Enterprise technology businesses: Does your brand have a pulse?

It is dangerously tempting to adopt a ‘tried and tested’ formula for the marketing of technology brands. The typical approach is a variation on the template developed by P&G in the 1960s: Problem. Solution. Reason-to-believe. Call to action. 

Review your own marketing, and that of your competitors, and I would wager that they conform to a similar pattern. First, the ambition to address a strategic issue “Empowering the future of…”; then an overview of the product’s advantages (usually supported by a diagram and a list of accolades); and finally the plea - “Let’s talk”. 

The words will be near-interchangeable. The screenshots could belong to any company. You’ve fallen into the commodity trap. If you’re not distinctive, you’re not giving customers a reason to choose you.

People buy people 

The old adage holds, even – and especially – in enterprise technology. When vendors’ capabilities sit within a hair’s breadth of each other on the RFP, buyers (as humans) will pick the team they feel ‘gets’ them, and that they can get on with.

B2B buying is a people business dressed in a procurement suit. The decision is emotional, underpinned by rationalisation. Who do I trust? Who really gets it? Who will pick up the phone long after the deal is done?

Which means the job of a technology brand is not to prove its specs. The specs are the price of admission. Compete on these alone and it’s a race to the bottom. The job of the brand is to elevate the people, the culture and the commitments behind the technology.

Not just through a clever tagline or a polished identity. Through everything: how your team talks in a pitch, how your engineers behave on an implementation, how your leadership shows up when things go wrong. The brand is the personality your company projects, and the promise your people keep.

Lead with character

Chromatic has worked with technology businesses at different stages of development and in very different markets. The ones that break through are the ones whose brand is built around the character of their people, not only the capabilities of their product.

MajorKey is an identity access management specialist. The temptation was to lead on expertise. Instead, the brand was built around a conviction about how the team works: as conductors, not code-cutters, orchestrating systems and people so an organisation plays in tune. The tagline “Technology in Concert” is a cultural commitment. It shapes how MajorKey's consultants introduce themselves, how they frame a proposal, how they describe what success feels like. The brand gives customers a reason to believe that these are people worth partnering with, before a single feature is discussed. Find out more>

Highmetric addressed a different insight. We all know that technology makes big promises and that reality often disappoints. Most technology partners act as advisors or as implementers. And that leaves a gap. Highmetric are the folk who bridge that divide: creative, committed, willing to own the outcome. “Delivering Technology's Promise” is a statement about the character of the team. It tells a prospective customer that Highmetric won’t hand you a strategy document and then walk away. That distinctiveness - made visible through the brand - contributed directly to commercial results. The business received unsolicited acquisition approaches and sold its ServiceNow practice for the highest multiple the category had seen. Find out more>

Vibrint was formed by combining ESi, known for its expert analysts, with Meadowgate, known for its technology platform. In federal intelligence, the instinct is to lead on throughput: more signals processed, more data ingested, more coverage. The brand instead anchored on what Vibrint’s people brought to the table: judgment, accountability, and the ability to help agencies make the right call under pressure. Every hire, every client conversation, every piece of collateral reinforces the idea that the people at Vibrint are defined by the weight of the decisions they support. Find out more>

Three very different businesses. But in each, the brand is distinctive and effective because it communicates something about the people, giving customers a distinctive reason to choose them.

Give your brand a pulse

A CMO's job is to make their people and their culture unmissable and unmistakable. 

How?

Articulate your culture as a client promise. Not values posters, but a promise of how it feels to work with your team.

Make expertise visible through your people. Put your engineers, consultants, founders and function heads on stage, on camera and on the page. Not as decoration, but as proof. Show how they think. Let buyers see the quality of judgment behind the product. 

Design behaviour, not just messages. Your brand earns trust when the experience matches the story. If your positioning says you are clear, calm and commercially sharp, your proposals, meetings, onboarding and problem resolution should feel that way too. Brand is not only how you look and sound. It is how consistently your organisation behaves under pressure.

Invest in moments where trust becomes tangible. Websites and decks create familiarity. Real interactions create conviction. Visits, executive briefings, client roundtables, summits, dinners and working sessions are where a technology brand stops feeling abstract and starts feeling human.
No website, no matter how well designed, can replicate the feeling of connecting with someone who gives a damn.

The brands that win long-term enterprise relationships are those that make human connections, through the quality of their people and the integrity of their programming. Not either/or, but both.

Because when your technology is super-human, your brand has to be too.

Written by Simon Case and Alec Rattray

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