Try a quick experiment this afternoon: open the homepages of your four closest competitors alongside your own, delete every logo, and ask a colleague from another department to identify which company is which. Running this exercise with clients, the results are reliably humbling. The value propositions are interchangeable, the customer promises are identical, and the differentiators turn out to be the same four differentiators, ordered slightly differently.

Cue the collective yawn, and cue the quarterly plan to publish more of it.

Everybody got faster at producing the same thing

According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, covering 1,015 B2B marketers, adoption of generative AI for written content now sits at 89%. But the reported benefits collapse steadily as you move down the value chain: 87% report improved productivity, 80% improved efficiency, 65% improved creative capability, 58% improved content quality, and 39% any improvement at all in content performance.

Read that ladder from the top to the bottom. Faster, cheaper, and no better received by anybody.

That describes an industry which solved a production problem it never actually had. The bottleneck in B2B marketing was not the number of assets a team could publish in a quarter. It was whether any of those assets said something a buyer hadn't already read somewhere else. Generative tooling has made that harder rather than easier, handing every competitor in your category access to the same fluent, competent, thoroughly average prose.

Practitioners can see the problem clearly enough. Full-Funnel's survey of B2B tech marketers ranks positioning and differentiation as the second-biggest challenge at 41.7%, placing it above sales-and-marketing alignment. HubSpot's data points the same way. Most marketers agree they need more unique, human-centred content to compete with AI-generated material, while roughly half admit to reusing identical content across their platforms.

Both of those statements are usually true inside the same marketing team, incidentally.

The gap nobody measures

On the SaaS Stories podcast I spoke with Rob Cassidy from Xsellerate about positioning work with mid-market and enterprise companies, and one figure from his practice has stayed with me.

"Eighty percent of the time, we find that the market presence and the messaging don't reflect what the company's leadership thinks it should."

Listen to the full episode of SaaS Stories with Rob Cassidy of Xsellerate

Consider what that describes. The leadership team holds a clear, confident, well-differentiated understanding of the organisation in their heads, and the market receives something considerably blander. Nobody inside the business notices the discrepancy. Leadership rarely reads its own website with fresh eyes, and buyers who find the messaging generic move on quietly, without ever filing a complaint.

Rob's remedy is unglamorous workshop work, asking difficult questions, drilling down, and making certain the messaging resonates with the people you're actually selling to rather than the audience in your positioning deck. It's a good deal less enjoyable than a rebrand, and it tends to change more.

B2B keeps talking itself out of creativity

Here's the thing that frustrates me most about this category. B2B brands rein in their creativity for no good reason at all, just a vague institutional sense that serious buyers require serious communication, and that anything genuinely memorable might look unprofessional in front of a procurement committee. Where exactly did that rule come from?

Meanwhile the same buyer goes home and watches whatever everybody else watches. Whether they're in business mode or consumer mode, people are people.

The strategic argument here favours the smaller organisation, which is the part most people miss. A market-leading brand has a defensible reason for caution, with share to protect and recognition it has already paid for. A challenger carries neither of those constraints, however, and creative risk is one of the few competitive advantages that doesn't require out-spending the incumbent. Yet challenger brands in most categories behave more conservatively than the leaders do.

Why does that keep happening? Usually the approval process was designed by people who are measured on avoiding mistakes rather than on being remembered.

What distinctiveness looks like in practice is set out at the foot of this piece, in three moves.

Where this leaves you

Content is king, queen, and probably half the royal court, but only the content that could plausibly have come from you and nobody else. The rest is filler that consumes budget and produces the appearance of activity.

The uncomfortable question isn't whether your content volume is sufficient. It's whether removing your logo would leave a reader with any idea who wrote it.

So run that homepage experiment properly this week. Five tabs, no logos, one colleague from outside the marketing team, and a written record of which company they thought was which. If they can't reliably identify yours, additional output won't fix the underlying problem. The fix starts with a positioning conversation that includes your founders and your best salespeople, rather than another content brief.

In the next piece I'll turn to the growth most B2B teams are quietly being handed this year, whether or not anybody resourced them for it: revenue from the customers you already have.