Where creativity goes to die

Why does B2B SaaS marketing feel like the graveyard of good ideas?

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🔥 If things look a little different in this week’s newsletter, don’t worry. You’re in the right place! This newsletter is the latest incarnation of Kevan Lee’s Substack and Bonfire’s company newsletter, Kumbaya Moments. Same great content, shiny new look. 🔥

Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight brand, marketing, and creative learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (which you’re welcome to join).

Wishing you a great week!

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I’ve worked at, with, and around enough startups to say—with high confidence—that B2B SaaS brand marketers have the same creative challenge: their work is deeply hobbled by the short-term thinking and cynicism rampant in VC-backed company leadership.

This usually takes the form of leadership that celebrates brand wins in the company all-hands—who doesn’t love good PR?—then questions brand ROI in private meetings. Or leadership that says brand matters while passively defunding it…then complains that brand isn’t driving measurable results with its $0.99 budget for making, distributing, and promoting creative brand work. Or! Or! How about this one—leadership that can’t understand why press releases about product updates aren’t generating industry buzz and virality. As if nothing more press-worthy than a new API could ever occur!

Cut to the brand team:

Earlier in my career—hell, earlier this year—I might have said that this was either an education or an advocacy problem. Either leadership and non-marketers don’t understand brand best practices—and why would they by default? I don’t understand accounting best practices—or marketing leaders weren’t effectively influencing on behalf of brand in a sea of competing business priorities. Or both.

But I’ve recently come to entertain the idea that something more systemic is going on: the VC system in general, for B2B SaaS companies in particular, fundamentally misaligns a company’s business strategy and executive leadership priorities from cogent, quality brand-building efforts.

I’ll explain what I mean.

Brand is a long-term investment. And more often than not, the true effects of brand elude traditional ROI calculations and even measurement. (Though you can measure certain things!) But how do you measure the business impact of the irrational rage of a diehard Apple user forced to adopt a PC at a new job? The utter despair of a Slack loyalist dropped into a Teams chat? You can’t predict pipeline based on the number of people creating petitions in their offices to use Zoom vs. Google Meet or vice versa, nor project revenue based on who is making their IT department miserable by refusing to change password managers.

We have attachments to a company and its software that go well beyond which one works better or costs less. These are emotional considerations that have to do with what is habitual and familiar, yes, but also what we deem, consciously or not, to be “us.” Because we identify with something about the company or the product or the experience. Because we believe that our using it is a statement about who we are, the type of work we do, the type of culture we want to support.

This is brand, babes. Because your brand is the sum of the experiences someone has with your company. Experiences which lead them to have feelings about your company. Feelings which lead them to accept or reject it, advocate for or against it, remain loyal to it or encourage churn.

^^^Thiiiiis. Taaaaakes. Tiiiiime.^^^ And it takes actually making an impression on your audience by actually doing things that they will pay attention to, engage with, appreciate, be delighted by, identify with. Brand marketers know how to do this.

And while I do think that sometimes company leadership just doesn’t understand this either through innocent ignorance or their inability to get their own preconceived notions about brand and marketing out of the way, as I said above, the real disconnection and misalignment is simply that the VC system for B2B SaaS has a totally contrary set of values and incentives.

Here’s the crux:

Brand best practices build companies strong and differentiated enough to create lasting value for many people over time.

VC best practices build companies fast and efficient enough to wring out the most value for a few people as quickly as possible.

Brand-building is neither fast nor efficient. And VCs aren’t famous for their grace and patience. Instead, they’re working in sprints toward milestones and exit ramps: Raise another round. Go public. Get acquired. The goal is rarely (ever?) to create an engine of sustainable prosperity for a large group of people—aka a startup’s employees—but rather to create explosive pockets of wealth for investors that offset the risk of their other investments, which they’re almost certainly in the process of growth-hacking into the ground.

This is the game. And most of us aren’t actually the ones playing it.

In the companies I’ve worked in, and the ones Kevan and I now support as strategic consultants, we see fewer and fewer leaders outside of marketing willing to nurture a story over time, to commit to consistency, to differentiate not just on specs, but on soul. Even when they understand the value of brand, they rarely have the operational runway or internal alignment to protect it. And they have board members and investors standing behind their desks with baseball bats—doesn’t help.

And listen, I don’t think this means brand marketing is a dying discipline. But I do think it means brand marketers need to get clearer-eyed about the playing field, or else change sports. We are not broken or bad at our jobs because our ideas don’t land with leadership, or because our KPIs are harder to graph in a board meeting. We’re operating in systems that were not built to prioritize the kind of value we’re here to create.

B2B SaaS is yolking dolphins and then wondering why they can’t plow a field. (We’re the dolphins. 🤘)

We’re conditioned to believe that if we aren’t thriving somewhere, it’s a personal failing. This keeps us from questioning—and then dismantling—systems that exploit us and our labor. But failure to thrive within a dysfunctional system sounds a bit like success to me. So, adopt a mantra that sounds like badly paraphrased T. Swift: “It’s not me. Bye. I’m not the problem, not me.”

And yet—there are companies out there doing it differently. Founders choosing bootstrapping and slower growth over cash injections and soulless scale. Leadership teams who see brand not just as a marketing function but as a strategic lever. Marketers finding pockets of freedom to experiment, connect, and make work they’re proud of. Maybe they’re not the loudest or the fastest-growing, but they’re building something that will last. And if more of us keep showing up—or creating our own things!—advocating for better, and putting great brand work into the world anyway, we might just help shift the story.

Because creativity isn’t dead in B2B SaaS. It’s just waiting for better conditions.

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Notable links, convos, and events

The following are all pulled from the Campout community.

• Our next free event will be a Co-Work & Chill on April 23rd. Perfect for anyone who works better with a bit of friendly accountability (and smiling faces) in the background while you jam. You can RSVP here.

• Kevan wrote an article for The CMO Club all about brand measurement ::dun dun dunnn!:: and we’re talking about it here in the free channel of Campout. Now’s the time to ask all your burning questions about how to set up a measurement framework!

• Our last event inadvertently gave rise to my new favorite concept—the "LinkedIn Shout-Hole"—coined by community member Chase Banger. Deeply accurate.

  

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But wait! There’s more…

Wanna be friends?

If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.

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If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

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