A B2B brand is its point of view embodied by its actions

Brand vs positioning

Positioning is about defining exactly what you’re able to offer your target market – and therefore what position you want to occupy in their heads. In other words, effective positioning helps your audience understand what makes your brand different from the competition, and why that difference will benefit them as customers. Until this is established, any further brand work is probably a waste of time.

So brand definition must precede brand building. If you don’t know who you are and why customers should choose you, how can you expect everyone else to?

But a brand isn’t a positioning. A positioning helps you achieve your goals in the medium term (winning in a specific market, for example, so you can move on to another). So you can think of positionings as significant but temporary strategic stepping stones in pursuit of the long-term vision.

A brand evolves over time too, but more slowly. Like positioning, it’s about perception, but there’s something fundamental about a brand that endures as your positioning shifts (indeed it informs these shifts).

But WTF actually is a brand? As far as soundbites go, this is the best I can come up with…

A B2B brand is its point of view embodied by its actions.

Let’s break down ‘point of view’. 

Your POV is your perspective on something important. It’s a deeply held set of beliefs and attitudes you have about an issue that’s relevant to your audience or market. It might be the way you approach a problem. It might be a stance you take on a divisive topic. What it definitely isn’t is a loosely held opinion on a passing fad. It runs deep.

But it’s not static or brittle. While the instincts at the heart of your POV persist, the context will adapt along with your market and your position within it. For example, if your mega-strategy for world domination starts with the sub-strategy of conquering a single vertical market first – CRM for party planners – then you would position for that vertical and cultivate your point of view in that immediate context. 

Once you own that market, you can start thinking about how your point of view applies to, or evolves for, the next strategic space. So the focus shifts, but your way of seeing things is coherent, and adds up to a recognizable point of view. 

Take Salesforce. It has opinions on what a CRM should do, or how customer service should work, or how agentic AI should work for various industries – and these are all consistent with its aggregate brand point of view from the old days: that there should be “No (legacy) software!” (as the original Salesforce ad went), and that businesses should have a single view of every customer. 

Your POV is how you see things from where you stand relative to others. To have a POV you have to inhabit a point in space. Like your positioning, which is also always relative to your competitive set, your POV is special because it comes from the point you inhabit in your market. You stand apart from them and that’s why you see things differently – just like we all have our own field of vision. And as your competitors and the wider market move over time, your own POV may adapt too.

Your POV is your view on your world (of enterprise software, or precision-cut widgets, or whatever) – not on the whole world. Your niche is your domain, and it’s big enough to play in, so stick to it. There’s a time and a place to talk about your bigger purpose or worldview in terms of social good or saving the planet while you do what you do (if you’re sincere about it), but don’t make your outlook so wide that you lose sight of what actually matters to your customers. 

Your POV creates your TOV, which emerges from it. Point of view is the perspective from which you speak – just like a narrative point of view in fiction. Every meaningful expression of your brand emerges from that character, that voice. 

And your POV is a point of view that you can persuade other people to adopt. That’s the real ‘conversion’ you should care about. That’s how you sell. You convince people to see things your way.

A point of view is not enough. Neither is talking about it.

Most brands are all talk. But talk is cheap. (It was even before GenAI.) Actions speak louder.

If you want to convince people to adopt your point of view, it helps if you can show you have skin in the game. What have you actually done to embody your point of view, beyond selling what you sell? The big-gesture stuff that costs you. And the small day-to-day stuff that comes naturally because your actions are consistent with your beliefs. The things you build. The people you help.

What are you doing right now to win people over to your point of view?

An example

The VC world is notoriously opaque for founders seeking investment. If you’re lucky enough to get a meeting, you’re still likely to get ghosted or feel lost in a maze of unfamiliar processes.

Concept Ventures is a pre-seed fund in the UK that thinks this isn’t right. They believe in “full transparency”, explaining to their audience: 

“That level of transparency is what we believe is key to building a venture ecosystem that actually serves the founder’s best interests.”

This is their point of view. 

And it’s a nice, differentiated point of view – but, crucially, they back this up with their actions:

“So that’s exactly what we’ve done […] we don’t want you to have any misconceptions about who we are or how we work. That’s why we’ve open-sourced everything – from our investment process and docs, to exactly what you can expect from us post-investment, everything you need to know about working with Concept…”

This is what they do.

They give founders a peek behind the curtain by sharing their investment criteria, their standard term sheet, and everything you need to know about working with them – via their Notion pages. 

It’s transparent, approachable, brave, open-sourced VC. Talk and walk. 

It’s their point of view, embodied by their actions. 

And I think that’s as good a definition of a B2B brand as you’ll find anywhere.