Brand Marketing Expert: How to make B2B brands stand out

Chelsea Castle compares inherited marketing programmes to hoarded houses. At Close, the small business CRM where she most recently led content and brand, the task was not to publish more on top of 12 years of assets. It was to decide which rooms to clean, which founder-led ideas still had value, and which materials needed to be archived or rebuilt.

That view comes from a career that started in journalism and moved through Emma/Campaign Monitor, Chili Piper, Lavender and Close. Chelsea has revived a beloved email marketing community, helped build employee-led brand motion around the Chili Piper pepper, and worked with Lavender’s data and sales creators at a pace that changed how she thinks about strategy.

Her strongest argument is that B2B brands are memory structures. Repetition, red threads and human judgement create the associations that make a company recognisable before a buyer is ready to buy, and Chelsea is clear that AI should support that work without flattening the people doing it.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Tom: You came into tech content from journalism and agency work. Which role changed the way you balance strategy with speed?

Chelsea: I studied journalism, worked in newspapers and magazines, and was editor-in-chief of two magazines. Then I moved into an agency that worked on marketing and branding for higher education. The mix of storytelling, purpose, technical work and branding eventually led me into content marketing in tech. I also really wanted to work remotely, and tech was the path I found.

Lavender was the point where I learned the most about balancing strategy and tactics. We were a very small company with a four-person marketing team, and we were a hodgepodge of non-traditional marketers. There was sales influence, a couple of sales creators and thought leaders, a non-traditional marketer and me.

Before that, I was very type A about strategy. I wanted a documented, thorough, data-backed, research-backed strategic document before I did anything. Then I was working with people like Will Aitken, who was pumping out content after content, and I kept thinking, “Shouldn’t we think about this first?”

That experience taught me the balance. You still need a strategy, and you need to know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how it helps you reach the goals. But you also have to move quickly, execute, and speak to your audience every day.

Tom: You have revived brands, scaled them and built from scratch. What changes when you inherit a content programme instead of starting one?

Chelsea: It is much easier to build a house from scratch than to rebuild a hoarded house. Close felt like that, and Emma did a little bit too. Close had 12 years of different marketing and content programmes, so I inherited a house full of stuff. Some of it was good, some of it could be improved, and some of it needed to be thrown out.

At Emma, the challenge was different. It was a startup darling in Nashville, Tennessee, then it was bought by Campaign Monitor. We had a 40 to 50 person marketing team serving five brands, almost like an agency model. Emma had been a strong brand with a beloved community of email marketers, and the work was about reviving that.

Chili Piper was more about building from the ground up. The founders had already built a lot through sales expertise, sales content and events, so the question was how to scale that and also start talking to marketers.

Lavender was also closer to building from the ground up, but it had very strong content IP, messaging and data. That is a content marketer’s dream because the raw material is already there.

Close was more like Emma. It was a bootstrapped company that had been around for 12 years. Back in the day, Steli Efti was doing founder brand marketing before that term existed. My challenge was to help scale Close into 2026 and beyond, revive awareness, and increase awareness in a crowded category.

Tom: When you joined Close, how did you decide what to clean up first without pausing the work that had to keep moving?

Chelsea: We were rebuilding the marketing team at the same time. A new marketing leader brought me in, and we spent about a year rebuilding what marketing at Close looked like from a team perspective, a KPI perspective and everything around that.

We had to balance what we could do now while cleaning up the house. We wanted to bring more people in and help them understand who Close was, but we did not want to invite people over to the party without cleaning the house first.

We made a priority list. Some things could be stuffed in a closet for now, and some things were like, “We really need to paint the kitchen.” From a content perspective, a lot of the obvious work was cleaning up the blog and resources. There was gated content that was a little clickbaity, where it looked like one thing and was really another. Those were easy decisions: archive, redirect, clean them up, or ungate and improve the content and design.

The harder part was absorbing the historical knowledge. In hindsight, I wish I had been able to put more of that archive into a Claude project or a digital twin. But I still think you need both. You need to absorb as much as you can into your own brain, and then use AI as a second version of you that has access to the broader archive.

Tom: AI can process the archive, but you argue marketers still need to absorb context themselves. Where do you draw that line?

Chelsea: I would still do it in an old-school way first. At Close, we had a treasure trove of Steli’s content. Years earlier he was on stages, at conferences around the world, on TEDx and on YouTube, really leading founder brand marketing before we had the language for it.

Even if some of that content was five to ten years old, a lot of it still rang true. Ten years ago, sellers needed a kick in the ass, and in 2026 sellers still need a kick in the ass. We used that source material to write a guide for ghostwriting like Steli, and I built a Steli GPT for sales advice, for writing like him and for talking like him. That helped us bring him back into the fold after he had stepped away for several years.

Right before I left Close, we connected the Close CRM to our MCP, to Snowflake and to Claude Code. I was able to extract product data and create content from it. In the past, that would have required a dedicated marketing engineer, and nobody was going to give me an engineer for that because they had more important things to do.

