Fender and Marshall make guitars and amps. Here’s what B2B can steal from their new LLM strategy.

Fender and Marshall don’t sell to procurement teams. But, as reported by Digiday, the thing they’re both testing right now is the same bet most B2B marketers are making: that the content you publish now determines what LLMs say about you later.

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The playbook Fender and Marshall are following

Interim CMO Kelly Magrath didn’t like that Fender’s site had become “transactional,” in her words, a shopfront built to move product. So she rebuilt it around story instead, pushing e-commerce to the side and filling the space with short videos on brand heritage, the artists who’ve played Fender guitars (Hendrix, George Harrison, Chrissie Hynde), and the craftspeople who build them. The point is to show up correctly while someone is still deciding what to buy, not necessarily to get more clicks.

Marshall took the opposite route: entertainment over heritage. The Dead Venue Sessions stages gigs by new bands inside long-shuttered clubs like London Fog and New York’s China Chalet. The resulting YouTube series is just one piece of a push that’s been running since May across paid YouTube, indie music publisher partnerships, out-of-home, and live experiential tied to the brand’s own record label. Being remembered as “the amp company” was never the goal here. Being remembered as part of the music itself is.

Different playbooks, but the same bet: AI models can’t be bought the way a SERP can. You can’t keyword bid your way into a ChatGPT answer. So brands are publishing more of their own original material and hoping the models pick it up as reference material. Skyword’s research says seven in ten US consumers now use ChatGPT or AI summaries while researching a purchase. Kantar found 75% of marketers plan to spend more on AI-assistant visibility next year.

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The results? TBD

While there’s no silver bullet yet proving any of this moves the needle on AI citations (Stephani Estes, chief media officer at The Shipyard, says as much in the Digiday piece, and there’s no attribution model or HubSpot dashboard that can tell you whether the AI actually read something and that changed anything) this is still useful territory for B2B marketers to be in, because the underlying work isn’t a gamble either way. 

Original, specific, well-told content was always going to build brand authority and search visibility on its own. AI citation is a plausible bonus on top of that, not the thing the whole bet rests on. And since nobody’s cracked the measurement problem yet, nobody’s ahead on it either, so there’s no “first mover” tax to pay for starting now.

So why does this matter for B2B, where brands need ROI, not roadies?

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What B2B can steal from this

The mechanism Fender and Marshall are both using is about having a clear brand narrative and pov in a specific, ownable piece of content, then publishing the real, specific, hard-to-fake version of it, repeatedly, in your own channels. That principle applies to B2B marketing as much as it does heritage or live music.

Operator-level specificity

The B2B version of heritage and craft is operator-level specificity. Fender’s advantage is that Hendrix actually played a Stratocaster. Your advantage is that your head of ops actually ran a specific migration, under specific constraints, and can describe what went down. Generic “best practices” content has nothing distinctive for a model to cite, but a named person describing a real, specific decision does.

Longer queries reward depth

People are writing longer, more specific queries into AI tools, which rewards longer-form, more detailed content over keyword-stuffed pages. If your content team is still optimizing for skimmability over substance, this is the signal to stop.

Consistency beats a one-shot asset

Consistency across channels beats a single hero asset. Neither Fender nor Marshall is betting on one campaign. They’re publishing constantly, in their own channels, in a consistent voice. For B2B, that’s the case for a steady drumbeat of specific, named, operator-driven content, not a single gated report you refresh once a year. 

LLMs distribute your brand, they don’t create it

LLMs give a brand a new way to reach people but the brand itself still has to come from the company. Think of LLMs as another channel to distribute your brand, not to create it, so your brand still needs to show up consistently across all touchpoints.

Measure what you can

Measure what you can, and don’t pretend you can measure it all. The responsible way we’re talking about LLMs at Campfire isn’t to promise our clients “AI visibility” as a deliverable with a number attached. It’s to treat original, specific content as the thing that was always going to compound anyway, with AI citation as a plausible bonus.

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This isn’t really a new strategy. Publishing specific, original, well-told stories instead of generic content is the same advice good content strategists have given for years. To steal the final line in the Digiday article: a brand’s own content may be only one of several sources LLMs typically draw from when composing answers. But it’s one a marketer can control.

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