Beige is not
a brand

Someone finally scored it. 100 brands, eight assets, one rubric. 78 came back generic. Two were invisible. And not a single one of them has a sound you would recognise. The bar is on the floor. Almost nobody is stepping over it.

Every brand thinks it is the interesting one. The audit says otherwise.

In June, Louis Grenier published The State of B2B Brand Distinctiveness 2026. He took 100 B2B software and AI companies and scored each one against eight distinctive brand assets. Colour. Logo. Visual device. Typography. Taglines. Human identity. Product UI motif. Sound. Zero to three per asset, twenty four available. The rubric is built on Jenni Romaniuk's work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, which is about as close to settled science as branding gets.

Then he published the scores. It is not a pretty document.

01The room is full of chameleons

Out of 100 companies, exactly one landed in the ownable band. One. Wiz, on 19 out of 24. Behind it, 19 companies were merely recognisable inside their own category. 78 scored generic. Two were invisible.

So eighty of a hundred brands are, in his words, beige. Take the name off the homepage and their own buyers could not pick them out of a line-up. These are not tiny startups working out of a bedroom. They are companies with funding, boards, brand teams, agency retainers and go-to-market budgets that would make your eyes water.

The highest score anyone managed, in the entire study, was 19 out of 24. Nobody is running away with this.

02Nobody has a sound

Here is the number that should keep you up.

Ninety one of the hundred scored zero on sound. Not weak. Zero. Eight scored a one, meaning present but generic, which is the atmospheric orchestral wash every explainer video in the world reaches for. Nobody scored a two. Nobody scored a three. The average across a hundred companies who collectively spend billions going to market is 0.08 out of 3.

An entire asset class, sitting empty.

And do not tell us there is nowhere to put it. Your podcast intro. The ad you buy inside someone else's podcast. The walk-on music at your conference. The booth. The webinar open. The founder's LinkedIn video. The end frame of every social edit you have ever posted. You are already making noise in a dozen places. It is just anonymous noise.

Michelin put a man made of tyres on a poster in 1898 and has barely touched him since. You have been refreshing your brand every eighteen months and still nobody could hum you.

03Everyone is fighting over the same square inch

Colour scored highest across the cohort, 2.12 out of 3, with 86 percent of companies hitting 2 or better. That sounds like good news. It is not. When every company in your category nails colour, the colours cancel out. A category of distinctive blues is still a category of blues.

Now look at the bottom of the table. Human identity, meaning a character, a mascot, a recurring face, averaged 0.73. Only 14 percent managed a 2. Sound, as we said, 0.08. These are the assets Romaniuk's research keeps finding are the fastest to build recognition, and they are the ones nobody is building.

The assets brands pour the most money into are the ones that work the least, precisely because everyone pours into them. The ones almost nobody touches are the ones that would actually get you remembered.

And no, the new lot are not better. The 41 companies founded in the AI era averaged 10.88. The 59 that predate it averaged 10.58. A dead heat. Speed and funding did not buy anyone a personality.

04What we'd make instead

Get your positioning straight first. A distinctive asset bolted onto vague positioning does not save you. It just makes you famously vague. The asset makes you retrievable. The positioning makes you worth retrieving. In that order.

Then go and take the empty goal. Sound and character are wide open in almost every category on earth. Build a sonic signature and use it everywhere for five years. Build a face, a character, a recurring human. Something a competitor cannot comfortably copy because it would look ridiculous on them.

Then hold it. Everywhere. Site, product, social, sales deck, event, the lot. Repeat it until you are bored of it, then keep going, because the moment it feels boring from the inside is roughly the moment it starts working on the outside. Wiz did not win on one great image. They built the same recognisable world in every place a buyer might bump into them.

The lesson underneath all of it is simple. Polished is not the same as distinctive. Polished gets you clean, professional and completely forgettable. Most brands pick polished because it is the safe choice, and then wonder why nobody remembers them. Blending in is not something that happens to you. It is something you chose.