Larry Weber urges big B2B companies to define what business they are in

Weber Shandwick founder Larry Weber told delegates at a B2B marketing festival in Miami on Tuesday that many large companies still cannot clearly answer the question of what business they are in.

Some of the big companies at the event “don’t really have a clear positioning,” he said, without naming them. Brands need to grasp not only what they sell but where their competitive advantage lies and what difference they make, he argued.

He illustrated the point with four repositioning projects from his career.

John Deere and General Motors

At John Deere, the conversation began over a drink in Washington, DC with then-chief executive Sam Allen. Asked about his legacy, Allen spoke about the task of feeding a further 2 billion people, yet his first answer on what business the company was in was tractors and equipment.

Weber took a wider view. “You’re in the business of innovation. You’re in the business of applying technology and you’re in the business of helping farmers,” he recalled telling the company. The positioning centred on helping farmers improve yields sustainably, rather than just selling machines.

“Every company is a technology company. Even if you make potato chips, you’re a technology company,” he said. It took more than a decade to embed the idea at John Deere, and for Weber the proof was that executives in both Germany and Southern California could describe the positioning in the same terms.

General Motors, he said, showed what happens when a company does not follow through. GM’s chief executive at the time saw it as a transportation business, while Weber argued it also operated in technology, knowledge and entertainment because of how much time customers spend in its vehicles.

When GM showed him OnStar, its in-car system, Weber saw potential for services far beyond roadside assistance, but he said the company wanted to present it mainly as a safety tool.

“When General Motors left that positioning, who took over the inside of a car?” Weber asked. “How about the technology world?” Pointing to how drivers prefer third-party navigation services, he added: “Isn’t that amazing that you would give that territory away?”

SAP and Arm

SAP’s problem was that it wanted to be the next Microsoft or Oracle. Weber recalled challenging co-founder Hasso Plattner on a call: “The only problem with that is they’ve already done what you want to be. So what are you going to do to be different?”

The answer came from SAP’s ability to help businesses around the world run their finance, HR and other operations. While competitors built platforms, Weber said, SAP could own the work those platforms made possible. “What you had was somebody making nouns and all of a sudden you had a software company that wanted to make a verb.”

At Cambridge chip designer Arm, the point of difference was its conviction that computing would go mobile, along with its low-power technology work. According to Weber, this gave Arm a way to take on Intel, whose positioning had stayed tied to the laptop. He recalled the competitive message as: “We’re going to remind you every day that you miss the mobile era and you miss the low power era.”

Storytelling in the AI era

Drawing on his background studying literature, Weber said businesses should think like playwrights, understanding the plot, the characters and what motivates them before attempting to tell the story.

“If a company doesn’t have a plot, they’re going to be lost,” he said. “I’m always telling company CEOs, you have to have a plot.” The CEO plays a leading role, he added, though companies also need to know their other stakeholders and tell a consistent story over time. “Every business has more than six or seven audiences.”

Weber said AI would not remove that need, predicting that agencies and marketing teams would become “more important, not less important” once the noise around the technology dies down. He also argued that earned media matters in the age of large language models: “What are they scraping? They’re scraping earned media.”

He questioned what widespread advertising inside AI products could mean for the quality and ethics of the information people get. But he said he was optimistic that AI could make data and creativity more powerful, and that its development would be “human-driven, not machine-driven.”

Responding to a question from Daniel Volker of Arup, Weber described a move from an “age of attention” to an “age of attachment”. Social media had been about winning attention, he said, while smartphones are now so woven into daily life that people barely register them as technology. He expects AI to become embedded in the same way.

His advice to marketers was to stick to the fundamentals as the technology changes: “Positioning is going to only increase in importance. Differentiation is going to increase in importance.”