In Fast Company, Martha Marchesi argues that winning attention in B2B means being willing to break category norms. With younger buyers expecting emotion, storytelling, and modern creative, disruption is emerging as a strategic lever rather than a creative indulgence.

Here’s the part the article never quite says aloud: disruption is positioning.

Every bold, category-shifting B2B campaign Martha highlights, every moment of wit, spectacle, or emotional punch, is powered by something far more fundamental.

Disruption is a difficult term. It's been co-opted and abused by Silicon Valley for about two decades now to the point of parody. At its core, the effect is to stand out in your category. That sounds a lot like positioning.

If a brand doesn’t know what it stands for, creativity becomes noise. If the audience doesn’t know what the brand stands for, provocative attempts at disruption become uncertainty. And that, as we know, is a growth killer.

Confidence and clarity in positioning are what give disruptive ideas shape. They determine where you can push, how far you can stretch, and what the market interprets as conviction versus gimmick.

Some arguments from the article seen through this lens:

Yes, but you can only meaningfully zag when you’ve defined the ground you stand on. Without that anchor, boldness drifts, and disruption becomes noise instead of distinction.

True, even of older buyers. And positioning determines which emotion the brand can credibly tap and which ones will feel off-key. Resonance requires a defined role in the category, not just better craft.

The campaigns she cites work because they surface tensions the audience instantly recognizes.But finding that tension, the thing buyers instinctively nod at, is positioning work first. Positioning identifies the truth. Disruption gives it altitude.

Disruption only reinforces the story the market already believes (or can be persuaded to believe).

Martha’s call for bolder creative is valid. But the lever that makes boldness effective is strategic clarity through taking a bold position in the market.

We help B2B teams build that foundation, clearer roles in the category, bolder stories buyers actually feel, and strategic tools that let you stand out instead of blend in.

Behold, SaaSy. The greatest B2B positioning shift of all time.

When Salesforce introduced “No Software” in 1999, they staked out a radically different role in the category: a company defined not by what it sold, but by what it refused to be.

“No Software” as embodied by the mysterious mascot SaaSy, was the rallying cry that made that position visible.

It remains one of the clearest examples of how decisive positioning can reshape a category, with messaging falling cleanly out of the strategic stance.

Salesforce’s breakthrough was a willingness to define the category differently and position themselves as the leaders of this new standard. They reframed CRM not as software you install, but as a service delivered through the browser. That's real disruption.

Why did it work?

Great positioning establishes what you’re against. Salesforce didn’t wage war on competitors, it targeted the entire software model: installs, maintenance cycles, IT overhead, cost complexity.

The strategic leap was the decision to shift the debate. The problem wasn’t CRM tools. The problem was delivery.

Salesforce didn't invent SaaS, it was already emerging, bandwidth was improving, and frustration with on-premise systems was rising. Salesforce simply positioned itself in alignment with that momentum.

Because the position was so sharply defined, every product decision, every demo, every feature reinforced it. "No Software" became an organizing principle.

Most B2B brands soften their stance. Salesforce chose to sharpened it. Great positioning doesn’t try to please everyone. It draws a line in the market and challenges buyers to step over it.

Bold positioning is where differentiation starts.

Messages like “No Software” are what happen when a company knows exactly what role it wants to play in the category, and what it’s willing to oppose to get there.

For years, B2B leaders have talked about “sameness” as a creative problem.
Now it’s quantifiable. And CMOs are openly acknowledging the strategic cost.

A recent Dentsu Global CMO Survey (2025) found that 79% of CMOs agree that optimizing for algorithms is creating a “sea of sameness” in marketing.

That’s a near complete collapse in creative confidence.

When every brand tunes itself to the same signals, the result is indistinguishability, and indistinguishability fuels uncertainty across the buying process. In a world where buying groups make most decisions before a vendor ever knows they’re in market, looking and sounding like everyone else is fatal.

The pattern mirrors our theme this issue. CMOs are losing brand ownership when their work becomes easy to ignore. Excessive messaging accelerates that erosion. What protects your seat is not more personalization or more touchpoints. It is clarity, restraint, and narrative discipline. The brands that stand out speak less often and with more intention.

Positioning broadens the many avenues for success that optimizating for the algorithm narrows.

CMOs know the trap. Few have a plan to escape it. And that gap is exactly where differentiation, trust, and category leadership are now won.

If your stance isn’t unmistakable, you’re not even in the race.

—Jay