Is Brand the Last Moat? What’s Left When AI Commoditizes Everything Else?
When every competitor can generate content, campaigns, and outbound at infinite scale, execution stops being a differentiator. This episode makes the case that brand and trust are the last defensible moat in B2B, and stress-tests that thesis with people who have to defend it in the boardroom. How do you make the business case for brand to a CFO who only looks at pipeline? Which brand metrics actually predict revenue? And is "brand" the answer, or just the thing marketers say when they run out of channels?
Guests
Tabita Andersson, VP Marketing EMEA at Rimini Street
Jessica Deckinger, CMO at HealthEdge
Transcript
Joaquin D (00:00)
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Futures. Today we are asking a pretty fundamental question. Is brand the last mode? What's left when AI commoditizes everything else? AI is making it easier than ever to create good content, campaigns, design, personalization, and even positioning. So every company suddenly has access to similar tools and capabilities. So what actually makes one B2B brand extinctive
From another. We are also going to explore whether brand becomes even more important as buying committees get larger and more complicated. What really creates the flexibility when competitors can copy your messaging and execution, and how marketing leaders balance long-term brand investment with the pressure to generate pipeline today. Joining me, we have a great panel and
Yeah, I'd love for each of you to introduce yourselves. So Jessica, would you like to start? give a sentence on yourself.
Jessica Deckinger (01:01)
Sure, my name's Jessica Deckinger. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Health Edge, and I'm based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Joaquin D (01:08)
Great.
Welcome Jessica. Thank you. Dave, welcome.
Dave (01:12)
Thanks for being yeah I'm Dave Ascott. I work here at Ad Zact and I'm based in the UK and yeah really looking forward to the discussion today.
Joaquin D (01:20)
Thank you, welcome. And Tavita, welcome.
Tabita Andersson (01:23)
Thank you very much for having me. So I'm currently VP Marketing for a company called Romini Street. I previously was Senior Vice President of Communications and Brands for a large public company. I'm also the author of Chief Communications Officers at Work and really enjoying joining the panel today. Thank you for having me.
Joaquin D (01:42)
Great introductions. Thank you so much for those introductions. So let's start with the central premise of today's episode. Okay, if AI makes good content, design, campaigns, personalization, and increasingly even strategic recommendations accessible to almost everyone. What actually makes a B2B brand extinctive anymore?
Does brand become more important because execution itself is becoming more commoditized, or does AI simply change the way we we mean by a strong brand?
Who wants to go first? This is very normal.
Tabita Andersson (02:18)
I believe it's going to become more important because the more everything else gets commoditized, the whole demand journey, all of our workflows, everything in terms of digital marketing is going to become very commoditized, which means the brand is going to be stronger and more important than ever. And part of that is that human element, the emotions and everything that we can put into a brand that AI can't put into a brand and giving it
that personalisation and that real human element to it. I believe that's going to become really important going forward.
Jessica Deckinger (02:51)
I agree with Tabita and I would add on I think there was a long time when there was a
Kind of a chasm between B2B and B2C marketing because the perception was that B2C marketing, everyone had to know that your brand existed. There was this awareness demand that was much higher bar than in B2B, where you only needed your buyer to know who you are. But now the buyer is a much wider audience, which I know we'll speak about probably later. But certainly the burden on making yourself visible and something that folks retain is a much wider net than it used to be.
And so behind the brand, there has to be real tangible value, not just a surface, colors VI and catchy taglines, and you have to have that kind of emotional grip on your potential audience of influencers and a purchase decision that's much wider than it used to be. And so like having that fundamental emotion behind the brand that Tabata mentioned, I think is more critical than ever.
Tabita Andersson (03:52)
And also, if I may add to that, think having a point of view, also in particular in B2B, it's no longer optional. It becomes part of your brand and part of your edge. And that point of view is something that's typically quite difficult to copy. And it's not going to become commoditized, I believe, going forward.
