B2B marketing has a boring problem, and everyone knows it. Somewhere between “enterprise solutions” and “synergistic partnerships,” the category decided that selling to businesses meant abandoning anything resembling personality. The result is a wasteland of stock photos featuring people pointing at laptops with expressions of manufactured enthusiasm.
Josh Golden from Yes& and Travis Robertson from Colossus think they know why this happened—and more importantly, they have ideas about how to fix it. Both run indies that increasingly work with B2B clients, and both believe the category’s bland problem isn’t inevitable. “The C-suite people making these decisions, they’re humans too,” Golden said. “They go home and watch Netflix and order Chinese food.”
Their conversation was about diagnosing why B2B went beige, what better looks like in practice, and why indies might be uniquely positioned to try something different.
Their diagnosis: learned helplessness
The beige didn’t happen overnight—it was learned behavior. “B2B just fell into a habit,” Robertson explained. “People stopped showing clients good work and started showing them what they thought was expected within that category.”
The expectation became a visual vocabulary of suited executives with arms folded, handshakes stamped with Getty watermarks, and copy that reads like it was focus-grouped into submission. But Golden questions whether anyone actually wants this: “I don’t think everybody needs to be seen in a suit doing the power handshake all day.”
Robertson and Golden’s diagnosis: B2B forgot something fundamental. Even the most rational business decision is still made by a human being. And humans, even ones with procurement budgets, respond to things that make them feel something.
Remember 90% aren’t buying
“Great B2B looks a heck of a lot like great B2C,” Golden said, which sounds simple until you realize how few companies actually believe this. The insight behind it: 90% of your market isn’t actively buying, so being memorable matters more than being comprehensive.
Robertson traced the problem to marketing’s old emotional hierarchy—rational to emotional to inspirational. “B2B just stayed on the bottom of it and didn’t move,” he said. The brands that break through understand that even enterprise software purchases are fundamentally human decisions.
Golden put it more directly: “This is about earning trust and occupying a place in somebody’s mind.” Beige doesn’t occupy much mental real estate.
Why indies can do it
Robertson’s explanation was direct: “We have more fun.” But behind the simplicity is a structural truth—indies approach work differently because they have to be brave to survive.
“We do things our own way, we have a little chip on our shoulder, there’s that underdog mentality,” Robertson continued. Golden added the practical element: “We’re used to doing without everything you would want, so we’re really good at living within constraints.” Constraints breed creativity; hunger makes every brief matter.
The structural differences run deeper. At holding companies, Robertson noted, B2B work lived in departmental silos, often staffed with only junior and senior people—”it was deemed less than.” Indies can’t afford to treat any work as second-tier. When you’re small, everything has to count.
What it looks like in practice
Barrett Hofher’s billboard for Attentive—”Drive sales with text marketing” on an actual billboard—is what Robertson calls “weaponizing antithetical media.” It’s smart without being smug, and it makes the point better than any PowerPoint about integrated marketing strategies.
Gong’s Super Bowl spot committed fully to their name with sales gongs everywhere. “You’re gonna lean into your brand name, lean in really hard,” Robertson said. The spot proved Golden’s theory that “nobody cares about the details of the product—they’re gonna walk away with the name and a thought.”
Colossus shattered cybersecurity’s visual clichés for CyberArk with surreal imagery around identity proliferation. “The cyber security category is just like every trope in the book,” Robertson explained—hooded hackers, shields, people who look like they’re in witness protection. Their solution felt appropriately strange and genuinely human. Not beige.
A reframe on risk
Golden reframed the entire risk conversation with one line: “Risk is actually the antithesis of risky. Taking no risk is risky.” It’s the kind of insight that sounds obvious until you realize how many boardrooms need to hear it.
The stakes actually make bravery more important, not less. Golden illustrated this: “If I’m buying enterprise software, the worst that happens to me is I lose my job, possibly lose my career, and then I can’t buy the car.” When that much is on the line, trust and memorability become crucial.
Indies understand this viscerally because they live it. When every client relationship matters and every brief is a chance to prove yourself, beige isn’t just boring—it’s business suicide. Being brave isn’t a luxury; it’s survival.
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Doug Zanger is the founder and editor-in-chief of Indie Agency News. He is also the founder of the Creative Bohemian consultancy, lives in the Pacific Northwest and is insufferable about it.
