The Story Gap: Why Smart Companies Still Sound Generic

If you lined up the websites of ten smart B2B companies in your category, there’s a good chance you’d struggle to tell them apart.

That’s not because these companies lack experience, insight, or ambition. Most have deeply knowledgeable teams, strong products, and years of hard-earned perspective. But when it comes time to put their story into the world, it comes out flattened — polished, professional, and painfully familiar.

This is the story gap.

The story gap is the space between what your company actually knows and what the market hears. Internally, your teams have sharp insights and real conviction about what works (and what doesn’t). Externally, that nuance gets sanded down into category clichés and safe B2B brand messaging that sounds like everyone else.

And the problem is getting worse. As more teams turn to AI to produce content at scale, the cost of unclear storytelling is higher than ever. Without a distinct point of view, AI only helps you blend in faster.

The good news? Closing the story gap doesn’t require inventing a new narrative. It requires learning how to find, articulate, and operationalize the stories you already have — the ones only your company can tell. 

What Is the Story Gap?

The story gap is the disconnect between what your company knows and what your audience actually hears. It’s pervasive across all industries but we see it acutely in B2B brand storytelling.

Inside your organization, there’s no shortage of insight. Sales teams know why deals stall. Product teams understand the tradeoffs competitors won’t admit. Leaders have strong opinions about where the industry is headed and where it’s wrong. This is the raw material for powerful storytelling.

But by the time that knowledge makes it into your marketing, it’s often diluted.

The story gap shows up when complex thinking is reduced to tidy value propositions, and teams prioritize sounding “clear” or “on brand” over sounding true. Instead of deliberately uncovering their most distinctive ideas, teams default to what’s familiar:

• Category language that “sounds right”
• Positioning statements built by consensus
• Thought leadership that informs but avoids strong points of view

Over time, this creates a strange paradox. The smarter and more experienced the company, the more generic it can sound, because its best insights are trapped in internal conversations.

How to Tell If You Have a Story Gap

If any of these feel familiar, the gap is likely already there:

• Your homepage could belong to one of your competitors with minimal edits
• Your thought leadership educates, but doesn’t challenge
• Differentiation shows up in sales calls — not in marketing
• Customers say, “Now I get it,” only after a demo or one-on-one conversation

None of this means your story is weak. It means it hasn’t been fully shaped or shared in a way the market can recognize.

And until that happens, even well-executed content will struggle to stand out.

Why Smart Companies Still Sound the Same

You’d think that smart teams, deep expertise, and years of experience would make a company sound unique. Often, they don’t. In fact, the more ideas, opinions, and stakeholders a company has, the easier it becomes to lose its story.

Here’s why even the sharpest B2B storytelling teams sound like everyone else.

1. Teams default to “safe” language

When you write for internal alignment instead of external distinction, you trim out the very edges that make your story unique. Words like innovative, trusted, and scalable solution feel “safe,” yet they flood the market. That sameness makes buyers tune out before you even make your case.

2. B2B buyers want stories — but they rarely get them

More B2B marketers are prioritizing narrative: telling more engaging stories is the top content priority for 45% of brands in 2025. Yet many companies still apply logic‑first messaging without emotional glue — and that puts them at a disadvantage.

3. Your best ideas never reach the audience

Some of the most compelling insights are outside marketing:

• Sales teams hear the real objections buyers won’t put in an RFP
• Product teams debate tradeoffs that competitors never admit
• Leadership argues about where the category is headed

If you don’t dig these insights out and give them shape, your content defaults to the same basic explanations everyone else uses.

4. Buyers research more before they talk to you

Modern B2B buyers consume a lot of content before ever contacting sales. About 60% of buyers make the final purchase decision based on digital content alone — and they may review multiple pieces before they reach out. If your content isn’t memorable or distinctive, it won’t influence that decision — no matter how smart your team is.

The Role of AI in the Story Gap (For Better and Worse)

AI didn’t create the story gap, but it’s definitely changing the stakes.

By 2026, most B2B marketing teams will use generative AI in content workflows. Gartner has already projected that AI will play a central role in outbound marketing and content production at scale. In practice, that means more content, produced faster, by more teams.

And that’s where the risk shows up.

How AI Makes the Story Gap Worse

AI works by learning from what already exists. In B2B, that means blogs, competitor websites, white papers, and thought leadership that already sound… the same.

So when teams feed AI vague prompts or generic positioning, AI does exactly what it’s designed to do: It averages. It generalizes. It reinforces sameness.

Instead of surfacing what makes you different, AI can:

• Repeat category clichés at scale
• Flatten nuanced thinking into polished but empty language
• Produce “fine” content that never challenges, surprises, or sticks

The danger isn’t bad content. It’s convincingly generic content — produced faster than ever before.

In 2026, buyers will view more AI-assisted content than purely human-created content. If your story isn’t clear before you involve AI, you won’t just blend in — you’ll disappear into the noise.