Joaquin D (04:13)
Yeah, really interesting. I think you mentioned
very interesting concepts. Jessica, you mentioned that you need to be visible and you need to share that tangible value and Tavita, that personalization and human element. but I wonder how we can combine both things. Because can you build personalization and that human element at scale so you are visible, right? And you are providing tangible value. How you can scale
that those human touch points that are so important. And I agree that build a brand, but then how you build a brand from very small and short interactions.
Jessica Deckinger (04:55)
to me, I think there's this kind of
position that existed for a long time where B2B brands had to present kind of the value proposition as their positioning and their brand messaging. And now we recognize that every emotion that we have in awareness building is not B2B, it's B2H. It's business to human, right? And so there has to be not just a point of view, but also an emotional component to the purchase consideration and decision. And so you have to appeal with much more human messaging, much more human positioning, much more human feeling.
every component has to be much more human feeling and addressing not just the logical, rational need that the person has to solve a pain point, but also the emotional need that goes along with that.
Tabita Andersson (05:35)
And just to add to that part of that is also the messaging actually becoming plain and simple and easy to understand. I think especially in the tech world, B2B tech world, we've been guilty of using lots of acronyms and complicating things more than we should. But with the sort of additional buyers and additional people that are involved in such a long, complex, multi-buyer process, you're going to have to, because you have to speak differently to your CFO versus your CIP.
versus your chief people officer who might all of a sudden be in the same buying group. So being human isn't necessarily always about emotions, it's also about just let's just speak and communicate in plain terms so we all understand each other because it's building the understanding that's also part of actually having a really great brand.
Jessica Deckinger (06:24)
A hundred percent. I think the language you use is more important than ever. I definitely echo everything Tabata just said. It's important not just to be not technical, but also just to appeal to the every kind of different roles, own unique language. And so being smarter about the kind of ability you have to translate things into terms that make sense to different audiences is more critical than ever.
Joaquin D (06:47)
and can AI help with that personalization, Can AI help with that or will amplify bad things? I don't know. tell me a little bit about that.
Jessica Deckinger (06:59)
I think
right now we're in this weird moment where it's a mixed bag because what you put in is what you get out. And so with AI, I think a lot of the prompting is critical and figuring out if you're gonna get the right answer. And so I think to the point Tabitha made earlier, that human part of the back end of this equation is important too. On your team, understanding your buyer is more important than ever. Being able to leverage AI as a tool to then create efficiency to scale that insight and understanding the language you need to use is important, but also.
Having the right inputs from your team. And so a team that's really smart about your customer base, about your buying committee, all the different personas in there is more important than ever. I think research remains critical and understanding your customer and understanding their pain and understanding all the parts of the journey. And that isn't something that can be manufactured necessarily in AI right now. I don't know, it could be at some point, but right now, sometimes AI can hallucinate and provide a context that's not fully baked and sources that are
Aren't fully accurate. And so relying on the humans behind the scenes will be critical for at least the foreseeable future until AI can really kind of understand and read the room on the other side of the equation. It's really hard if your team isn't prompting it correctly and kind of has the right tools there on your side.
Joaquin D (08:16)
Wa one hundred percent
Tabita Andersson (08:17)
I also
Joaquin D (08:17)
of the sorry.
Tabita Andersson (08:18)
Yeah,
I agree, Jessica. I would also add, think something that AI is quite good at is helping you being critical and testing it. So testing your message and your words to different audiences and helping you being critical in formulating and articulating your brand. I think we've been very good at embracing it as helping us generating content, much to the dismay of, I think, of writers out there because we've ended up with a
of AI slop and we can all identify what comes from AI and what doesn't. But what it is very good at is that kind of that message testing and that looking at well, how does my brand actually fare against certain personas and certain biotypes? And then figuring out you don't need a team in house team to then have that critical thinking and looking at Jessica mentioned about hallucinations, we need to make sure that we look in.
and check the accuracy and validity and proof points of what it produces.
