How I Reframed a Commoditized Category Around Business Value

In one of my roles, I walked into a category buyers thought they already understood.

That was the problem.

When a market feels familiar, buyers stop looking for value and start comparing price. The conversation had become highly transactional: quote requests, supplier comparisons, procurement pressure, and a general assumption that one provider looked much like another.

The obvious response would have been to improve the pitch.

I thought the bigger problem was that we were pitching to the wrong room.

Most of the conversation lived in procurement. Procurement mattered, of course, but their job was to control cost and risk. They were not the people waking up thinking about growth, customer experience, brand trust, employee engagement, or how a fragmented program was affecting the business.

So I started changing who we talked to.

That meant getting into conversations with marketing leaders, people teams, and executives who owned the outcomes our work could actually influence. The discussion changed quickly.

Instead of talking about unit price, we could talk about consistency across markets. Instead of individual transactions, we could talk about customer and employee experience. Instead of another vendor line item, we could talk about governance, compliance, speed, measurable engagement, and the cost of doing things badly at scale.

That shift was not just messaging.

It required rebuilding the commercial story so a CMO, CFO, procurement leader, and operations team could each see the same program through the lens that mattered to them.

And once that happened, the category became much harder to dismiss as a commodity.

What stayed with me is that commoditization is not always a product problem.

Sometimes the value is already there.

It is just trapped in the wrong conversation.

And changing the conversation can change what the business is willing to fund.