Hunter & Bard

Hunter & Bard B2B positioning and strategy for founders who need to open doors with US enterprise buyers. We’ve worked with Siemens, JLL, and 100+ growth-stage companies.

We fix what’s costing you deals: messaging, positioning, brand, and sales approach. Hunter & Bard is an inbound marketing and branding agency that works with fast growing, revenue generating SaaS companies on lead generation and thought leadership, and marketing automation. We work with tech companies on branding and design. Hunter & Bard is focused on building tech leaders through strong content and branding. Hunter & Bard uses the HubSpot platform for marketing automation, sumome for mailing list growth and several other platforms for marketing automation. We know how to use the right tool for the right marketing job. Our clients include: Showd.me, Fruit Street, Sarine, Axa Tech, CloudEndure, Allianz, Pitango VC, Yallo, Musketeer, and more. Contact Shira Abel at shira (at) hunterandbard (dot) com for more information on working with Hunter & Bard

09/01/2026

Technical communities reward fluency.

Knowing a command, tool, acronym, meme, or obscure reference can tell other people that you belong there. An ad that uses that shared language gives the right audience a small status reward just for understanding it.

That is why this works so well in tech.

It is also why people can fool themselves with it.

There is a huge difference between a reference your audience already uses and a reference your creative team thinks your audience should understand.

One builds affiliation.

The other is an inside joke nobody asked to join.

If the audience needs an explanation, you probably crossed the line.

Absolutely.
08/30/2026

Absolutely.

08/19/2026

Most B2B brands spend a lot of time trying to look credible.

Very few spend enough time trying to be easy to remember.

Those are not the same thing.

One reason distinctive brand assets work is that the brain prefers what it can process quickly. Researchers call this processing fluency. When something is easier to recognize or make sense of, we tend to feel more comfortable with it.

Familiarity compounds that effect.

Robert Zajonc’s research on the mere-exposure effect showed that repeated exposure can increase positive feelings toward something even when we are not learning anything new about it.

That matters because brand building is not just about communicating more information.

It is also about creating recognizable cues that become easier to retrieve over time.

Anthropomorphism adds another layer. Research by Pankaj Aggarwal and Ann McGill found that people evaluate products differently when they perceive human characteristics in them. Giving something a recognizable personality can make an abstract company easier to understand and relate to.

This is especially useful in B2B, where so much of what we sell is complicated, intangible, and difficult to visualize.

The point is not that every company needs a character.

The point is that buyers need something their brains can grab onto.

If every interaction with your brand requires people to process you from scratch, you are making memory do a lot more work than it needs to.

08/12/2026

Here’s the thing, I had absolute faith that Delta would do the right thing and I would simply get my money back. I don’t fly Delta often because SF is a United hub and Oakland is a Southwest hub, but the reputation of the company is so good, I wasn’t worried about getting my money back.

If a company with a reputation this good can have such a cluster for customer service, your company can too.

Pull 25 tickets your support system calls closed and read only the customer’s final message.

You will find four endings hiding under one status:

1. The customer confirmed the problem was solved.
2. An agent completed an internal action and assumed it was solved.
3. An agent promised an escalation, then closed the case.
4. The customer stopped replying.

Most dashboards call all four “closed.” The customer recognizes one.

Now trace ownership. How many people touched each case? Who still owned it after transfer three? Could that person issue the refund, restore access, or replace the product? If authority only appears after a regulator, a chargeback, or a public post gets involved, your escalation process is decorative. Very organized, though.

Split the weekly report:

- confirmed resolution
- agent-assumed closure
- reopened within 30 days
- transferred twice without resolution

Then read the cases in the last two categories. Those are the customers your dashboard has already forgotten.

Your customer does not experience the queue. She experiences your company.

08/12/2026

Give professional auditors the same financial statements and their conclusions about whether the accounting is legitimate shift depending on who they believe is paying them.

Don Moore, Lloyd Tanlu, and Max Bazerman ran that experiment. The auditors took no bribes and did not report feeling any pressure. Their judgment moved anyway. Moore and Bazerman call the effect moral seduction, and the argument they published in 2006 is that professionals rarely notice how compromised a conflict of interest has made them, because it arrives as a relationship rather than as an offer.

Which is the part the video doesn’t cover. That number cleared a board, a set of investors, an engineering team, and a bank running formal diligence, across two years. JPMorgan was not a skeptical reader. It wanted access to millions of college students at the start of their financial lives, and the user count was the entire reason to buy. The people with the most access to the truth had the most reason to like the number.

So the outside read has to come from someone with nothing riding on the answer. Not your board, not your lead investor, not the person who helped you build the deck.

Write your metric definitions down while they still cost nothing, then hand them to someone who was not in the room when you wrote them.

Free messaging audit at hunterandbard.com: the outside read on language you have stopped hearing.

