When everyone has access to the same models, the same capabilities, the same speed to ship, the product itself stops being the wedge. Founders find out quickly that features and functions can get matched in a quarter. Outcomes converge and if the customer squints, everything looks very same same.
So what's left? Brand!
Right now, more than any other time in marketing, IT'S A RACE TO CULTURAL RELEVANCE!
How'd we get here? I think three things broke at once.
The culture changed, the attention economy turned feral, and the categories got crowded.
We spend all day on our phones, thumbing past wars, conspiracies, and ads for things we don't need, all of it sloshing together in our slop-filled feed. Slop it up you little piggies!
AI lowered the barrier of entry -- so similarly to all the slop you see in your feed, startups are slopping up all the categories because it's easier to build and ship (shitty) products. When you look at B2B technology in the post-GPT world, every space has a dozen (often more) near-identical players. And the channels are so chaotic that the old reliable ways of reaching people are drowned in the noise. Product marketing was built for a calmer world. When every product hits parity, and every feed is a firehose, features stop being a differentiator because everyone else is making the same claim into the same void at the same time. This is why product marketing no longer works.
But it's wild because so many companies fail to recognize this, and they keep cycling through the same playbook.
When growth stalls, the instinct is to reach for a function -- a hire that will solve everything! First, it was the product marketer, because surely if the world just understood why our product was better, we'd win. Then demand gen, because we're not generating enough demand and surely growth was just a matter of spending on the right channels. Each hire was the same bet: that a single function could make up for the missing piece underneath it all. Product marketing without awareness. Demand gen without brand. Every time, the missing piece was the same one, just pushed down a level until there was nowhere left to push. And so now, FINALLY, everyone is arriving at the same realization at once.
Brand is THE thing.
Brand is THE differentiator.
Build brand first and everything else gets easier. The market has heard of you, so demand gets easier. You have their attention, so now they actually WANT to hear about your features.
But in B2B tech, brand was always last. A complete afterthought. The thing you maybe tried once the "real" growth levers were exhausted. We just need BETTER product marketing! We just need to GENERATE DEMAND! 🥴
In 2026, it's none of that. It's about attention, and nobody has any of it(!), so you have to earn it through emotional connection, humor, storytelling, the right narrative and visual identity that isn't shit. That's the work only brand can do. The order was always backwards. The layer everyone treated as the finishing touch turns out to be the foundation, and the companies that figure it out first own their categories.
New categories are emerging faster than ever, new products inventing new spaces overnight. And the first company to create real cultural relevance and ubiquity within a category wins. Not the one with the best features. Not the one with the cleanest demo or the most impressive benchmark. The one that owns the category in the collective mind, the way Clay owns GTM engineering and Lovable owns vibe coding.
It's awareness. It's virality. It's the network effect of being the name people say when they describe the category or the problem. Once you own that, the features become table stakes and the brand becomes the moat.