For decades, the “B2B voice” has been the safe, default setting for enterprise marketing. You know the tone: polished, sterile, and devoid of any human friction. It’s the language of white papers, mission statements, and corporate update emails.
Mercifully, generative AI has turned that voice into a worthless commodity.
If your brand’s content strategy is to sound “professional and informative,” you are now competing against a free algorithm that can generate 10,000 words of perfectly structured corporate jargon in three seconds. To build a defensible moat in an attention economy, brands must stop acting like vendors and start acting more like entertainers.
As an executive working in branded audio for a large public media company, I watch Fortune 500 companies miss this memo every single week. They are so fiercely protective of their marketing goals that they forget the fundamental rule of media: you must create something that people actually want to engage with. Most often, that requires throwing out the script and leaning into authentic human vulnerability.
Refreshed leadership advice from CEO Stephanie Mehta
The “safety” trap
Take a scroll through the business charts, and you’ll find a textbook example: a recent podcast launched by a major financial institution. They clearly had a massive budget and a corporate mandate to establish “industry leadership.” But they also seem to be terrified of personality, with every script sanitized by a committee and every interview stripped of natural banter.
They wanted to sound undeniably professional but instead produced a flawless dose of audio Ambien. The show will sink without a trace because nobody wants to spend their morning commute being read a prospectus.
The scripting stranglehold
Meanwhile, enterprise tech brands often demand total control over a show’s narrative to ensure they hit specific KPIs. Instead of hiring great talent and letting them steer a dynamic, human conversation, their marketing teams may insist on rigid, word-for-word scripting.