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Hello and welcome to the 210th edition of Fresh Salmon.

If you're new here - welcome aboard.
And if you’d like to catch up on past issues, you can explore the archive anytime.

Quick note before we dive in: this edition contains an idea that might make your CMO uncomfortable. Good. That's the point.

Let's get into it.

Meet our primary partner for today’s edition: Roku. Check them out 👇

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

The Moat in Marketing?

Ask any B2B marketer what their moat is and you'll get some version of the same five answers.

"Our content." "Our brand." "Our community." "Our data." "Our relationships."

All valid. All being said by your competitors at this exact moment.

Here's the question nobody is asking:

What if the moat isn't about what you attract but about what you deliberately repel?

The Most Counterintuitive Move in Marketing Right Now Is Making Yourself Smaller

We've spent a decade optimizing for reach. More traffic. More impressions. More leads. More in the funnel.

Reach used to be hard. AI has made content infinite. Ads exist for every budget. You can get in front of a million people this week if you want to.

So here's the brutal question your whole marketing strategy rests on: if everyone has reach, what does reach actually give you?

Noise. That's what it gives you. You are making noise alongside 10,000 other companies making the exact same noise, for the exact same buyers, saying the exact same things slightly differently.

The brands quietly winning in B2B right now understand something most marketers refuse to accept.

In a world where attention is infinite, the moat is scarcity. And the most powerful form of scarcity isn't product scarcity. It's audience scarcity.

The moat is not getting your message to everyone.

The moat is making it crystal clear that you are not for everyone.

Meet our secondary partner for today’s edition: mintlify. Check them out 👇

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Repulsion Is a Growth Strategy

I know what you're thinking. "We can't afford to turn people away."

You're already turning people away - you're just doing it inefficiently, after wasting your ad budget and your sales team's time on bad-fit accounts that take 8 months to say no.

The companies that understand this are doing something that looks irrational from the outside.

They are engineering rejection into their marketing.

37signals (the company behind Basecamp) doesn't just have a product - they have a worldview that explicitly antagonizes a huge swath of the tech industry. They've written entire manifestos about why VC-backed growth-at-all-costs companies aren't their customers. They insult the hustle culture that most SaaS companies romanticize. They've deliberately shrunk their total addressable market.

Their revenue per employee is among the highest in software. Their customer retention is extraordinary. Their marketing costs are a fraction of companies a tenth their size.

The repulsion is the attraction.

When you loudly declare "we are not for you" to one audience, you are simultaneously telling another audience - the right audience that "we built this specifically for you."

That feeling of being specifically chosen is one of the most powerful forces in buyer psychology. It's not just that they want your product. It's that they feel understood in a way nobody else has understood them.

You can't manufacture that feeling with a broader message. It only exists at the edges.

Define Your Enemy

Every category-defining B2B brand has a villain.

Not a competitor - a condition. A way of doing things that is broken, lazy, wrong, or harmful to the people they serve.

Gong's villain isn't Salesforce. It's gut-feel sales management. Every piece of content they've ever made is an argument that running a sales team on intuition is leaving money on the table. That argument repels old-school sales leaders who are proud of their instincts, and magnetically attracts data-driven revenue leaders who feel unseen in their own organizations.

HubSpot's villain wasn't a competitor. It was interruptive marketing. Cold calls. Paid banners. Their entire movement was built on the idea that marketers had been doing it wrong — which naturally repelled the segment of the market that liked doing it wrong, and pulled in everyone who was already uncomfortable with it.

Drift's villain was the form. Literally a web form. They didn't market software, they marketed a manifesto that filling out a contact form to talk to a salesperson is an insult to your time. You either felt that or you didn't. If you felt it, Drift had you.

In every case, the villain is the thing their ideal customer already resents. The brand just had the courage to say it out loud.

What does your ideal customer secretly resent that everyone in your industry is still doing?

That resentment is where your moat lives.

Meet our secondary partner for today’s edition: Wistia. Check them out 👇

The AI Playbook for Video Teams That Can't Slow Down

Wistia's new AI Video Marketing Trends report shows how marketers are using AI to move faster, improve quality, and extend the life of every video. See how leading teams are driving results without adding more work.

Download the Full Report

The Practical Test: Are You Repelling the Right People?

Here's a question worth taking to your next marketing meeting.

Look at your last 10 pieces of content, your LinkedIn bio, your homepage. If a prospect read everything, would they know who you are NOT for?

If the answer is no, you don't have a positioning problem. You have a courage problem.

Because the reason most B2B brands don't do this isn't strategic. It's fear. Fear that the CEO will see the blog post and say "why are we being so controversial?" Fear that we'll miss a deal. Fear that narrowing means shrinking.

But here's what the data from the fastest-growing B2B brands shows consistently: the more specifically you describe the problem, the customer, and the villain - the higher your conversion rates, the shorter your sales cycles, and the stronger your retention.

Vague marketing generates vague pipeline. Specific marketing generates conviction. And conviction closes deals.

So What Is the Moat?

Not content. Not SEO. Not your newsletter (sorry).

The moat is a worldview so specific, so clearly held, so consistently expressed, that copying it would require your competitor to stop being who they are and become who you are.

That's the only thing that can't be automated, replicated, or outspent.

Your POV is a business asset. Not the kind that shows up on a balance sheet, the kind that shows up when a prospect finally finds you after years of feeling like nobody in your space actually gets it.

That recognition? That's not a marketing outcome.

That's a moat.

The question to sit with this week:

What would your marketing have to say - loudly, publicly, repeatedly - to make the wrong customer self-select out? And why haven't you said it yet?

Reply and tell me. I read every response, and I suspect this one will start some interesting conversations.

That’s it for this week.

If this edition sparked an idea for you, share it with someone building in B2B.

See you next time.

Do what is good for your soul ❤️

Vivek