How AI Can Help Close the Story Gap

Here’s the flip side: AI doesn’t create strategy—but it amplifies it.

When teams ground AI in real insight, strong points of view, and clearly defined story territory, AI becomes a powerful multiplier. It helps you scale what already makes you distinctive instead of smoothing it out.

Used well, AI can:

• Extend strong narratives across channels consistently
• Help teams operationalize the story faster
• Support content velocity without sacrificing clarity

But AI can only work with what you give it. If your story lacks conviction, AI won’t invent one. If your perspective isn’t clear, AI won’t find it for you.

That’s the real role AI plays in the story gap: it exposes weak brand storytelling faster—and rewards teams who do the hard work upfront.

The Real Question Isn’t “Should We Use AI?”

In 2026, that question will be irrelevant. Everyone will.

The real question is whether you’ve done the work to define:

• What you believe that others don’t
• What you know that competitors can’t claim
• What stories you want AI to help you scale

Without that foundation, AI accelerates sameness. With it, AI helps you show up sharper, clearer, and more consistently than ever.

And that’s why closing the story gap matters more now in an AI-powered world.

How Column Five’s Story Scan Finds Your Unique Stories

Most brands don’t need better storytelling. They need a better way to uncover what’s already there.

The Story Scan Methodology exists to surface those ideas, pressure-test them, and turn them into a foundation teams can actually use.

What the Story Scan Is (and Isn’t)

Let’s be clear about what this work is not.

It’s not a messaging exercise where everyone wordsmiths a value proposition until it sounds pleasant and forgettable. And it’s not a feel-good brand workshop built around platitudes no one will challenge later.

The Story Scan is a diagnostic. We look at how ideas move through your organization today — where they sharpen, where they flatten, and where they disappear altogether. From there, we build a strategic foundation that gives teams shared language, clear direction, and room to say something real.

Story Scan Pillar #1 — Expertise

Every company claims expertise, but few know how to articulate expertise effectively.

We start by talking to the people closest to the work: sales, marketing, product, and customer-facing teams. These conversations surface the nuances that never make it into decks — the tradeoffs and lived realities that shape how your business actually operates.

From there, we identify internal experts with genuine points of view. Not just subject-matter knowledge, but perspective. The kind that comes from seeing the same problem up close, over and over again.

Some of the most valuable insights don’t live within a single team. They show up in the overlaps and gaps between them. Mapping those tensions often reveals the stories competitors can’t tell.

Story Scan Pillar #2 — Vision

Expertise explains what you know. Vision explains what you believe.

This pillar examines competitive positioning by identifying the orthodoxy—assumptions your category rarely questions.. What everyone says. What no one pushes back on.

Through structured Vision Quest workshops, we help teams articulate where they genuinely disagree with the status quo. Then we test those ideas. Not all of them hold up, and that’s the point.

We rank perspectives from lukewarm to hot to identify the ideas worth standing behind. The goal isn’t to be contrarian. It’s to be clear about what you believe and why it matters.

Story Scan Pillar #3 — Proprietary Data

Data alone doesn’t differentiate you. Interpretation does.

We audit product data, customer insights, and custom research to find patterns that say something meaningful about your market. Then we turn those insights into narratives people can actually remember.

These insights are shaped into ownable campaigns and repeatable data storytelling that reinforce your perspective over time, helping your brand build credibility without relying on empty claims.

Taken together, the Story Scan doesn’t give you a single story to tell. It gives you a story engine — one that helps teams create content that stays consistent, distinctive, and grounded in truth as you scale.

Case Study — See how HackerOne closed their story gap

Closing the Gap Starts With Looking Deeper

The story gap isn’t a creativity problem. It’s a visibility problem. Your most valuable ideas exist, but they don’t always reach the market.

Closing that gap means looking deeper into how your teams think, what they know, and what they believe about the space, and turning those insights into a story system your marketing can scale.

A Story Scan helps you uncover the stories only your company can tell, and build a foundation your teams can use across campaigns and channels.

If your marketing sounds fine but feels interchangeable, it’s time to close the gap. Talk to Column Five about running a Story Scan and give your teams a story they can build on.

FAQs

Can AI help brands differentiate their storytelling?

AI amplifies differentiation when you have a clear story system in place. AI can scale content and maintain consistency, but it can’t invent a unique point of view. Without defined story pillars and narrative guardrails, AI tends to amplify sameness instead of differentiation.

How is Story Scan different from messaging frameworks?

Messaging frameworks focus on how you say things. Story Scan focuses on what you say — the unique experti`12se, vision, and data your company actually owns.

Who should be involved in identifying a company’s story?

Cross-functional storytelling ensures your narrative is both accurate and ownable. Sales, marketing, product, and customer-facing teams all hold pieces of the narrative. Leadership helps define vision. Including these voices ensures your story is both accurate and ownable—and that it resonates across your organization and your market.