Why Reactive Technologies Markets Through Standards Bodies Instead of Demand Gen

Why Reactive Technologies Markets Through Standards Bodies Instead of Demand Gen

Your marketing team wants to run ABM campaigns. They’ve built buyer personas, mapped the customer journey, and identified high-intent keywords. But what if the most effective marketing in your industry happens in technical committee meetings that your CMO has never heard of?

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Marc Borrett, CEO and co-founder of Reactive Technologies, explained why his grid measurement platform markets primarily through standards bodies and technical organizations rather than traditional B2B campaigns. Their approach reveals a counterintuitive truth: in conservative industries, defining what “good” looks like matters more than generating demand.

The Risk Dial That Traditional Marketing Can’t Move

When Reactive Technologies approaches potential customers, they’re not competing against other vendors. They’re competing against the risk of trying anything new at all.

Marc frames the challenge in terms that traditional marketers rarely consider: “General approach for us is really to achieve sort of the best practice solution. So you know, again going back to the customer type, again for all the right reasons, being conservative, we need to make sure that the solutions we offer, you know, if you imagine a risk dial for a customer, we need to move that dial from. We’re not the risky innovative solution that might cost your job. If you go with us with a proven technology solution that delivers the measurements that you need to run your grid.”

This “risk dial” metaphor captures something crucial. In critical infrastructure, the default isn’t “choose the best vendor.” It’s “avoid making a mistake that could black out a city.” No amount of case studies or ROI calculators addresses that fundamental psychology.

Traditional demand generation assumes customers are comparing solutions. But grid operators aren’t shopping for the best grid measurement platform—they’re trying to determine if grid measurement platforms as a category are safe enough to consider at all.

Where Technical Standards Create Market Categories

Instead of fighting this psychology, Reactive Technologies embraced it. Their marketing strategy focuses on working with standards bodies and technical organizations to define what proper grid measurement looks like.

“Marketing focus is to be part of that and to make sure that we explain very clearly why our solution works and why there is not, in our view, a better way to do it,” Marc explains.

This isn’t about thought leadership in the content marketing sense. It’s about establishing the technical foundation that makes your category possible. When standards bodies endorse specific approaches to grid measurement, they’re not just validating Reactive Technologies—they’re validating the entire concept that this type of measurement should exist.

The effect compounds over time. Once technical standards incorporate your approach, you’ve done something more valuable than generating leads. You’ve made your solution the baseline against which alternatives are evaluated. Competitors don’t just need to match your features—they need to match the standard you helped define.

Why Conservative Industries Trust Standards Over Marketing

The power grid operators that Reactive Technologies sells to have good reasons for their conservatism. They manage infrastructure that millions of people depend on. Making the wrong technology choice doesn’t just hurt their company—it can cause cascading failures affecting entire regions.

In this environment, marketing claims carry little weight. What matters is technical credibility validated by neutral parties. Standards bodies provide that validation in ways that even the most sophisticated content marketing cannot.

When Marc describes their customer base, the word he emphasizes is trust: “When you’re selling into a relatively conservative set of customers, as we said rightly risk averse, trust is the thing you have to build.”

But how do you build trust when your customers are skeptical of vendor claims by default? “The only way that we, I think we’re able to do it is really from having a very credible technical team. You know, we have a very, I would say, high calibre engineering capability and at some point that quality starts to become evident because, you know, you’re able to back it up, you’re able to share data, you’re able to show the physics of what you’re trying to do.”

This technical credibility gets amplified through standards bodies. When your engineers present at technical conferences, publish in industry journals, and contribute to standards development, they’re not generating MQLs. They’re building the institutional credibility that makes sales possible years later.

The Patient Timeline That Standards Require

Standards-based marketing operates on timelines that would horrify most growth marketers. Reactive Technologies spent five and a half years before generating meaningful revenue—much of that time invested in technical validation and standards development.

Marc is candid about the difficulty: “It is tough and it is bleak and it is lonely. You know, I’m not going to start crying but it is genuinely difficult. But you have to believe and as long as you know you’ve got the right solution to the right problem then that is the fire that you’ve got to keep alight and that’s the fire that you got to stoke.”

What sustained them during this period wasn’t marketing momentum or pipeline growth. It was watching the problem get bigger. Their first customer spent about 16 million pounds annually on the issue Reactive Technologies addressed. “Over the next five years, as we were working with them and we were going from a small scale pilot to a bigger scale to then a national scale, that problem grew fivefold. So 16 million turned into 32 million and eventually got to somewhere north of 250 million in that time period.”

This problem growth created natural market momentum that no marketing campaign could generate. As the renewable energy transition accelerated, the need for better grid measurement became increasingly obvious to everyone in the industry. Reactive Technologies didn’t need to create demand—they needed to be positioned as the technical standard when that demand materialized.

Creating New Categories Through Technical Definition

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Reactive Technologies’ approach is that they’re creating an entirely new measurement category—one that didn’t exist because the phenomenon had never been measured before.

“Basically, we are having to create, in some cases, an entirely new category,” Marc explains. “So when we talk about measuring the grid, actually, we’re talking about measuring a particular phenomena that has never been measured before.”

Creating new categories through marketing typically involves positioning, messaging, and analyst relations. But in conservative infrastructure, categories are created through technical definition. You can’t market your way into a new budget line item. You need to establish why this type of measurement should exist, what constitutes valid methodology, and what standards any solution must meet.

This is where working with standards bodies becomes essential. When technical organizations adopt frameworks that include your measurement approach, they’re not endorsing your product—they’re legitimizing your category. They’re telling conservative buyers that this isn’t an experimental vendor trying something risky. It’s an established technical practice that responsible operators should implement.

The Practical Mechanics of Standards-Based Marketing

What does standards-based marketing actually look like in practice? For Reactive Technologies, it means their engineering team is their marketing team.

The company focuses on “working with standards bodies, technical bodies that really help set what good looks like from a technical engineering perspective across the industry,” Marc notes. This includes presenting research at industry conferences, contributing to technical specifications, and engaging with the expert committees that define best practices.

These activities don’t generate immediate pipeline. But they create the conditions for sales years later. When a grid operator finally decides they need real-time stability measurement, they’re not discovering Reactive Technologies through a Google search or LinkedIn ad. They’re already familiar with the company because Reactive Technologies helped define what proper measurement looks like.

The investment required is substantial. You need senior engineers who can communicate complex concepts to skeptical experts. You need patience to engage in multi-year standards development processes. And you need conviction to prioritize these activities over more measurable marketing tactics.

When Standards-Based Marketing Works

Standards-based marketing isn’t appropriate for every B2B company. It works in specific conditions that Reactive Technologies exemplifies:

First, your customers must be highly risk-averse, where mistakes have catastrophic consequences. In these markets, technical validation through neutral parties matters more than vendor marketing.

Second, you must be creating a new category or significantly redefining an existing one. Standards-based marketing establishes legitimacy for entirely new approaches.

Third, your sales cycles must be long enough that the multi-year investment in standards development pays off before you run out of capital. This requires patient investors and sufficient market size to justify the timeline.

Fourth, you need a problem that’s growing faster than your ability to sell. Problem growth creates natural momentum that carries you through the years required to establish technical standards.

For companies operating in these conditions, traditional demand generation isn’t just inefficient—it’s ineffective. You can’t marketing your way into trust when trust only comes from technical credibility validated by the institutions your customers already respect.