08/11/2026

One of the best places to find marketing debt is in your sales calls.

Listen for what your team keeps having to correct:

“We do enterprise now.”

“We’ve had that feature for a year.”

“We don’t focus on that market anymore.”

“That pricing changed.”

“We’re much broader than that now.”

Then figure out where the buyer learned the old information.

An old PDF.

A partner page nobody updated.

A founder’s LinkedIn profile.

A review site.

An old pitch deck.

A webinar from two years ago.

A salesperson still using the previous positioning.

The buyer didn’t invent the outdated perception. Somewhere, your company taught it to them.

And once you change the positioning, consistency matters.

Šerić, Ozretić-Došen, and Škare found in 2020 that consistent marketing communications had a strong relationship with brand trust and loyalty.

That’s the part companies underestimate.

Changing the homepage is easy.

The harder job is finding every place the old story is still being repeated, then making the new story boringly consistent everywhere the buyer encounters you.

Listen for what sales keeps having to correct.

Every repeated correction tells you where the old positioning is still alive.

07/29/2026

The first ten paying customers can tell you more than 100 free signups, but only if you stop treating every failure to return as the same signal.

Nobody pays.

The problem may not matter enough. The promise may be weak, the audience may be wrong, or the price may be testing more commitment than the problem deserves.

They pay but never finish setting up.

The setup demands too much effort before the first useful result. You have an activation problem.

They reach the first result but never return.

The product may solve an occasional problem rather than a recurring one. It may also be easier to return to the old workaround than to build a new habit.

They use it, complain, and cancel.

Now you have something specific to investigate: what they expected, where the experience failed, and what they did instead.

Interview them after the behavior. Ask:

1. What did you expect to happen?
2. Where did you hesitate or stop?
3. What did you use instead?
4. What would have made a second month worth paying for?

“Did you like it?” invites courtesy.

“What did you do instead?” forces a concrete answer.

Your early price is a measuring instrument. It has to be high enough to create a real tradeoff and low enough to be fair for an unfinished product. Tell people what they are buying, refund the misses, and keep track of behavior before opinions.

Free users can be useful once they use the product. That condition is where most free beta tests collapse.

You can survive ten annoyed early customers. Building for six months from compliments is the expensive option.

07/28/2026

A security incident is not automatically a PR disaster. A defensive first response can turn it into one.

Lovable fixed its technical issue within two hours. The incident affected public projects only. Private projects and Lovable Cloud were never affected.

That matters.

But when the issue became public, Lovable led by saying it had not suffered a data breach. It focused on public code access being intentional and its documentation being unclear.

Meanwhile, security researchers had been reporting the problem through HackerOne for almost two months. Those reports were closed because Lovable’s instructions to its outside triage team were outdated.

That is where the PR problem started.

When something goes wrong:

1. Explain what happened in plain English. Do not begin with a legal argument about what the incident should be called.

2. Define the scope. Who was affected? Who wasn’t? What information could be accessed?

3. Say what has already been contained and what affected users need to do.

4. Own the entire process. A vendor operating on your instructions is an extension of your company.

5. Give people a time for the next update, even if the update is that the investigation is continuing.

6. Publish the postmortem after the immediate response. Explain the technical cause, the process failure, and what will prevent it from happening again.

Lovable eventually did much of this. It also admitted that its first response was dismissive.

But a good postmortem doesn’t erase your first instinct under pressure.

It begins the work of repairing the damage that instinct caused.

I was at a Pavilion event last week and every single person building with AI said they're working more hours.I think it'...
07/27/2026

I was at a Pavilion event last week and every single person building with AI said they're working more hours.

I think it's the near-miss. A prompt is a variable reward: most come back almost right, occasionally one is perfect, and you can't predict which. That's the exact schedule that makes slot machines work.

I wrote about what the research says, and about the fact that I now bring my laptop to bed. https://hunterandbard.substack.com/p/building-with-ai-is-addictive-its?

07/21/2026

In the 1950s, the industrial designer Raymond Loewy noticed people are pulled two directions at once. He called it neophilia, a love of new things, and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. His work sat exactly where those forces meet: advanced enough to feel fresh, familiar enough to feel safe. He named the rule MAYA, Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. It is why the Coca-Cola bottle and the Shell logo still look right decades on.

Your website lives on that same seam. The layout is where you stay acceptable. The message, the visual identity, and the argument only you can make are where you get to be most advanced. Push novelty into the structure instead and you cross Loewy’s line, because your buyer feels the friction as risk.

You already watch founders get the acceptable half right without naming it. Every pitch that lands as a fresh spin on a known winner is MAYA at work. Airbnb sold itself as eBay for homes. Uber sold itself as Airbnb for cars. New idea, familiar handle. Give your website the same courtesy.

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