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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Think Foundation Before Finishes:
Many founders focus on marketing tactics (the "color of the house") before establishing strategic foundations. Start with deep audience understanding, market positioning, and strategic differentiation before moving to channel selection and creative execution.
Embrace Competition in Market Development:
Being the only company in a category often means there's no real market. Healthy competition validates market demand and helps with analyst coverage, customer education, and category development. Your competitors are actually helping advertise that the problem exists.
Match Marketing Strategy to Audience Behavior:
Early-stage B2B tech companies often default to Google Ads and social media without considering whether their sophisticated enterprise buyers actually discover solutions through these channels. Private events and educational content often work better for complex, high-consideration purchases.
Use AI as a Creative Collaborator, Not a Replacement:
AI excels at brainstorming and helping communicate visual concepts to designers, but human judgment remains critical for filtering ideas, adding strategic context, and ensuring quality. The most effective approach treats AI as a productivity enhancer that still requires significant human input.
Focus on Current Capabilities Over Future Possibilities:
While AI has captured customer imagination, many buyers are asking for capabilities that don't exist yet. Successful marketing in emerging tech categories requires constantly anchoring customer expectations in current, proven capabilities while maintaining vision for future development.
Build Marketing Around Customer Learning Journeys:
When there's no established buying process, marketing becomes about facilitating customer education and peer learning. Private events where customers can learn from each other often prove more valuable than traditional product-focused marketing.
Conversation
Highlights
In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Barbara Lewis, CMO of Coactive AI, a company helping enterprises unlock value from their image and video content using AI. Barbara brings a unique perspective as an eight-time startup marketing leader who has consistently chosen early-stage companies over established ones. With a background spanning from Siebel Systems during the dot-com crash to building marketing organizations from scratch, Barbara shares tactical insights on marketing in emerging categories, the realities of category creation, and how AI is reshaping both marketing practice and customer expectations.
Topics Discussed:
Building Marketing Organizations from Zero in Early-Stage Startups
- Transitioning from product management to marketing at Siebel Systems
- The strategic decision-making process for joining early vs. late-stage companies
- Scaling marketing teams and systems in high-growth environments
Category Creation vs. Market Education
- The myth of company-driven category creation and why markets create categories
- How to approach marketing when there’s no established purchasing department
- Balancing customer imagination with technological reality in AI markets
Strategic Marketing Tactics for Emerging Technologies
- Private event strategy for complex B2B sales cycles
- Why traditional digital marketing approaches don’t work for all audiences
- Educational content as a primary marketing vehicle
AI’s Impact on Marketing Practice
- Using AI as a brainstorming and creative collaboration tool
- The limitations of AI-generated content and the importance of human judgment
- How generative AI is changing customer expectations and buying behavior
Lessons from the Salesforce vs. Siebel Competition
- The reality behind the legendary competitive positioning
- How Salesforce leveraged competitive drafting without direct competition
- Why understanding true competitive dynamics matters for strategy
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