Marc Andreessen was right, software did in fact eat the world. Today, that’s true for almost every enterprise business. Whether you’re in industrial tech, professional services, or finance, more and more of your work is done via a digital intermediary.
Yet lurking beneath this transformation is a problem that’s often only discussed by the product team—feature creep. As software accumulates more capabilities, it becomes bloated. Leaving most users interacting with only a fraction of what’s been built. In fact, the average software product has 80% of its features rarely or never used. And when Gartner finds that 85% of B2B buyers say they feel overwhelmed by the information they encounter when evaluating products and services, it's no longer just a product or governance problem, it’s a brand problem that can weaken differentiation, hurt messaging coherence, and make the product feel distant from the brand you worked so hard to build.
So, how can marketers step in and keep control of their brand’s narrative? By keying in on some of the same principles that lead to strong brand building, we can realize the potential behind product-driven brands.
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Don’t drown in the Feature Creep Soup
Adding features feels like a win across the organization. Sales teams get very specific answers to their customer’s questions. Product teams get to flex their innovation muscles. And leadership sees momentum. But every new feature is also a new voice. At launch, a product usually speaks with confidence and focus, the value is clear and articulate. But over time, as features stack up, those voices start to compete. The product gets louder and harder to understand. Eventually, there’s so much noise it drowns out what makes the product compelling. And that’s when marketers tend to fall back on lists — use cases, bullet points, benefits — a flood of functional claims that may look comprehensive but feel identical to competitors and to your customers as well. Because in most markets, buyers can get 95% of what they need from several vendors.
It’s not the features that differentiate you, it’s your brand. When you lead with brand, you anchor your messaging in the value your product creates, not just what it does. That’s what keeps complexity from overpowering clarity.
Case Study: Bank of America — Innovation Messaging
The Challenge: Constant innovation created communication overload. The organization needed a way to make new tools and capabilities feel cohesive and connected.
The Answer: We created a value layer linking core brand promised to product capabilities through a framework that make every message ladder up to a larger story.
How It Worked: Each team was able to adapt the story for different audiences and tough points–helping the same product or feature take on different meanings depending on which value story was the focus. This allowed for a consistent, value-driven narrative for products and features.
The Results: A unified messaging system that continues to guide new technology launches, even for internal tools.
2. It’s not about you, it’s about your customers. Be empathetic.
Another common trap for marketers is how they present their products together. It’s easy for product managers and marketers to mirror their company’s internal team structures, lines of business, or other divisions in the way they present products to the market. “It works for us, it will work for our customers.” But too often, this makes little sense to customers. From a buyer’s perspective, what matters isn’t how your business is arranged—it’s how your products fit into theirs. That’s why we encourage clients to mirror their customers instead of themselves.
For many of our clients, the first thing we do is push them to think about how their customers use their products. We talk to sales teams who are face-to-face with their customers to uncover where and how their solutions create value. From there, we build product architectures around use cases, roles, or purchase behaviors. The outcome can take on a range of forms and can even be used simultaneously on places like a website where you can repackage products in different ways such as HubSpot does.
For Invenco, a convenience management technology company spun out of Vontier, we helped reshape their product structure around the physical areas where their solutions get deployed: Retail Management, Payment Management, and Forecourt Management.
This shift moved the conversation from product names and features to tangible customer benefits. And reinforced the company’s focus on the convenience retail segment, a core objective of their rebrand. The result? A simpler, clearer buying journey. And a product story that supports the brand’s promise rather than competing with it.
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Demos Deserve More Credit
Product demos are one of the most powerful, yet underutilized, tools in the enterprise marketing playbook. Data shows that buyers who engage with an interactive demo are 3.2x more likely to convert. But only 29% of buyers ever experience one. Why? Because too often, demos are treated as technical show-and-tells. They showcase features, not value. They reinforce complexity, not confidence. A better approach: treat demos as brand experiences. They should help audiences understand the story behind the product. Not just how it works, but why it matters.
For one of our major bank clients, we helped reimagine their flagship offering at a traveling event series. Instead of focusing on prospects, we made existing customers the heroes.
By turning demos into peer-led conversations, attendees learned from each other, not just from the brand. The result was a more transparent, authentic, and ultimately more persuasive experience. It was brand first, feature second. And it worked.
Brand as the Filter for Complexity
Product complexity isn’t going away. But when brand has a seat at the table, complexity becomes an advantage instead of a liability.
- Brand provides focus. It ensures every message connects back to your core value, not just your latest release or feature.
- Brand provides structure. It organizes your product portfolio around customer needs, not company silos. And helps your customers know exactly when and where they’d use it.
- Brand provides coherence. It turns technical interactions, like demos into opportunities for connection.
As product, marketing, and sales become more intertwined, it’s getting harder for teams to tell one cohesive story. A brand experience mindset helps align everyone — giving the business a consistent, human way to show up in every part of the product journey. Because in a world where software has eaten everything, brand is what gives its spice.