Positioning as a Growth Engine

·52 min·5 clips

Marnie Puente explains how AI cuts content creation from 10 hours to 30 minutes, freeing marketers for strategic work.

This episode of Renegade Marketers Unite features host Drew Neisser in conversation with two senior B2B marketing leaders: Marnie Puente, CMO of government contractor SAIC, and Sarah Larson, VP of Marketing at Wolters Kluwer Health. They explore how strategic positioning drives business growth, especially amid market shifts and technological change. Marnie Puente details her first-year mission to rebuild SAIC's marketing function with an "AI-first" approach from the ground up. She explains that using AI tools like SAIC's own government-compliant platform, TenGen, augments her team by automating manual work like content drafting, freeing marketers for strategic tasks. A key challenge she highlights is ensuring AI-generated content achieves quality and hyper-personalization, not just volume, particularly for account-based marketing. Sarah Larson recounts how her team's positioning work for the clinical decision tool UpToDate earned them a Forrester B2B ROI award. Their research revealed the buying committee had expanded to include non-clinical roles like CFOs and COOs, not just the clinicians who loved the product. This insight led to a major repositioning of UpToDate as an enterprise-level solution, which in turn influenced product development and bundling. Larson emphasizes that effective positioning requires understanding external market dynamics, such as healthcare providers' financial pressures post-COVID. A surprising claim is that a successful positioning exercise must sometimes lead to actual product changes, not just new messaging. Marnie Puente notes that as a government contractor, SAIC faces unique restrictions on AI tools, requiring custom, compliant solutions. Sarah Larson shares that her company deliberately positioned itself around "responsible AI" to protect its core brand attribute of trust, rather than hastily adopting all AI trends. The conversation reveals that even beloved brands like Nike or Starbucks can falter if they lose touch with customer needs and market realities. The tone is conversational and practical, blending personal anecdotes with actionable B2B marketing strategies. This episode is ideal for B2B marketing leaders, CMOs, and product marketers navigating positioning, AI integration, or buying committee complexities. Listeners seeking tactical advice on rebranding or leveraging AI for growth will find concrete examples. Those outside the B2B space or looking for a highly technical dive into AI may find the discussion too broad.

As heard by us

Positioning as a growth lever, with product, messaging, and market pressure all in view.

Positioning is treated here as a business move, not a branding flourish. Sarah Larson and Marnie Puente follow how a wider buyer mix forced them to rethink the story, the messaging, and parts of the product, with healthcare pressure, reimbursement strain, staff retention and…

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You want positioning that reaches new buyers and can force real product changes.

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