Safe is Invisible

Welcome to this week’s edition of Cyber Motion, tailored for cybersecurity business leaders. In this newsletter, you’ll find practical strategies, cutting-edge insights, and fresh thinking designed to help your security-focused brand break through a crowded market. My goal is to equip you with the tools and ideas needed to thrive amid shifting threats, buyer skepticism, and evolving industry standards.

– Tobias

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Three speakers at CyberMarketingCon said the same thing in different ways last week: brand credibility and trust are the only sustainable competitive advantages left in cybersecurity.

That's not marketing fluff. That's reality in a market where feature parity arrives in 18 months and your differentiation gets copied before your Series B closes.

While I think trust and credibility are important (indeed I think they are table stakes) there’s another key theme I find much more interesting.

There was a second theme that kept surfacing which boils down to, your brand needs to be "the show, not the commercial."

Challenger brands nodded along to the first point. They love the idea that established players have lost their way; that acquisitions and shareholder demands have watered down what made those companies credible in the first place. That narrative is comfortable. It positions the underdog as the virtuous alternative.

But "becoming the show"? That sounds expensive. Time-consuming. Like something you do after product-market fit, after the Series C, after you have a brand team and an agency on retainer.

Here's the truth they're missing: you don't need a Hollywood budget to be memorable. You need a point of view.

When I ran a marketing agency years ago, local clients would occasionally ask to run movie theater ads as cheaply as possible. My question was always the same: Who is going to remember your commercial after sitting through a $400 million entertainment thrill-ride?

That's the exact problem cybersecurity startups face today. You're competing for attention against companies with nine-figure marketing budgets, booths the size of small buildings, and PR machines that can dominate a news cycle.

Try to look like them and you become a knockoff. A pale imitation. Forgettable.

But you aren’t only competing for attention with your competitors. You are also competing for attention with constant notifications and dopamine scrolling. It’s a noisy world and everyone is trying to grab the lime light.

The winning move is to look and sound different. Not for the sake of being different. Different because you have something distinct to say and you're willing to say it loudly.

Creating a "layered world that people want to interact with" doesn't happen overnight. But it can start with one layer:

Pick one. Build it. Iterate. Add another layer when you're ready.

In markets where feature differentiation is hard (and cybersecurity is absolutely one of those markets) brand differentiation is everything. It's not a luxury for later. It's the strategy that separates the companies people remember from the ones that disappear.

If you're leading marketing at a cybersecurity startup or challenger brand, ask yourself:

Safe is boring. Boring is invisible. And invisible brands don't win.

The behemoths have scale, legacy, and inertia. You have speed, conviction, and the ability to take risks they can't afford to take.

Don't waste that advantage trying to be a cheaper version of them.

Stay sharp,
Tobias