Jessica Deckinger (09:17)
I think the other interesting thing I'm seeing is that AI has been a really powerful tool in looking at what competitors are saying, which we'll talk about that as well, I'm sure, at some point, but certainly understanding as you're doing that testing Tabitam mentioned, really iterating based on what's out there already in the market, so you can use your human brain to then create new, fresh perspectives as opposed to kind of just regurgitating what's already being created by the rest of the market.
Joaquin D (09:42)
I would love to hear any concrete examples of how bringing humans in the loop can
help with the AI outcome because for some weird reason AI can do pretty amazing things, right? Can do code for us, can analyze a lot of data, but cannot write as a human. And so you definitely need humans to check the accuracy and also tone of voice. I would love to hear any examples that both of you are having now of yeah bringing humans in in the loop.
Jessica Deckinger (10:14)
I mean,
a recent one we had was really around thinking about positioning for a procurement team. Like we're talking about the kind of doing some research to figure out how we can do some mid-funnel marketing against a procurement team and making sure that they're aware of what we're doing. And we
had some thinking on the human side, did some AI generated ideation, kind of went back and forth between the two to pull together some thoughts. And we gut checked it with our sales team who are speaking to the procurement team and our contracting team. And they were able to raise concerns that they had heard from the other side that weren't generated by either us or AI. And I think that's a limitation of the fact that we were using the prompts that we thought we knew, what we had heard before, but there were new things coming up that we hadn't considered. And so we were able to then go back and iterate again
And it became this circular kind of like evolutionary process, this feedback loop where we could take in real inputs from the market from what's happening in the world that are, current challenges, current things that are being said by other competitors in the market and bring those into the fold to make a better, more effective marketing, messaging and brand positioning and all that. And I think had we not talked to the people in the market, who are actually out in the market hearing what's live and happening, we would have missed.
things that would have been critical to our testing and success.
Tabita Andersson (11:29)
Yeah, I've got very similar experiences actually as Jessica in terms of message testing where we've found that AI will go out and look at all the messaging that's already out there. And that's the messaging that we've already done, but not necessarily what lands with customers. So we've then gone and looked at like, the same as Jessica looked at what actually what does these personas care about care about right now. And when you talk to your sales teams or your
sales teams that actually brings up some different angles and hooks and we've then taken that against what AI say and versus what we've done in the past and then together you can then really improve the messaging. I agree there is a real place for the human element as part of working with AI here.
Joaquin D (12:18)
I think you have both mentioned a lot that B2B like the B2B buyer itself is becoming more complicated and we often talk about the buyer as one person, but you have also mentioned this that major B2B purchases can involve procurement, right? Can involve finance, legal, technical teams, and and many others.
So does brand become more important as buying committees become larger and more fragmented?
Tabita Andersson (12:49)
Yes, I would would definitely argue so. Part of that is for the budget reasons we don't have necessarily the budget to go and do full marketing, full demand marketing for each of the personas. So how do you influence the other buyers and actually brand is a really good way of doing so by going wide and large in terms of your awareness activities. So I think that's that's the kind of coming back to a high level simple messaging that everyone
can
understand and then driving that consistency through the brand and not necessarily having to go down and dig deep and do deep marketing for each of the personas. And also in addition, think PR and media becomes more important when you're trying to reach wider audiences because that can actually help you land the message in different ways and help that kind of budget go wider as well.
Jessica Deckinger (13:46)
I agree. I think there's also
Trust is more important than ever before because we're out there in the market trying to talk to multiple personas, but also competitors are trying to talk to multiple personas and they're saying things that sound really great on paper, and can they can spin up a website in a day that looks like your website and has sounds like it's real and it sounds like it's a meaningful thing. But there's a reputational piece to this that's really critical, which has to do with not just the quality of the product that you're selling, the solutions that you're selling, but also the
team behind it, the service that you provide, the reputation you build in the market with competitive with customers. And then also I think there's a a component to
Case studies being able to prove that you've delivered what you said you wanted to, put out in the market and you've filled the pain that you promised to people that is more important than ever. So I agree definitely with Tabita. The PR and the earned opportunities for someone to recognize what you're doing without having to pay for it are more critical than ever. But then also layer on the proof points that show that you can deliver what you say are gonna do and at scale.
