PVML’s Creative Marketing Tactics: Coffee Vouchers, Custom Mugs, and Why Being Weird Wins

PVML’s Creative Marketing Tactics: Coffee Vouchers, Custom Mugs, and Why Being Weird Wins

Walk through any cybersecurity conference and you’ll see the same scene repeated across hundreds of booths: branded pens, generic swag, polished sales pitches, and forgettable conversations. Every vendor blends into an indistinguishable mass of promises about protection, compliance, and enterprise-grade solutions. Standing out requires something most B2B founders are terrified to do: looking weird.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Rina Galperin, CTO and Co-Founder of PVML, a data access platform that’s raised $8 million, shared the creative marketing philosophy that helps them win in one of the most crowded markets in tech.

The Philosophy: Be Bold or Blend In

PVML’s marketing approach starts with a simple premise that most companies intellectually understand but fail to act on. “I think it’s important to be bold and take risks with marketing. Otherwise you’re just blending in,” Rina states.

The cybersecurity market exemplifies this challenge. Thousands of vendors compete for attention from the same buyers. Everyone claims to be innovative, secure, and easy to implement. Product pages look identical. Pitch decks follow the same structure. Even the people manning conference booths wear similar business casual uniforms.

In this environment, playing it safe guarantees invisibility. A perfectly professional, completely unremarkable marketing approach ensures you’ll be forgotten within minutes of any interaction. The prospect will walk away thinking, “That seemed like a decent solution,” and immediately forget your company name.

PVML recognized that memorability requires risk. “You sometimes need to risk having a door shut at your face to potentially land something big and suppress competition,” Rina explains.

This isn’t recklessness—it’s strategic acceptance that some prospects will think your approach is strange, unprofessional, or off-putting. That’s the price of being remembered by the ones who matter.

The Tactics: Simple, Personal, Memorable

PVML’s creative tactics aren’t elaborate or expensive. They’re surprisingly simple, which is part of why they work. Consider two examples Rina shares:

Coffee vouchers at conferences. Instead of collecting business cards and promising to follow up (like every other vendor), PVML hands out coffee vouchers. The implicit offer: let’s have an actual conversation over coffee, not a transactional booth interaction. “It can be as simple as going to conferences and handing out coffee vouchers to land coffee dates with prospects,” Rina notes.

Customized mugs for client onboarding. When new clients come aboard, they receive personalized mugs. Not branded swag with the PVML logo plastered across generic merchandise, but customized items that acknowledge the specific relationship. “Or making customized mugs for clients onboarding days,” Rina shares.

These tactics work because they do something rare in B2B marketing: they treat prospects and clients as individual humans rather than pipeline entries. A coffee voucher says “I want to have a real conversation with you.” A customized mug says “we see you as a specific person, not interchangeable revenue.”

Why Low-Budget Tactics Create Outsized Impact

The beauty of PVML’s approach is that none of these tactics require significant budget. Coffee vouchers cost a few dollars. Customized mugs might run $20-30 each. Compare this to the tens of thousands companies spend on booth space, swag, and sponsored conference parties.

The ROI comes from memorability, not scale. PVML doesn’t need to be remembered by every conference attendee—they need to be remembered by the 10-20 prospects who are genuinely good fits for their solution.

A coffee voucher handed to the right prospect creates a memorable interaction. Three months later, when that prospect is evaluating data security solutions, they remember “the company that gave me a coffee voucher and actually wanted to talk” far more clearly than the dozens of vendors who gave them branded pens.

The customized client mugs serve a different purpose: they create moments worth sharing. When a new customer receives a personalized mug, they’re likely to mention it to colleagues, post about it on LinkedIn, or simply remember the gesture when asked about their onboarding experience. That organic word-of-mouth is far more valuable than paid advertising.

The Risk Calculus: Doors Slammed vs. Deals Won

The hardest part of creative marketing isn’t the tactics—it’s accepting that some people will react negatively. Hand out coffee vouchers at a conference and some prospects will think it’s unprofessional or gimmicky. Create customized client gifts and some will view it as frivolous spending.

This is where most B2B companies retreat to safe, forgettable marketing. The fear of negative reactions outweighs the potential upside of memorability. PVML embraced the opposite calculus.

“You sometimes need to risk having a door shut at your face to potentially land something big and suppress competition,” Rina states. The willingness to accept some negative reactions is what creates differentiation.

Think about the alternative: completely professional, utterly forgettable marketing that offends no one and creates zero memorable impressions. You’ll never have a door slammed in your face, but you’ll also never be the company a prospect remembers when they’re ready to buy.

The Deeper Principle: Creative Marketing as Competitive Advantage

Behind PVML’s specific tactics lives a more important principle: in crowded markets, creative marketing becomes a sustainable competitive advantage precisely because most companies are unwilling to embrace it.

Most B2B companies, especially in conservative industries like cybersecurity, default to professional-looking but generic marketing. They hire agencies that produce polished materials that look exactly like everyone else’s polished materials. They attend conferences with booth setups indistinguishable from competitors. They send follow-up emails using the same templates as every other vendor.

This creates an opportunity. Any company willing to be genuinely creative—and accept the risk that comes with it—automatically stands out. The competitive moat isn’t the tactics themselves (coffee vouchers are easy to copy), it’s the organizational willingness to embrace tactics that might make some prospects uncomfortable.

Most companies can’t or won’t make this leap. Their legal teams will object. Their executives will worry about brand perception. Their sales teams will prefer the safety of conventional approaches. This organizational conservatism is what makes creative marketing sustainable as a competitive advantage.

When Creative Marketing Works (and When It Doesn’t)

PVML’s approach isn’t universally applicable. Creative, personal marketing works best when:

Your target market is small and well-defined. PVML doesn’t need to reach millions—they need to reach specific decision-makers at companies handling sensitive data. Personalized tactics scale to thousands, not millions.

Your sales cycle is long and relationship-driven. Enterprise security sales involve multiple stakeholders and months of evaluation. Being memorable throughout that journey matters more than immediate conversion.

Your category is commoditized and crowded. When every vendor looks the same, creativity creates differentiation. In truly novel categories, you might not need it.

You’re willing to accept that some prospects will react negatively. This is non-negotiable. Creative marketing means some people will think you’re unprofessional, weird, or gimmicky.

The Implementation Challenge

The gap between understanding creative marketing and actually implementing it is where most companies fail. Everyone agrees that standing out matters. Few are willing to hand out coffee vouchers when their competitors are hosting polished evening receptions.

PVML bridges this gap through philosophical commitment at the founder level. When your CTO explicitly states that you need to “risk having a door shut at your face,” it gives the entire organization permission to try tactics that might fail.

This top-down embrace of creative risk is what separates companies that talk about innovative marketing from companies that actually do it. Without founder-level commitment, creative ideas die in legal review, budget meetings, or simple organizational inertia toward the safe and conventional.

The Lesson for Crowded Markets

For founders competing in saturated categories, PVML’s approach offers a clear path: embrace the weird, accept the risk, and trust that memorability beats polish in crowded markets.

Your competitors are optimizing for not offending anyone. Optimize instead for being remembered by the prospects who matter. Hand out the coffee vouchers. Create the customized mugs. Risk having some doors shut in your face.

Because in a category where everyone looks identical, the companies willing to look weird are the ones prospects actually remember when it’s time to buy.