BRAND AWARENESS IS NOT YOUR GOAL
Since the Levitt study in the 1960s, Marketing Myopia has been on the syllabus of nearly every MBA program for a reason. It describes what happens when a company defines its business by what it makes rather than by the customer need it satisfies.
In tech, it’s practically an epidemic.
Companies lead with:
AI-powered platform
End-to-end solution
Grid optimization
Digital transformation
Accelerating the energy addition
These words and phrases might describe the company or product. They aren’t distinct or memorable. They do not describe your buyer’s problem.
That distinction matters because enterprise buyers don't buy based on your category label. They buy to resolve pain.
Pain = Change.
A utility leader may be trying to plan around volatile data-center load without detonating a capital plan.
A project developer may be trying to get through permitting, interconnection, financing, and supply-chain constraints before economics or policies change again.
A battery-materials buyer may be trying to secure supply without the traditional water, time, and capital exposure built into conventional extraction.
These are buying situations. Your category is not.
This is where market (category) and salience meet.
Market orientation means looking at the business through the customer’s eyes, not from inside the company. Salience means your brand is the one that leaps to mind when the problem shows up.
Your job as a Founder/CEO/Brand Leader is not to figure out: “How do we explain our platform better?”
Your job is: “What urgent, expensive, or career-defining problem should make the right buyer think of us?”
The answer is rarely buried in a feature list. It’s usually hiding inside the status quo:
The spreadsheet, consultant, and workaround that technically works but extends project timelines
The incumbent system that keeps the lights on but can’t support the next wave of demand
The infrastructure plan that works until load, cost, permitting, or reliability assumptions change
The capital decision that appears conservative but compounds exposure
That’s where brand positioning hits.
Make the cost of inaction visible.
Name the moment of pressure.
Show how a peer took a different approach.
Then, connect your brand position to that moment (pain).
A useful test for your website, investor deck, or campaign:
Complete this sentence without using the words platform, solution, AI, innovation, or energy addition.
“When [specific buyer] faces [specific operational, financial, regulatory, or infrastructure pressure], we are the company they should think of because [specific risk or cost we reduce].”
If the sentence is difficult to write, you don’t have a brand position and can’t create salience.
Because being known is nice.
Being remembered when the stakes are high is better. (brand recall, brand preference … sales)
R&D Agency helps energy, infrastructure, industrial, and climate-adjacent companies move from product descriptions to market relevance and from awareness to salience.
*Read the OG source on salience: “Marketing Myopia” by Theodore Levitt —> companies lose relevance when they define themselves by what they make instead of the need they satisfy.