Tabita Andersson (14:49)
think also in addition, AI search is just going to become more more important. I mean, we're already seeing how the behavior of people searching is changing. And I'm just noticing with myself, I'm looking more when you do your Google search, you're looking more and more on the AI search piece of it. And that's going to be exactly the same with our buyer. And we're going to need to figure out how we can influence and make sure that that's accurate what shows up in AI search. Because that's where
your multiple buyers are going to be. So how do we make sure that from a brand perspective, and to me this is more brand and awareness necessary more than kind of your demand channels, how do you make sure that we're showing up in AI search and how do we make sure that we can cater to those larger buying groups in AI search because they're all going to come to there and check you out.
Jessica Deckinger (15:40)
Agreed. And then I also I think a component to that is not just the earned part of things that adds to that and the brand value. It's also the the human knowledge, the data points that you have that are fresh and unique that really help add to that visibility. It's been valuable for us in finding ourselves in a stronger position in GEO and AEO search, just to make sure that we have fresh data because AI doesn't scrape for existing data that it already has, it scrapes for new content that has value. And so that's both earned opportunities.
These brand, trust and brand kind of value, and then those new data points. And so those are really more critical than ever.
Joaquin D (16:14)
Yeah, do you both want to share any examples that you are doing regarding AO and GEO? I know that having good data, Jessica can definitely help with that, but how do you collect that data or any other actions that you're doing to appear on AI results?
Jessica Deckinger (16:32)
I mean, we do survey data amongst customers and prospects kind of regularly to try to get gather insights that are fresh on what's happening with the latest trends in the market and the latest trends, macroeconomically and pin points and things that that our target customers and prospects are really considering and thinking about. And that helps because they when you're then using that to build the content, fresh content with data points that goes out in the world when people are searching for to solve their problems, it's against real.
data that matters to them. So meaning if one of the biggest issues are regulatory changes happening for health insurance companies and that's a big macroeconomic issue that's happening, a big dynamic that's happening in the market is that regulatory issues are causing all sorts of financial issues for them. Then when someone's saying hey, when they're looking for a solution to that and they're searching in the market for those particular kind of themes, we've got content that addresses those particular trends in market. And so it's kind of this like loop again where you're getting
Getting people in on the issues that are most painful to them because you've surveyed to find out what's most painful to them and build content off of that.
Tabita Andersson (17:36)
Yeah, we do very similar. We also do surveys and reports throughout the year to inform our content strategy. I think in addition to that is also thinking about what does your content on your website, is it serving that AI search bot? Do you have the right type of content? How are you educating your buyers with the content you have on your website? So it's thinking about your entire content strategy around your website.
side that can influence AI search. And then on the back end of that is also then your keyword search strategy. So does your SEO keyword strategy aligns with your geo strategy versus your PR strategy, which is quite an interesting kind of new alignment. That's that's sort of appeared, I think in the last few months or year really, to try and kind of really do all we actually talking about the same themes, topics that will drive the right results in AI search.
across all functions within the marketing ecosystem. And then also to add to that, the agency that we're PR agency that we're working with is just trying to get some new tools as well to try and actually measure geo and AI search. So figuring out well actually how can we measure it? How can we report on it? How can we see whether we're moving the dial or not? It's really quite interesting. And I find that quite fascinating because I think that's gonna become part of the overall kind of CMO market.
marketing reports and dashboards going forward. But literally everyone is just experimenting, I think, at the moment with our palm.
