In October 2010, something unusual happened in the world of marketing. Gap Inc., which had built one of the most recognisable brands in American retail for more than 20 years, overnight replaced its iconic logo with a new design. The blue box shrank into a small gradient square hovering awkwardly above a Helvetica wordmark, trading its dependable and effortless American casual vibe for something that felt generic.
Social media erupted. Loyal shoppers felt confused, even betrayed. Their reaction was not just about typography. It was about the lack of communication.
In the busyness of launching a new logo, Gap had missed staging its evolution. Instead, it had abruptly changed the face of a company that millions had grown up with. Within days, the backlash intensified. The company attempted to crowdsource feedback, which only amplified the perception that it did not have a clear direction.
Six days later, Gap reversed the decision and reinstated the original logo.
What happened in that week was not just a design failure. It was a case study in marketing randomness.
Stories like these are not rare. Many brands, across B2B and B2C, struggle not because of product failure, but because of how marketing is executed in the early years. In the absence of a dedicated marketing function or clear strategic ownership, companies begin committing what can best be called “random acts of marketing”.
They increase social media posting frequency because someone says founder branding works, then go silent for weeks when priorities shift. They publish AI-generated blog articles in the hope of capturing SEO visibility, but without a clear content strategy. They experiment with webinars, sponsor a couple of events, test paid ads for a month, redesign parts of the website, and launch email campaigns — often all at once, and rarely sustained long enough to compound results.
Channels appear and disappear. Visual styles change. Landing pages don’t look or sound like the ads driving traffic to them. What begins as healthy experimentation gradually turns into inconsistency in presence, tone, and visual identity.
Internally, this feels like momentum because there is activity across platforms. Externally, the experience is fragmented.
To the buyer, the brand does not feel active; it feels inconsistent.
Inconsistency Is Expensive
In B2B SaaS, purchase decisions involve multiple stakeholders, risk assessment, budget approvals, and long evaluation cycles. In this environment, inconsistency is not neutral — it introduces doubt and creates friction at every stage of the buyer journey.
Buyers today interact with many pieces of content before they ever speak to a sales rep. According to recent research, the average B2B buying process now involves around 16 interactions with vendor touchpoints before a deal is won, underscoring how many moments of truth exist along the journey. When messaging lacks coherence and cadence lacks consistency across those interactions, buyers struggle to anchor their understanding of what the company truly stands for, leading to confusion.
And in a crowded market, confusion is costly.
The Hidden Cost of Random Marketing Acts
Random acts of marketing often begin with practical, well-intentioned decisions inside growing companies.
In early or mid-stage B2B SaaS teams, everyone multi-hats. The person who “knows Canva” becomes the designer. The one who writes decent emails is suddenly handling copy. Someone curious about ads starts running performance campaigns. None of this is wrong in spirit — it’s scrappy and necessary in the beginning.
But over time, without a shared narrative and strategic guardrails, these well-meaning efforts start pulling in different directions. Visuals evolve without consistency. Messaging reflects individual interpretation rather than brand intent. Campaigns are launched based on bandwidth, not buyer journey.
This lack of alignment leads to objections or simply delayed decisions from prospects. And in complex enterprise deals, delays often become losses. It lengthens sales cycles, reduces win rates, and weakens pricing power because buyers who aren’t sure what you stand for are also not confident to commit.
The rise of AI has amplified this risk. Today, it is easier than ever to produce marketing materials at scale. Blogs can be generated in minutes. Landing pages can be built without engineering effort. Ads can be deployed instantly. But AI does not provide positioning, taste, or judgment. It reflects the clarity — or the ambiguity — of the inputs it receives.
Beneath the surface, the deeper issue is simpler: the lack of a marketing foundation makes randomness fill the vacuum when pressure mounts.
The Work That Actually Moves the Needle
The first phase of meaningful marketing transformation in such companies is rarely glamorous. It is not about launching bold campaigns or scaling ad budgets. It is about excavation. It requires asking uncomfortable but necessary questions:
• Who are we truly for?
• What problem do we solve better than anyone else?
• What capabilities do we have internally to activate and sustain a channel?
• Who is responsible for ensuring accountability?
From those answers, clarity begins to emerge.
Channels that cannot be sustained consistently are deprioritized. Messaging is unified. The homepage, sales decks, and ads are rewritten to reinforce a single narrative. Visual identity is standardized. Performance marketing, when introduced, amplifies a coherent story rather than compensating for its absence.
This process feels slower than random experimentation. It lacks the immediate gratification of launching multiple campaigns at once. But it rebuilds market confidence.
Clarity Compounds. Noise Does Not.
Marketing in B2B SaaS is not decorative. It shapes how the market understands, categorises, and compares your product.
No marketing can be neutral in the early stages when companies rely solely on founder networks, borrowing growth from trust capital. But when competition intensifies and that borrowed growth cannot sustain them, random marketing fragments perception, dilutes positioning, and forces future efforts to work harder to rebuild trust that was quietly eroded.
And the singular decision to move from scattered activity to structured clarity is what defines whether a B2B SaaS company compounds its momentum or slowly dissolves it.
(Views are personal)
