By David Fuller, Fractional CMO

SaaS companies are burning cash on AI generated leads while companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble sell billions of dollars of commoditized products to a mass market customer base every day. There's a lesson here.

SaaS marketers obsess over product-led growth, free trials, and feature differentiation. Meanwhile, FMCG brands have been working since 1884 (yes, that is 18...) to master something more fundamental: how to make functionally similar products feel indispensable. They have decades of institutional knowledge about loyalty, pricing power, and market share in categories where rational comparison should make brand irrelevant.

It's time SaaS learned from soap.

The Inconvenient Truth About Your Product

FMCG marketers understand something that SaaS marketers deny: most products in a category do roughly the same thing.

Tide cleans clothes. So does every other washing detergent. Coke is sweetened fizzy water. So is Pepsi. This is also true for cars, mobile phones and other commoditized items. The goal is to maintain market share, and customer loyalty that survives cheaper alternatives launching every quarter.

Your project management tool, CRM, ecommerce platform, CMS or marketing automation suite has almost exactly the same functionally to a dozen competitors. FMCG brands stopped pretending features create moats decades ago. SaaS is still living in that fantasy.

Five FMCG Principles SaaS Marketers Ignore

1. Brand Equity Compounds, Features Don't

FMCG companies invest relentlessly in brand building, not just performance marketing. They know awareness and mental availability drive purchase decisions when customers face dozens of acceptable options.

SaaS marketers treat brand as a luxury for later-stage companies. They pour budgets into bottom-funnel tactics like PPC, retargeting, comparison pages, optimizing for immediate conversion. 

Coca-Cola doesn't outspend Pepsi on "buy now" ads. It invests in making Coke the automatic answer when you think "refreshment." That mental real estate, built over decades, is worth more than any feature launch.

2. Category Creation Is Better Than Feature Competition

FMCG brands don't just compete in categories, they create them. Red Bull didn't fight in the soft drink aisle. It created energy drinks. Dove didn't make better soap. It created the "real beauty" moisture category.

SaaS companies race to add features competitors have, then claim differentiation through minor variations. They're fighting for share in defined categories instead of redefining the game.

When Salesforce launched, it didn't build a better Siebel. It created a new category: "no software." When Slack launched, it didn't build better enterprise messaging. It created "where work happens."

Category creation gives you 3-5 years of differentiation before competitors catch up. Feature parity takes 3-5 months. Yet most SaaS marketing is feature-focused.

3. Habit Formation Beats Feature Education

FMCG brands obsess over usage occasions and rituals. When do people brush their teeth? What triggers the decision to grab a snack? How do we insert our brand into automatic behaviors?

SaaS marketers obsess over onboarding flows and activation metrics but ignore habit formation. They optimize for the first week, not the first hundred weeks.

Listerine created the morning and night brushing ritual. "Chicken Tonight" did exactly what it said on the jar. These habits persist regardless of new entrants with better formulas.

SaaS Marketing people should ask: What business ritual can we own? Not "what features drive activation" but "what regular behavior makes our product automatic?" Calendly captured "send me your calendar link." Exchanging business cards has been replaced with the phrase "Are you on Linkedin". These phrases are more valuable than feature lists.

4. Price Architecture Creates Tiers, Not Just Pricing

FMCG brands master price architecture, creating good-better-best tiers that let them capture different customer segments without devaluing premium offerings.

P&G doesn't just sell Tide. It sells Tide (standard), Tide Plus (upgraded), Tide Pods (premium convenience), Tide Free (sensitive skin), each at different price points capturing different needs and willingness to pay.

SaaS pricing is typically feature-gated tiers that confuse customers and commoditize the product. "Our $49 plan has 5 users and basic reporting. Our $199 plan has 20 users and advanced reporting." Pricing is a whole subject on it's own because it can be a strategy in and of itself like giving the product away until customers become reliant upon it versus trading on a 'you get what you pay for' mentality. 

The FMCG lesson: Your pricing should reflect how different customers value outcomes, not which features they access.

5. Distribution Is Product

FMCG brands know that being available at the moment of decision is more important than being marginally better. Coke's competitive advantage isn't formula, it's distribution. The strategy is that no matter where you are in the world, you are no more than 10 meters from a Coke, 

SaaS marketers think distribution is just "channels." They miss that distribution shapes the product itself. WhatsApp won because of the network effect. WordPress won because it was infinitely customizable. Stripe won because it was the easiest payment integration to install.

FMCG calls this "availability advantage." Being present at the decision moment beats being slightly better but harder to access. Your product's friction is a distribution problem, not a product problem.

What This Means for SaaS Marketing Strategy

When you advertise for a marketing leader, rather than looking for one who has only ever worked in tech or 'hypergrowth' markets, consider someone who has managed brands in mature, highly competitive commodity markets.

• Invest in brand before you think you're ready: If you're spending 90% on performance marketing and 10% on brand, flip it. Brand builds moats. Performance marketing just extracts value from awareness someone else created.
• Define your category, don't just compete in it: Stop explaining how you're different from competitors. Explain what new problem you solve or what new way of working you enable.
• Design for habit, not just activation: Map the business rituals your customers have. Which one can your product own? Build your product and marketing around capturing that repeated behavior.
• Rethink pricing as segmentation: Your tiers should reflect different customers with different needs, not arbitrary feature gates. Price to the value delivered, not the cost incurred. Think of new business models. Rather than price per month or per year, charge by actual usage.
• Reduce friction as core strategy: Every extra click, signup field, or integration step is distribution failure. The easiest-to-use product captures more market than the best product that's hard to use. 

Why This Matters Now

It is actually a zero-sum game. For many SaaS products, the behaviour is substitution rather than growing the market. The growth-at-all-costs era is over.

FMCG companies operate in low-growth, highly competitive categories with thin margins and constant private label threats. Yet the strong ones thrive. They've learned to build durable businesses on fundamentals, not growth hacks.

Brands like Sunlight Soap, that have been around since 1884 have mastered brand equity, category ownership, habit formation, price architecture, and distribution, the same fundamentals SaaS companies now need to survive.

Where does a Fractional CMO fit in?

The right fractional CMO creates asymmetric value, especially one that has experience in 'old-world' marketing. They've seen both worlds, performance marketing and brand building, growth tactics and durable strategy, SaaS metrics and FMCG fundamentals.

What can SaaS markers learn from the Automotive industry? What can SaaS Marketing people learn from the Travel industry? Has your CMO done 'real, hard marketing'? Not just ridden the wave of being in the right place at the right time, got lucky with a viral video, but maintained market share in a low-growth, highly competitive market.  

Your SaaS product is more similar to soap than you want to admit. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can learn from brands that mastered differentiation in commodity categories. Stop optimizing your way to irrelevance. Start building brand equity, owning categories, creating habits, architecting value, and removing friction.

The SaaS companies that survive the next decade won't be the ones with the best features. They'll be the ones that learned what Tide, Coke, and Dove figured out generations ago: functional parity is inevitable, but mental and behavioral dominance is defensible.