Beyond ‘Marketing Swagger’: How Vev Cracked the Code on Enterprise Communication

When you’re building something truly innovative, the temptation is to create equally innovative marketing language. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Vev founder Tine Karlsen revealed how rejecting this instinct led to their breakthrough in enterprise communication.

The Communication Challenge

The core challenge was explaining a new type of product to sophisticated buyers. “Our biggest challenge at the moment is that Vev is so new that we have to sort of compare Vev to very well known platforms for someone to understand what Vev is,” Tine explains.

This challenge was amplified by the complexity of their solution. “We cater to teams, so we have to get through to both the designer, the developer, and other stakeholders on the team. And that makes the task incredibly complex.”

The Failed Marketing Experiments

Initially, Vev tried conventional enterprise marketing approaches. “We have tried a lot of nice ways to communicate what Vev does, which ends up as more concepts, more than just saying directly what we do,” Tine shares. They discovered that elaborate marketing concepts often obscured rather than clarified their value proposition.

The Breakthrough Moment

The turning point came from an unexpected realization. “What led me to that aha moment is actually sort of less bullshit and less marketing swagger when it comes to our communication,” Tine reveals. “I’m now getting closer more and more to trusting that our user group understand what we’re saying.”

This shift towards simpler, more direct communication proved especially powerful in enterprise sales situations. “We typically see that whenever we get the luxury of demoing our platform, that’s when typical clients understand the value of the platform.”

Let Results Speak

Instead of complex messaging, they began leading with concrete results. For example, with their first major client, Shipstead, they could simply state that they “reduced the time to market for these types of sites with over 90% from three weeks down to now being 30 minutes.”

This focus on tangible outcomes rather than conceptual benefits helped bridge the gap between their innovative solution and traditional enterprise buying processes.

The Multi-Stakeholder Solution

Rather than trying to create one message that worked for everyone, they developed clear, role-specific value propositions. For designers, they focused on design control. For developers, they emphasized extensibility: “anything that you can code, you can build within Vev.” For marketers, they highlighted the ability to make rapid content updates without compromising design integrity.

The Future Focus

This commitment to clear communication continues to shape their vision. “When it comes to the product, which I of course love talking about, we want Vev to be the front end builder that you naturally think of no matter what CMS you have chosen,” Tine explains.

For founders selling innovative solutions to enterprises, Vev’s experience offers a valuable lesson: sometimes the best way to communicate something new is to strip away the marketing complexity and trust in your audience’s ability to understand direct, straightforward value propositions. The key isn’t to make your solution sound more sophisticated – it’s to make its value more obvious.