When I walk to Lumen Field for a Sounders match, two very different ads always stick out to me. One is a giant pickup truck suspended above the crowd, a steel frame looming over thousands of fans. The other is Sound Transit’s gameday message warning people not to stand too close to the platform edge. Lime runs a similar campaign in The Urbanist: “Ride streets not sidewalks.”
Most of my day is on foot, but I also bike, ride buses and trains, and occasionally rent a car. That perspective makes the contrast hard to ignore. Car ads almost never waste time on safety warnings. They sell lifestyle and identity. But transit or micromobility providers often spend their limited ad space on reminders that sound more like disclaimers than vision.
The Incumbent vs. the Challenger
This same dynamic plays out in B2B marketing. Incumbents like Salesforce don’t waste ad dollars proving they are legitimate. They assume legitimacy, then sell vision: efficiency, growth, freedom. Challengers often get stuck spending precious airtime on reassurance. They fall back on messages like “we’re secure” or “we’re enterprise-ready” instead of telling the bigger story.
Okta offers a better model. Rather than leading only with compliance or safety, it told a story about speed and empowerment: identity made simple so teams can move faster. The reassurance was still there, but it was not the headline.
And that’s what effective challengers do. They bake legitimacy into the product and the proof points, while leading with aspiration.
The Wasted Space
Operational messaging is not bad on its own. It becomes a problem when it is divorced from vision. A platform sign telling people not to fall into the train gap is technically correct, but it reinforces danger instead of trust. The same is true for SaaS startups that flood their marketing with compliance or uptime claims but forget to tell buyers why they exist in the first place. It is wasted space.
The constraint of having to include a safety or compliance message is not a limitation so much as an opening for creativity. The message itself can carry the brand story if it is framed right. For example, instead of “don’t stand too close,” Sound Transit could have run “Yellow keeps you safe” alongside an image of riders chatting with coffee in hand, relaxed behind the yellow line that demarcates the platform. The safety rule is still clear, but it is also part of a bigger promise: reliability, ease, and community. Lime could do the same: “Streets are for riding. Sidewalks are for sharing.” A simple directive that doubles as a brand statement about respect and balance in the city.
The lesson applies directly to B2B. Compliance and security requirements will always demand space, but the way you phrase them can either reinforce fear or highlight trust. Okta, AWS, and Slack showed how the safety line itself can become shorthand for empowerment, speed, and belonging. That is the difference between a disclaimer and a brand story.
Doing Both
The truth? Many organizations will always have to include some of these messages. A safety budget might require it. A compliance officer might insist on it. But that does not mean the message has to sit apart from brand and strategy. The work is to integrate it. Safety reminders can sit inside the larger frame: you are safe here, you belong here, this is a system built for you. In B2B terms, the company can meet procurement’s security checkbox while still speaking to the executive’s vision. The safety note is part of the chorus, not the only lyric.
We see this with cloud software providers. AWS and Azure may meet compliance requirements by default, but their ads focus on speed, scale, and transformation. They reassure, but they do not waste the headline. Slack did this too: while it had to prove security to IT teams, its outward message was about changing how teams work together. Legitimacy was required, but aspiration won the market.
The Creative Opportunity
For founders and CMOs, the lesson is clear. Challenger brands do not win by apologizing for existing. They win by combining reassurance with aspiration. Legitimacy is the baseline, not the story. Buyers expect you to be safe, secure, compliant, reliable. That is table stakes. What earns attention is the bigger promise.
If you are a challenger, do not spend your budget repeating the disclaimer. Use that space to show who your buyers become when they choose you. Blend the necessary with the aspirational. Incumbents may own the status quo, but challengers have the chance to define the next story. That is not a disadvantage. It is an opening for creativity.