Joaquin D (19:05)
I think that leads naturally into the idea of defensibility because everything now can be copied, right? You can create an agent that researches whatever your competitors are writing and writing exactly the same thing in a different style. And not copying, but like well, actually it's copying but
it's writing with with with different tone of voice, and it's impossible to notice that was COVID, right? and I I guess that also serves for AI AEO and GO, right? So I think this is very common today. So where does the real brand mode sit? Is it positioning, creative, or customer experience? I don't know.
reputation
Tabita Andersson (19:55)
There's two things that comes to mind. One is, think, protection of your brand and reputation is becoming more important going forward. We have to make sure that we protect what we have. So looking at having a domain strategy, for example, making sure that you work with your IP lawyers on your trademarks and all the IP that you have. I do think that protection part of it is something we need to work with our legal teams and the wider community to
ensure that we protect what we have. then on the other side, when you talk about moat, think having a brand that permeates beyond just marketing can become a real moat. think about your wider community, your wider stakeholders and audiences. It's your investors. It's not just your customers and clients. It's perhaps your investors or your employees, it's your influences, it's your
analysts, it's the journalists, it's everyone that you work with on a much wider scale that can really become your moat because if everyone's brand champions then that's the moat that you can't copy.
Jessica Deckinger (20:56)
Yeah, I would take that even a step further, which is that I think this sales and marketing connection is more important than it ever has been before in this lane. In past, I think B2B kind of there is often this
It's kind of like an old, feeling that there's like marketing and sales against each other and they're kind of like fighting a battle over who gets to attribution for what. And now there's this much more I think, modern perspective from a lot of companies where sales and marketing are really extensions of each other. And so the brand mode becomes showing up as one team in everything you do. So the connectivity of the messaging you're putting out in the market is the same from a marketing perspective, is the same as the messaging that's happening in the conversations one on one in every room.
A sale is in progress. And so we are using AI as a tool actually not just to look and see about search and all those things on the how people are finding us, but really to create connectivity between our sales and marketing functions and making sure when we come up with some new piece of content, some new
piece of data that's critical, a new case study, a new positioning moment, and a perspective like Tabata had mentioned earlier, we're then using that to create kind of a bridge over to the sales team so they can echo that out into the market and be really the voice of everything we're doing in marketing. We show up as one company at all times.
Dave (22:09)
how you experience a brand is like every interaction you have with that organization, right? Right from the very beginning, all the way through sales, all the way through marketing way. It's sort of one of the reasons why experience is so hard to get right is that it's every individual within the organization, every touch point builds it, in the mind of the buyer, the buying committee, the customer, whatever it is. And so I think when you think about things that are difficult to copy,
I think that kind of ability to deliver a great experience is a really difficult thing for somebody at somebody to copy. So understanding your customers, delivering the experience they want.
I think that's a really big point that everyone said has made me think of at the end.
Jessica Deckinger (22:44)
I think the other component to that, which we sometimes don't talk about but should be spoken about, is that customer success is a critical arm in that as well. once someone's on board, the journey continues, and making sure that connectivity of messaging continues throughout the entire experience and life cycle of that customer's journey is critical because that creates the ability to then be referenceable to make sure that the customer feels, pleased and will be kind of not
just a source of case studies, but will speak for you at events or say something nice because I think more and more
because of AI and because of the proliferation of content and all the copying that's happening, people know that's true. And so being able to believe what you see is not as easy as it used to be because the buyers all know out there in the market that they're seeing things replicated en masse and they don't know what's real and what's not. And so having that like human reference where someone can say to them, Yes, this is real, or a referral where someone says, we did so and so, you should do it too. That net promoter is more important.
than ever.
Joaquin D (23:44)
Yeah, and I think we should treat our clients as they were prospects. Sometimes we forget that we can do cross-selling and upselling and just advocacy in general, right? It's so important. So we should keep selling to them and do marketing to them because they should never forget that.
about your brand, right? It's so important and yeah, not only customer success, I mean also communication, like showing them ads that are valuable to them so they can understand better your products, your brand in general, right? I think it's also really important.
Okay, so let's finish with probably the hardest part of this conversation for any marketer leader. Even if we agree that brand matters, most CMOs are still under pressure to demonstrate pipeline, right? you need to demonstrate revenue, commercial impact. So how should B2B marketers balance investment in brand with the pressure to generate demand today?
