I remember when everyone was designing homepages that looked like Airbnb: a background photo in the hero, centered text, a high-contrast CTA button.
Then came the Stripe era. We had a design agency client that kept getting leads asking, “Can you make our website look like Stripe?”
It was never really about the website. In marketing, everybody loves formulas that work. There’s always someone (a successful brand) who figures it out first. And then everyone starts copying it until eventually, we all end up with the same idea of what a company in the category is supposed to look like and say.
But every once in a while, somebody decides it would rather be memorable than safe.
This newsletter is about one such company.
In today's newsletter:
I came across this story while building a strategy for one of my clients in the CMS industry.
AI pushed the CMS market to evolve, particularly the enterprise segment. A category that has gone from CMS → DXP → composable DXP → headless is now adding another acronym to the mix: AXP.
All the major enterprise CMS vendors are telling the same story: Agentic AI.
Their positioning is built on the same claims: AI-powered content operations. AI workflows. Speed and scale. Automate the busywork. Create more content. Personalize everything. Build what's next. Accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.
It makes sense. AI is changing these platforms, so everyone wants to talk about it. But if every CMS is agentic, being agentic is not a differentiation.
So when I saw how Optimizely rebranded, I was shocked.
Optimizely used to look like this:
They wanted enterprises to start accelerating. Basically, like everyone else.
Now they look like this:
The visual identity is… well, not what you'd expect from an enterprise CMS: fish, parrots, flaming coffee cups, a man driving a hamster. Weird.
You remember it.
But what's even crazier, Optimizely new brand has this big idea: “Marketers should be free to grow.”
“AI should make the mundane elements of marketing easier so brands can focus on the things that AI could never replace: human curiosity, creativity, and compassion.” – Alex Atzberger, Optimizely's CEO
“You work in marketing – fun, right? Not quite. In the constant pursuit of efficiency, what was once a creative discipline has become disconnected and dull.” – Ragged Edge, the brand agency Optimizely hired.
Oh my god.
Creativity is still human. AI can't replace it. That's what I want to hear from a technology company! Not another promise about speed, scale, and efficiency.
Yes. And no.
I mean, of course, it's marketing. And that's the point.
I am their target audience. I work in positioning and content and literally spend my days thinking about differentiation. I spent this Thursday afternoon reading about Optimizely rebrand, trying to understand what they were doing, because that's the thing about memorable brands: they make you feel something about the company behind it.
A lot of B2B companies don't get it. They are trying hard to look like everything else.
Optimizely's own creative team says some of the early creative concepts made people nervous.
Optimizely wanted their team to feel uncomfortable. One of their internal principles was: “Bravery will not be optional.”
That's a pretty damn good rule for a rebrand.
Every B2B platform will have AI agents and promise more speed, personalization, orchestration, and scale.
As the features and capabilities become more similar, the brand becomes more important.
When everyone can build the same features, people need another reason to remember you. And maybe that's the opportunity AI creates for brands. It's not to make everything more efficient but to remove enough of the mundane work that humans can spend more time making interesting things.
Here's the idea I want you to take away from Optimizely: If you're working in a category where everybody looks the same, be creative. It matters.
Yesterday, when everyone went to bed except my baby and me, the last thing I wanted to see was a message from a client:
“We ran your content through an AI detection tool. It said it was 100% AI-generated.”
I’m sorry, WHAT? To say I got mad would be an understatement.
I know exactly how we create content, how much research goes into it. I know how many rounds of thinking, writing, rewriting, fact-checking, and arguing go into every piece.
And now some random AI detector gets to look at the final article for 30 seconds and announce that it’s “100% AI-generated”?
Bitch, I was there.
Now I’m working on a creative way to deal with this objection because apparently, this is a conversation we need to have.
I’ll share what we come up with.
Kate
P.S. If we aren't connected already, follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you like this newsletter, please refer your friends.
P.P.S. Need a hand with differentiation? Reposition with Zmist & Copy.
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