#28 - Jess Cook

This week on Behind Good Content, I sat down with Jess Cook, VP of Marketing at Vector.

Jess spent much of her career in consumer marketing, working in spaces where differentiation has very little to do with features (think cereal and toilet paper). 

That background matters right now, as B2B brands find themselves in increasingly crowded markets where many tools look and function the same.

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One thing Jess made clear early in our conversation is that consumer marketers stopped pretending products were meaningfully different a long time ago.

“Everything we’re selling is kind of at parity with one another.”

Rather than trying to explain why a product is marginally better, consumer brands focus on being remembered.

To show what that looks like in practice, Jess shared a story from her time working on Rice Krispies.

Rice Krispies is, at its core, just puffed rice. There’s not much to tackle from a product standpoint. 

But it’s also one of the first solid foods many toddlers eat, which gives it a meaningful place in a family’s life.

When the team set out to build a campaign, they didn’t start with the product. They started by asking what moms remembered about Rice Krispies in their family’s story. 

The answer consistently pointed back to the toddler years; early moments of laughs and chaos and delight on their little ones’ faces.

Instead of trying to manufacture nostalgia, Jess and her team went looking for it where it already existed. They found early mom bloggers who had posted photos of their kids trying Rice Krispies for the first time, licensed those real images (paying scholarship money in exchange), and built the campaign around them.

The product itself didn’t become something more interesting overnight, but the brand became more memorable by anchoring to a moment people already cared about.

The instinct to design for memory rather than differentiation is something consumer marketing has been practicing for decades. 

What B2B brands can learn from consumer marketing

Jess now leads marketing at Vector, and when she moved into B2B, she was struck by how familiar the challenge felt.

Her starting assumption, shaped by years in consumer marketing, was simple: you can’t lead with a storm of benefits and features. There has to be something someone can hold on to.

In crowded markets, memorability determines whether a brand even enters the conversation. Before evaluation or persuasion happens, a buyer has to remember you.

Here are a few ways that Jess brought her consumer marketing mindset to Vector:

1. Build a recognizable brand identity

One of the reasons Jess was excited to join Vector was that the company already had strong signals in place: a mascot, vibrant colors, and a clearly stated problem.

“It felt like a B2C brand, but it happened to be a B2B product.”

Consumer brands rely on these cues because they make recognition effortless. The same principle applies in B2B. When a brand is visually distinct and emotionally legible, people don’t have to work to remember it.

2. Make the people behind the brand visible

Jess believes B2B has an advantage many consumer brands don’t: buyers want to know the humans building the product.

At Vector, about six people post regularly, including founders, marketing, sales, and demand gen. Jess supports this with systems: interviewing founders, turning those conversations into draft posts, and trying to remove obstacles before they derail posting.

That consistency builds familiarity with the people behind the product — and that familiarity builds both memorability and trust.

3. Create content that attracts without selling

Vector’s podcast, This Meeting Could Have Been a Podcast, is intentionally not about the product.

Jess describes it as an awareness magnet — something genuinely useful for marketers that helps people understand who Vector is over time. Each episode focuses on a single topic and leans into honest conversations that many marketers wish they could have in their own companies.

It works because it’s funny, real, and grounded in shared frustrations, delivered in a format people can easily consume and enjoy. 

(If you haven’t checked it out, I couldn’t recommend it more. Episodes here.)

4. Turn shared pain points into memorable ideas

Jess also shared a story of one of Vector’s strongest campaigns, a video series called The Next Best Way.

The premise is straightforward: marketers will go to extreme lengths to get ads in front of the right buyers. The team dramatized that reality by showing a marketer popping out of a trash can or appearing in a bathtub spinning a sign.

The joke, of course, being that you could do all that… or you could use Vector.

Jess described it as one of the best-performing organic pieces of content she’s ever posted for the company.

“It’s like a living meme.”

Consumer marketing has long understood the power of getting in on an inside joke, and Jess found a way to bring it to her B2B context. 

5. Don’t skip out on likeability

One of the points Jess was most emphatic about is that likeability matters in brand building. It’s not an easily measured KPI, but it’s something worth considering because, at the end of the day, folks go with brands they like.

This doesn’t mean every brand has to be cheerful and polite. Jess cited Liquid Death as an example — it’s loud and crass and still deeply likeable because it understands who it’s talking to.

So much of Jess’s approach to brand is grounded in storytelling and who wants to read a story with characters they don’t like? 

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Looking forward to 2026, I have no doubt consumer marketing principles will only grow more and more important. The market and the marketing channels B2B orgs use are saturated, so companies are going to need to get more creative. 

But they don’t need to start from scratch. Jess made it clear that the playbooks and jumping-off-points exist — they’re just not found in the B2B section. 

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Next Guest:

‍Noah Greenberg, CEO at Stacker

Thursday, February12th