High-Value Brand Assets Most B2B Companies Haven't Tapped Yet (with Louis Grenier, Founder of Stand The F*ck Out)

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:00)
Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the Agents Web, built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform in AI search, no developer needed. Your website isn't just your home page anymore, it's actually the first thing an AI agent is gonna read about your company, and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer, before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists. Which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI Search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams use to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI Search, govern your content and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at webflow.com/four/exitfive.
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**Louis Grenier** (1:57)
True.

**Dave Gerhardt** (1:57)
Markup AI helps you catch that first, so you're always putting your best stuff out there. Go and check it out at markup.ai, that's markup.ai.
You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.
My guest on this episode is Louis Grenier. Louis is the founder of STFO, a B2B positioning and GTM consultancy, aka Stand the Fuck Out, which is book he wrote, which is great. He's also one of the keynote speakers at Drive 2026, our big annual event for Exit Five, coming in this September. And he just ran a study scoring 100 B2B companies on how distinctive their brands actually are. And the results were kind of surprising. Most of them blend together completely. So we get into why that happens and what actually makes a brand memorable. And it's not the stuff that we usually talk about on this podcast, actually. We're talking about design, logos, sound, mascots, the physical identity of a brand. Louis makes the case that in a world where every product looks the same and AI has made differentiation nearly impossible, this might be the last real lever left to pull. Let's get into it. This is an awesome conversation, all about brand and B2B with Louis. All right, we're back on the podcast. I'm excited to have you, Mr. Louis, because behind the scenes, we just spent about 15 minutes. You are one of the big stage, big name keynote speakers at Drive, September 8th through 10th, 2026 in Vermont. We're shipping you over via train, via boat. We're getting you over to the United States, which is a big deal. You're going to be talking.
You just told me what you're going to speak about and told me that I'm not allowed to tell anybody about it, which makes it even better. I'm excited to have you. We just published your research recently in our newsletter. The goal for having you on the pod today was to talk about this, because you wrote this interesting angle. You're all about standing out. You put out this state of B2B brand distinctiveness, which, let's just start there. What the hell does that mean? And why did you go and do this?

**Louis Grenier** (4:06)
Bonjour, bonjour.
It was a pleasure to talk to you. I remember when I met you, you had hair. So that was a long time ago.

**Dave Gerhardt** (4:13)
Yeah, fuck you. That's it.

**Louis Grenier** (4:17)
I don't help companies stand out. I help companies stand the out.