The loudest part of your B2B brand is your operations

Last week I got maybe the biggest ick I’ve had all year. My colleague sent me a Loom.

That’s not the ick. I think Looms are great. It’s neat when a colleague makes me a little TV show to explain an idea or brief me on something.

The ick happened during the Loom onboarding process. I’m new at Beneath. Which means I have a new laptop, and I need to download the Loom app and make an account before I can watch Alex, our Growth Director, do his thing. (And MAN does he do a thing.)

In the following seven days, Loom sent a drip feed of welcome emails. How to make your first Loom. How to sync your calendar. I’m clearly in the “Tips ‘n Tricks” onboarding stream. No biggie.

But I’ve Loomed before, so I hit unsubscribe. And that’s when things took a turn.

Your shop window extends behind the curtain

The first click was fine. It took me to a page called “Learning Resources” with just two check boxes to opt-out of.

But then I hit “Go To Preferences” – expecting that I’d maybe have to unsubscribe from a dozen more streams.

And I saw this monstrosity.

There are 9 sections and 87 possible email streams. I had been opted into 47 of them.

I feel a succession of disgust and vertigo – at the sheer magnitude of the email industrial complex, and at my precarity on the verge of so many funnels waiting to carve me up and cross-sell to me.

What kind of gymnastic logic concludes that by downloading Loom you’re a candidate for [checks notes] the Product Upgrades stream for Opsgenie, the (soon-to-be-retired) incident alerting platform?

You can infer some things about a B2B brand from the way it threatens to market to you.

And in this case, the medium of Loom’s marketing operations is directly at odds with the message of its brand — a company that ostensibly helps people understand each other better runs on a one-size-fits-all comms strategy.

It’s like Adam said in his recent post about why B2B brands are the sum of a POV, embodied by actions. The integrity of Loom’s POV is compromised by its duty to feed the great Atlassian marketing machine.

This is the kind of dissonance we spend a lot of time thinking about as a B2B branding specialist. Because brand positioning and messaging only really works when it survives contact with the operational reality of the business.

Brand action can override brand identity

There’s always collateral damage when a giant like Atlassian acquires a company like Loom.

Integrating customer records, databases, systems, processes and teams is complicated and expensive. So it’s no surprise when the success metric for Frankenstack MarTech operations defaults to “all our systems talk to each other” over “protect the brand experience”.

But somewhere in the process, someone made a decision that shows me who Loom is for now – and it’s different from the messages they built their brand on.

Two years ago, Loom’s POV was: The most important part of your work is you.

Now the cost of entry to watch a two-minute video of my colleague is exposing my inbox to nearly 50 email streams about Product Management and Developer Tools and Service Delivery and Knowledge Bases.

The actions betray the perspective. And now I’m a man, standing in front of a brand I used to be pretty fond of, asking it to leave me alone.

For a B2B brand positioning agency, that’s the useful lesson here. The words matter. But only if you behave in a way that makes those words feel true.