Building a Brand That Moves Markets
- Karine Del Moro
- Oct 24
- 6 min read
Ask most B2B marketing teams to define "brand," and you'll hear about messaging frameworks, visual systems, tone of voice… But ask a high-performing CMO, and you'll get a fundamentally different answer: brand is leverage.
If your brand isn't moving markets, you're not building a brand. You're running a content factory.
So what do I mean by “moving markets”? For me it’s about:
Shaping perceptions
Influencing buying decisions
Commanding premium pricing
In an era where tech buyers are more sophisticated, more sceptical and more autonomous than ever, brand isn't the soft and fluffy cousin of demand generation. It's a force multiplier. It transforms awareness into preference, accelerates velocity through the funnel, and distinguishes category leaders from everyone else chasing them.
Here are 5 steps to building a brand that moves markets, not just MQLs.
1. Brand is strategic, not decorative
Let's be clear about what brand means: your brand isn't your logo, colour palette or homepage copy. It's what your market believes about your company, even if [and especially when] you're not in the room.
This means your brand must:
Reflect your market position with precision
Reinforce your value proposition at every touchpoint
Build trust across every buyer interaction
Brand is the strategic framework that governs how your company shows up in your category, how you articulate your story, and how you earn credibility before any sales conversation even takes place.
Top Tip: Run a "blind test." Remove your logo from your materials. Does your perspective, voice and visual identity still signal who you are? If not, your brand isn't differentiated. It's purely decorative.
2. Own the narrative
In saturated tech markets, features blur together and funnels fracture. What cuts through is a clear, compelling narrative combined with intellectual authority that positions you as the market leader.
First, you need to define your market narrative:
What key trends are happening in your industry?
What future are you inviting customers to build with you?
How are you uniquely positioned to guide them there?
This isn't storytelling for storytelling's sake. This is about thought leadership, not just clever content. It's about establishing market context that makes your solution the inevitable next step.
When your executives, product leaders and CMOs consistently share bold perspectives and original research, you achieve something competitors can't easily replicate. That's when your brand becomes synonymous with category expertise. So make sure you drive the message home at every opportunity:
Publish POV-driven content that challenges conventional thinking
Speak at industry events about where the market is headed, not just your product
Build an executive presence that makes your leadership the go-to voice in your space
Top Tip: Dedicate 20% of your content budget to original research and thought leadership with zero product mentions. The goal is to own the conversation, not just participate in it. Then collaborate with product and executive leadership to hammer your narrative relentlessly across every channel.
3. Consistency builds credibility
Executives often underestimate how long it takes for brand positioning to penetrate the market. Internal fatigue sets in after six months but market saturation takes years. This gap is where most B2B brands falter: they pivot messaging, chase trends or dilute their narrative before it has time to take root.
The most powerful brands are almost painfully consistent:
Same narrative on the website and at the conference booth
Same voice in the webinar and the sales presentation
Same values in the career page and the product roadmap
In B2B, buying cycles are long and buying committees are large. A single deal might involve 6-10 stakeholders across multiple touchpoints over 6-18 months. If your brand shows up differently each time - different messaging, different tone, different value proposition - you create cognitive friction. Buyers don't know what you stand for, and confusion kills deals.
Consistency does three critical things:
Accelerates Recognition: When prospects encounter your brand repeatedly with the same narrative and visual identity, pattern recognition kicks in. They start to remember you.
Builds Trust: Consistency signals stability and commitment. It tells buyers, "We know who we are, and we're not changing our story depending on who's in the room."
Compounds Authority: Every consistent touchpoint reinforces your market position. Over time, this repetition doesn't just build awareness. It builds belief.
Top Tip: Audit all touchpoints quarterly: are you delivering the same story across brand, content, sales, and customer experience? Create a "brand truth deck" that documents your core narrative, visual standards and voice principles. Make it required reading for every new employee and agency partner.
4. Brand drives pricing power and pipeline quality
Strong brands don't just generate more leads, they attract fundamentally better ones:
Buyers with compressed sales cycles
Higher average contract values
Lower churn rates
Why? Because brand-educated buyers already believe in your value. They don't need convincing, they need validation.
