need me to tell you that buying cycles can span years, which means most of your marketing reaches people who aren’t ready to buy right now. The goal, then, isn’t immediate conversion – it’s memory. You want your brand to be the one that comes to mind when a future need arises.

For resource-strapped companies, building mental availability is the most effective way to offset limited physical reach. You may not be mentioned in every industry analyst report right away, but that’s not a problem – success comes from claiming space in the buyer’s mind through smarter marketing. That’s where your unique perspective comes in. It’s your point of view, your ideology, and it influences everything you do.

You’re being screwed (and not just on a Friday night)

The unfortunate truth is the biggest brands in a category screw Underdogs. For every dollar the biggest brands spend on their advertising, they get an 18x multiplier compared to Underdogs. And not only that, the biggest brands have waaaay bigger budgets. Classic!

And research shows that 90% of an audience consider just two brands when in the consideration phase. Just two! Why? Because your audience buys based on habit. Sleep-walking, making choices on auto-pilot.

What it really means to have a “point of view”

Don’t be fooled: a point of view isn’t the same thing as generic branding babble. Customers don’t care in the slightest about your brand positioning statement, your vision, your mission, or how nice you claim to be. Platitudes like “we put our customers first” or “we’re passionate about innovation” are table-stakes, not differentiators.

A real point of view might be one of the following:

Name the problem: Spotlight what’s broken about the status quo, like when TransferWise showed how much it cost to send money abroad.
Reset priorities: Reframe what customers should value that competitors overlook, like when Salesforce railed against on-site software.
Challenge convention: Surface the truth others are reluctant to say aloud, like when Dollar Shave Club reminded everyone what a razor really should be.
Pick a fat enemy: Pick a fight with the fattest, slowest (but richest) organization, like when BrewDog picked a fight with the fat-cat CEOs of beer brands.

The biggest brands, sitting comfortably with the lion’s share of the market, have little incentive to rock the boat. They stick to the winning formula – or at least the winning formula for them. In practice, that means maintaining the status quo to appeal to as many people as possible. And that’s your opportunity. Ohhh, now it’s getting interesting!

You have one option, and one option only

For challenger brands, this caution creates an opportunity. Underdog brands can win attention by doing what the biggest brand can’t, won’t, or daren’t do. We have to earn the right to be noticed. To grow, we must take market share from the biggest brand – and they’re not going to just roll over and let you have it, are they? No. You’ve got to fight for it; you’ve got to really fancy it.

Tickle the audience, tittivate them, make them laugh, make them cry, smile, grimace, nod along, wince, recoil in horror, or better yet… get them to twist ‘n’ shout.

Get them to do something, anything. Remember they’re sleep-walking, buying on auto-pilot. So we need to provoke them. We need to break their prediction. Yes, it’s riskier than being ignored – but that’s precisely why it works. The biggest brands avoid these spaces, leaving the space open for Underdogs to break through and build mental availability.

Doing what the big players won’t: lessons from the Underdogs

Some of the clearest examples of point-of-view distinction come from consumer markets, where Underdogs have taken on well-established industry giants. Yep, B2B companies tend to be more vanilla, but there’s still much they can learn from B2C. They might be wearing a suit, but they’re still humans (just about), with emotions, dreams, desires. They remember daring advertising just like everyone else.

A wonderful case study is Burger King’s award-winning “Moldy Burger” campaign. With just a 20% market share compared to McDonald’s 60%, Burger King couldn’t hope to out-spend or out-distribute its rival – so it out-thought them. While McDonald’s played it safe and just wanted to grow the market, Burger King did what its competitor would never do: show its burgers decaying to prove they contained no preservatives. Hugely successful, sparking conversation and memorability – a textbook example of building mental availability.

Those in the UK will also recall the insurance comparison sites Compare the Market and GoCompare. Both launched memorable campaigns in 2009: Compare the Market introduced its CGI meerkat Alexander Orlov, while GoCompare unleashed Gio Compario – an over-the-top opera singer whose obnoxiously catchy jingle remains one of the most irritating ads ever made. Love it or hate it, it worked: according to GoCompare’s 2009 financial report, the campaign boosted brand awareness by 450% and increased turnover by 53%.

Now, you may think these consumer examples don’t translate to B2B – but they do, just in a different tone. B2B buyers still have short attention spans and appreciate originality. B2B Underdogs can use a strong point-of-view to great effect. For example:

Salesforce: In its early days, Salesforce launched the “No Software” campaign to champion its then-unique SaaS stance. The platform didn’t offer more features than competitors, but it had a bold POV – one that CEO Marc Benioff described as “the end of software.”
HubSpot: HubSpot coined the term “inbound marketing,” which has since become industry shorthand. At the time, plenty of marketing automation tools already existed, but by framing a movement around educating buyers rather than bombarding them with ads, HubSpot positioned itself as a thought leader.

Remember, capitalism isn’t fair

Research from Havard Business Review shows that in B2B, 90% of RFPs are won by a company that was on the client’s first list. That list might be a formal document from procurement, a quick WhatsApp message between an internal champion and the C-suite, or – more often than not – just a few names mentioned in a meeting as decision-makers wrap up a call.

Just think of the gazillion RFPs you’ve lost over the years. Time and time again, you lost because you were never going to win.

It doesn’t matter how many nurture tracks the prospect had seamlessly travelled down, how many times the sales team spoke to the prospect, or how good your CRM is (or isn’t).

It’s not fair. RFPs aren’t fair. They should be an objective assessment of the merits between companies. But they’re not. They’re won by the biggest company (and they’re big because they keep on winning).

Okay, so what's the answer? Building mental availability with true thought leadership

If perspective is your differentiator, then content marketing is how you turn it into impact. Bold ideas need a platform, and in B2B, that means a constant drumbeat of thought leadership: blogs, webinars, research, and opinion pieces that inform and influence buyers long before they’re ready to purchase.

What makes this powerful is that they’re not about chasing clicks or quick wins. It’s about shifting how buyers see the world – and ensuring your brand is the one they remember when the need arises. The strongest campaigns:

Start with the problem, not the product. What’s broken in your industry today? What silent struggles do customers face that few are willing to name?
Define your energy. A memorable POV usually needs a foil. For Salesforce, it was on-premise software; for HubSpot, intrusive outbound marketing. Naming what you stand against gives your message energy.
Keep it simple and sticky. The best POVs fit into a single phrase – “No Software,” “Inbound Marketing,” “Revenue Intelligence.” If it takes a paragraph, it won’t stick.
Express it consistently. Your POV should be a constant drumbeat, shaping campaigns, content, events, and even your product roadmap. Consistency is what turns a stance into a reputation.
Deliver it through thought leadership. Use research, opinion content, and storytelling to reinforce your POV until your brand becomes synonymous with your point of view.

Yes, it sounds exhausting. And yes, it would be loads easier if we could just say, “we’re great.” But no, capitalism isn’t fair. Remember: this takes proper graft, a ton of brain-power, and it isn’t about producing sales overnight. Instead, you’re planting the seeds of trust and preference in a buyer’s mind that grow over time.

Done well, you’ll “own” a piece of the industry conversation – mental real estate that’s memorable and that your competitors can’t easily take.