Jessica Deckinger (24:46)
there are components to marketing that play into demand. PR plays into demand, right? People see an article, they read about your business, they read about your solutions, and they want to reach out and find you. So that inbound motion is important.
So brand flows through every aspect of touch that we make in every aspect of our demand campaigns. And so making sure that we are investing in the core ideas and that point of view and those perspectives that will help flow through every aspect of what we do is critical, but it's just one part of a larger scheme. So I don't think about it as like 40-60 or 50-50. It's really
one motion. And so every campaign we run, we're thinking about what's the piece of content behind it, what's the value of that perspective, how does it represent our brand? How does it tie into the whole message that we're trying to portray and the retention we're trying to build with folks so that they think about us in their moments of of pain and need and reach out.
Tabita Andersson (25:41)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Jessica. You can't have one without the other. I've recently read a really great analogy that says if the demand is the car, then brand is your gas. You can't move forward without the both of them together. And I thought that was such a good picture. So actually, to me, I think about brand as pipeline. It is all one.
kind of have to also measure everything. think there's a point in here as well around we've been very good at traditionally measuring demand but actually with AI now coming in the barriers to measuring brand have become lower so we can actually get much better at looking at the performance of our brand as well as we are with the rest of the piece of marketing. that also means that we can balance our budget, we can make sure that we cater to
across the funnel in a much better and more efficient way.
Joaquin D (26:39)
And do you have favorite metric to share to a CEO or a CFO who asks what pipeline did this brand investment generate? Is it impressions served to accounts or touch points or brand searches or whatever that you can correlate with sales over a period of time? Do you have any favorite metrics?
Jessica Deckinger (27:00)
I love GEO metrics. We are tracking that to Tabitha's point. There's a lot of technologies out there that'll enable you to track kind of how you're showing up in searches for key pain points. And we've heard from the sales team from our executives what those key pain points are and from the customers and prospects themselves. So if we go back into the system and can gut check how we're performing against those pain points when people are searching in AI, searching and search, we can really show where we stand. And then I think in terms of our brand again to Tabita's point and to the point we're both making that the brand is integrated into that.
So that's one metric for me. The other metric is share voice. I love to look at share voice in the market, like how much of the voice we're commanding, because we only know we are as good as the perspective we're putting out there. It's not just about having a good PR firm, it's about having the messaging to capture attention. And so if you have the right positioning to capture lots of attention, then you know that you're do you're kind of on the right, hopefully on the right track.
Tabita Andersson (27:49)
And in my experience, every CEO likes a different metric. So sometimes it's also you have to figure
Jessica Deckinger (27:55)
After
Tabita Andersson (27:55)
out what metric much like your CEO likes more than any. I've had someone who loves brand equity, for example, and I've had others that go, no, I want to know the pipeline. So I think figuring out what your CEO and your execs want and it's probably the key point to start off with before you start tracking too much and building too many pretty dashboards.
But otherwise to me, brand equity is an interesting one. think unaided and aided awareness is really useful as well because you can start seeing whether the needle is shifting over space and time. And then it's the classic pipeline metrics on top of that and seeing what are we actually influencing from a brand perspective, not just from a demand perspective.
Jessica Deckinger (28:38)
100%, both sides of the equation. And I think CEOs actually, in my experience, have gotten more sophisticated over the years, like underwaning what they want to see. So it's not like you can show I picked two because that was the question, but I think you can show twenty metrics and that probably asked for twenty more. And I think that is what's happening. And so having a marketing ops or a revenue ops team that's really savvy is becoming more important than ever.
Joaquin D (29:01)
100%. All right. Jessica Tavita, Dave, thank you so much for joining today. I think one of the most interesting ideas from this conversation is that AI can make it easier to reproduce whatever the visible parts of marketing, but much harder to reproduce everything underneath them.
The expertise, the reputation, culture, those things that you are building with your teams. and trust have been built over time, right? You can't build trust in six months, right? So thank you so much for joining us and thank you to everyone listening to B2B Marketing Futures. We'll see you in the next episode.