When you build a strong brand, you essentially change the economics of your go-to-market strategy. Brand leaders can charge 20-30% more than competitors without significantly impacting win rates. Why? Because buyers perceive brand leaders as lower risk. They're not just buying your product. They're buying the credibility that comes with your market position. When a buyer chooses the category leader, they never have to justify that decision to their boss. Gartner research shows that 77% of B2B buyers rate their purchase experience as extremely complex or difficult*. A strong brand reduces perceived risk and decision anxiety.
Brand-educated buyers enter your funnel with pre-existing trust. They've already consumed your thought leadership, seen you speak at events, or heard peers mention you. This means:
Fewer discovery calls needed to establish credibility
Less time spent on competitive differentiation
Faster consensus among buying committee members
Higher close rates because you're already on the shortlist
Strong brands attract buyers who align with their ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). They self-select based on your narrative, values and market position. This means:
Higher product adoption rates
Lower implementation friction
Stronger customer advocacy and referrals
Reduced churn because expectations are aligned from day one
Here's where it gets powerful: brand impact compounds. As you win better customers, they become advocates who amplify your brand. Their success stories attract similar buyers. Your brand becomes a flywheel that drives both acquisition efficiency and customer lifetime value.
Top Tip: Track the performance delta between brand-first channels (word-of-mouth referrals, organic LinkedIn engagement, branded search) versus paid acquisition channels. Create a dashboard that shows average deal size by source, sales cycle length by source, win rate by source, and 12-month retention by source. This data becomes your business case for continued brand investment. When you can prove that brand-sourced deals close faster and at higher ACVs, suddenly brand isn't a such a "soft" metric anymore.
5. Brand is a company-wide commitment (not a marketing initiative)
You cannot build a meaningful brand within the marketing silo. Your sales team delivers the brand promise. Your product embodies it. Your executive team amplifies it. Your customers validate it.
The fundamental mistake you can make is treating brand as a marketing project. Brand teams develop positioning, refresh the website, launch a campaign… and wonder why it doesn't stick. Here's why: brand isn't what you say about yourself. It's what the market experiences when they interact with your company.
Every function shapes brand perception:
Sales: Your AEs aren't just closing deals. They're brand ambassadors in every discovery call, demo and negotiation. If your brand promises "partnership and transparency" but your sales team uses high-pressure tactics and hides pricing, you don't have a brand problem. You have a credibility problem.
Product: Your product is your most important brand touchpoint. If your brand narrative is about "intuitive, effortless automation" but your product requires a 40-page implementation guide and dedicated support, the disconnect destroys trust faster than any campaign can build it.
Customer Success: Post-sale is where brand promises are validated or violated. If your CS team is understaffed, unresponsive or focused solely on retention metrics rather than customer outcomes, you're teaching customers that your brand narrative was just marketing fluff.
Executive Team: Your C-suite doesn't just set strategy - they personify your brand externally. When your CEO speaks at events, posts on LinkedIn or engages with analysts, they're either reinforcing your brand narrative or creating confusion.
People & Culture: Your employer brand and your product brand aren't separate. Employees who don't believe in your mission, understand your market narrative or feel aligned with your values will struggle to represent your brand authentically.
Top Tip: Elevate brand to a shared KPI at the executive level, not merely a marketing metric. Run a quarterly "brand alignment workshop" with leaders from sales, product, CS, and HR. Use real customer interactions to audit brand consistency. Ask: "Did we deliver on our brand promise here?" When the answer is no, treat it as a strategic priority, not a failure. Finally, create a brand council with representatives from each function who meet monthly to identify brand gaps and coordinate solutions.
Final Thought: Build a brand that's bigger than your funnel
Moving markets means moving minds. That requires more than content calendars and campaign tactics [although you still need those I'm afraid!]. It demands a brand built on strategic clarity, uncompromising consistency, and the conviction to stand for something meaningful in a sea of sameness.
If you're a CMO determined to win in crowded, commoditised markets, remember this: demand generation fills the pipeline but brand determines who shows up in it, and why they choose you.
Need a safe pair of hands with over 25 years of experience in B2B SaaS to support your marketing strategy or execution? Send me a message today!
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