I am not anti-AI, but I do not want my brain to become as smooth as a bowling ball. We have been writing, communicating, connecting, persuading and telling stories since the beginning of time. We need to find the right way to keep the human in the loop without losing the friction that helps people develop judgement.

Tom: You describe brands as memory structures, not just messaging. What should a B2B team build every day to make that memory stick?

Chelsea: Think about any brand you are devoted to, probably a B2C brand. You can recall moments over time where you had connections, interactions or exposure to that brand, and those moments are like marbles gathering in a jar.

With Apple, it is the packaging, the minimalism, the phone being charged when you turn it on, the setup being easy, and the migration from phone to phone being easy. With Apple and Nike, it can also be the ads that make you tear up. Those moments add up over time and create a memory structure in your brain.

Repetition matters. The studies change, so maybe you need to hear something seven times, 17 times or 30 times before it sticks. The point is that brand is built through repeated associations.

At Chili Piper, we had the chili pepper logo, fire emojis, hot sauce, certain things we would say and certain ways we would say them. It was an ecosystem of brand associations. Those are red threads. A red thread could be a point of view, a tagline, a visual device or a set of ideas.

Every function in marketing can be producing content, programmes, lifecycle emails and campaigns, but none of it matters if there is no continuity. You also do not need to talk about your company or product in everything you do. The red thread is often implicit. That is the art, and it requires context and judgement.

The brands that win are the ones that empathise with their audience’s problems better than anyone else. We are wired for connection. No AI and no technology will change that biology.

Tom: What does a red thread look like when it moves beyond a tagline?

Chelsea: I use red thread as an umbrella term. It is not always a tagline or a message. With Notion, for example, the idea is that tools should adapt to you, not the other way around. You see that in the product, in the community templates and in the calming brand tone. It is about customising rather than configuring, so there is a feeling of ownership.

Asana talks a lot about clarity and helping teams do their best work. You see that through focus, alignment and visibility in the product features. Even some of Asana’s App Store update copy leans into that more empathetic, philosophical tone.

Vector is a good smaller-stage example. They are owning contact-level marketing, or close to that category name, and they are reinforcing the idea that you should target individual people, not just a random ABM list. Their ghost brand mascot works because buyers visit your website and then ghost you. It is a direct product and problem association, not a random mascot.

At Chili Piper, the orange circle on profile pictures and the pepper emoji in employee names helped people recognise who was from the company in the feed. That helped build a foundation for employee-generated content.

At Lavender, we had the colour, the people, the data points and the frameworks. The four people on the marketing team were posting on LinkedIn every day, and that was part of the marketing strategy. We were nearly 100% inbound as a product-led, self-serve tool, and we were the evangelists for the product and the content.

Tom: Brand work breaks down when marketing carries it alone. How did you get the rest of the company to carry the story?

Chelsea: It has to start at the top. It has to come from the founders and the leadership team. Marketing is everybody in the company, whether you are an engineer or the janitor. Everybody is part of marketing.

At Close, the culture was different, and not everyone was naturally interested in that kind of participation. So instead of trying to start small fires all year, we focused on big fires. We launched a content programme called the Blueprint Series, which was the relaunch of Steli in many ways.

That became a big moment for the whole company to rally around distribution. Close had never done anything like that before, and we were able to activate and enable people to share it with their networks. It was a real distribution success.

Chili Piper was different because participation was ingrained in the culture. Everybody wanted the pepper emoji, and we literally had a calendar invite on everybody’s calendar every week for something they were helping amplify. Every company is different. Sometimes you rally people around everything, and sometimes you rally them around a few big moments.

Tom: How do you make a point of view sharp enough to travel without turning it into rage bait?

Chelsea: It comes down to origin and intention. Anybody can go on LinkedIn and say something insane for clickbait. A real point of view has to be rooted in something: your experience, your data, your founder’s story, your product, or the problem your audience is trying to solve.

Dave Gerhardt has a line about life being too short to work for a CEO who does not understand marketing or brand. Peep Laja at Wynter says your opinion does not matter, your customer’s does. Those are points of view people can recognise because they are connected to a real belief and a real business.

At Close, one of Steli’s views was that the root of many sales problems is the seller. It is psychological, emotional and human. People disagreed about whether that should be the message, which is part of what makes it strong.

At Chili Piper, Nicholas had a point of view that buyers had changed. When they came to your website, they were already educated and often 80% of the way there, so you needed to get them to sales right away. That sounds obvious now, but at the time it was not how people thought about marketing websites.

Chris Walker is another strong example. Years ago, he was saying MQLs are a vanity metric and teams should stop optimising for them. People did not like that direct attack on how marketing teams were measured, but it helped change how many people think about measurement and KPIs.

Consistency is in the how, not just the what. A point of view should show up across marketing, sales enablement, what the sales team says, and what founders and leaders post. That does not mean repeating the same phrase every time. It means knowing what you stand for, what you stand against, why you exist, and using those constraints to make the work more creative.