If business feels harder than it used to, it’s not just you. There are simply too many B2B brands.
Not just more competition. Not just a tougher market. There is a genuine imbalance between the number of B2B brands and the level of meaningful demand.
Step back and look at most B2B categories today (SaaS, consulting, HR, accountants, solicitors), and the pattern is clear. There is no shortage of solutions. There is an excess of them.
The problem isn’t differentiation. It’s duplication.
Different companies arrive at near-identical propositions: making teams more efficient, unlocking better decisions, improving performance, driving growth.
All reasonable. All valid. And increasingly indistinguishable.
You are not competing against bad businesses. You are competing against many businesses that are good enough in exactly the same way.
There aren’t any more problems. Just more solutions.
When supply outpaces demand
For a long time, growth was fuelled by uncovering unmet needs. Find a problem, solve it well, scale it.
But in most mature B2B categories, that work has already been done.
The core problems are known. The ways of solving them are already established. The solutions are abundant.
Demand hasn’t changed. Supply has.
There are now more tools, more services, and more “solutions” than ever before addressing the same underlying needs. Rather than expanding the market, most companies are dividing it.
And when demand is divided, the consequences are predictable. Acquisition costs rise. Differentiation narrows. Switching increases. Loyalty weakens.
Not because customers are irrational, but because the choices are functionally interchangeable.
Why is this accelerating for B2B brands?
This is structural, not accidental. Three forces have changed B2B over the last decade.
- The first is the ease of building. SaaS infrastructure, no-code tools, and global platforms have made launching a product or service dramatically simpler. What once required capital and capability can now be done quickly.
- The second is the speed of scale. The moment an idea works, it spreads — across markets, geographies, and competitors. Durable advantage is harder to sustain.
- The third is the convergence of thinking. Founders, marketers, and strategists increasingly draw from the same pool of content, frameworks, and best practices. Increasingly, they are also drawing from the same AI tools.
Which means not only are companies building similar things, they are thinking about them in the same way.
The false promise of “finding a gap”
In response, most businesses fall back on the same instinct: find a gap. Niche down. Refine the segment. Tighten the message. It sounds strategic. It usually isn’t.
In crowded markets, these gaps don’t hold. They’re either too narrow to matter, already being pursued, or disappear as soon as someone else notices them.
What looks like an opportunity is often just a brief window before the rest of the market catches up.
So businesses push further, searching for something overlooked. But increasingly, there is nothing left to uncover.
A different way to think about strategy
If existing demand is exhausted (or at least heavily contested), then the answer cannot be to compete for it more efficiently. It has to be to change what demand is based on.
This is the point at which strategy begins to diverge from how most businesses practise it.
Strategy is no longer driven by analysis, benchmarking, or best practice. Those are accessible to everyone now. Replicable. Increasingly automated.
What’s left is less comfortable.
- A point of view about how the category should work.
- A disagreement with assumptions others accept without question.
- A decision to take a position that won’t make sense to everyone (at least not immediately).
The kind of idea that feels slightly off before it proves itself right.
These are not outputs you arrive at through optimisation. They are bold and difficult choices you make.
Where AI fits into this for B2B brands
AI has entered this landscape at precisely the right (and wrong) moment.
Because it is exceptionally good at producing the kind of thinking that already dominates B2B: structured, logical, well-evidenced, and conforming to existing patterns.
Ask it for a strategy, and it will give you a clear market view, sensible opportunities, coherent positioning, and strong justification.
In other words, it will give you the consensus.
And the consensus is exactly where the problem lies.
If every business uses AI to inform its strategy, those strategies will inevitably converge. Not because AI is flawed, but because it is trained on what already exists. It reflects the thinking that came before it.
The risk isn’t that AI replaces strategic thinking. It’s that it reinforces average thinking at scale.
Read our article on AI helps you ZIG. But only human creativity can help you ZAG!
The real shift
This changes what it means to do strategy well.
Previously, the challenge involved finding the right answer. Now, the challenge is recognising that the “right” answer may already be overrepresented.
To look at something logical, evidence-based, and widely agreed upon — and decide that it is not enough.
To choose a direction not because it is validated, but because it is meaningful.
And to accept that this comes with risk.
This is not theoretical
The businesses that have genuinely broken out of crowded B2B categories have done something similar. Not by finding a gap, but by making an argument.
- HubSpot didn’t identify an underserved segment. It rejected the logic of interruption and reframed marketing around attraction instead.
- Salesforce didn’t improve CRM. It challenged the assumption that software needed to live on your servers at all.
- Basecamp went in the opposite direction to the market, building simpler software while others added complexity.
None of them found a gap. They decided what was wrong with their category and built around that conviction.
At the time, each of these positions was easy to argue against. That difficulty isn’t incidental. It’s the point.
If an idea is easy to agree with, it is probably already well served.
What actually creates an advantage now
When supply exceeds demand, efficiency is no longer a differentiator. Nor is optimisation, nor adherence to best practice. These are baseline expectations.
Today, real advantage lies not in better execution, but in a distinctive perspective.
But perspective is not the same as positioning.
Positioning is designed to appeal. Perspective is willing to alienate.
A business with a genuine perspective will turn some customers away, because it has made clear choices about what matters, what doesn’t, and what should change.
That discomfort isn’t a problem. It is usually the point.
Safe ideas don’t create demand. They compete for it.
Create demand, don’t compete for it
How do you stop competing for demand and start creating it? There are two ways this tends to happen.
The first is category design. Not competing more effectively within your market, but stepping back and asking whether it’s the right market in the first place.
The shift isn’t about uncovering a hidden problem. It’s about redefining the one everyone already thinks they understand — giving it a different shape, a different language, and in doing so, changing what people recognise as valuable.
That’s what HubSpot did with inbound marketing. They didn’t win an existing category. They changed how the category was understood, and in doing so, made themselves the obvious choice.
The second is simpler, and harder. Define what you stand against.
Not a competitor, but an idea. A way of working that everyone accepts, but that you believe is wrong.
Basecamp stood against the cult of busyness. HubSpot stood against interruption as a growth strategy.
Both approaches require the same thing in the end, a willingness to ask genuinely uncomfortable questions about your business and your category, and to follow the answers wherever they lead.
That kind of thinking is harder than it sounds. It requires the right environment, the right questions, and often, someone outside your business to challenge the assumptions you don’t know you’re making.
It’s also exactly what design thinking is built for. If you want a practical framework for working through these questions, our Design Thinking Playbook is a good place to start. It covers how to reframe problems, challenge assumptions, and test ideas before committing to them.
Download our free Design Thinking Playbook
Breaking out of saturated markets starts with better questions, not better answers. Our Design Thinking Playbook is designed to help you reframe problems, challenge assumptions, and move beyond the obvious.
