Brand, Creativity and Credibility in Cybersecurity Marketing

In my first CyberMarketingCon 2025 recap, I talked about what’s changing broadly in cybersecurity marketing. The theme people kept coming back to was brand: how you show up creatively, what you stand for and whether people actually believe you.

This post zooms in there – on the intersection of creativity, world-building and credibility.

Everywhere you looked at the conference, people were naming the same problem: sameness.

Websites sound alike. Campaigns look alike. Messaging blurs together, especially in dense categories like identity, cloud security and SecOps. The brands that are breaking through are the ones willing to make sharper creative choices and build a consistent brand around them.

In cybersecurity, that brand tends to show up as:

• Trust: do buyers believe you’ll do what you say over time?
• Clarity: can they quickly see where you fit in their stack?
• Alignment: do your values and worldview feel compatible with theirs?
• Community: do customers feel part of more than a vendor relationship?
• Creativity is how those qualities become visible.

In her keynote, Jaqui Morgan from Palo Alto Networks shared a line that stuck with a lot of people: “Shoot the show, not the commercial.” The point was simple: polished isn’t always what connects. Scrappy, in-the-moment content can build more trust than a perfect brand film.

A few principles that surfaced in that discussion:

• Clear narrative over clever jargon. The teams seeing momentum can explain their value in a short, memorable story a CISO can repeat to their board.
• Emotion matters, even in cyber. The strongest work taps into the human side of security – fear, frustration, relief, pride.
• Safety is expensive. When every company claims innovation and leadership, playing it safe often means disappearing into the noise.

Don Jeter, CMO at Torq, took that further with a focus on “world-building.” His view:

• “Stop marketing. Start world-building.”
• “Make a movement, not a message.”
• “Repeat the message until the market repeats it back.”

Practically, that looks like:

• Designing your brand experience before defaulting to product feature lists
• Defining a clear “us” and “them” in the category
• Creating episodic content that feels like chapters in the same story, not disconnected one-offs

The examples were memorable – thought leadership delivered as a comic book, creative that zigged where the rest of the category zagged. The common thread: a willingness to do something distinctive and then commit to it long enough for it to become part of the brand’s mental real estate.

Creativity and world-building get people to pay attention. Credibility decides what they do with that attention.

Conor Coughlan, CMO at Armis, framed credibility and trust as the real currency in cybersecurity marketing. He shared five pillars of brand credibility:

• Authentic purpose: you know what you stand for and it shows up beyond the brand book.
• Consistent delivery: your story is stable across PR, sales, web, events and enablement.
• Radical transparency: you treat buyers as educated and skeptical, and you’re honest about tradeoffs.
• Evidence-based claims: you bring validation from customers, partners and third parties, not just adjectives.

Customer-centricity: you talk in terms of the customer’s problem and outcomes, not just your internal processes.

He also pushed for a shift from vanity metrics to meaning. The teams building real equity are using metrics to support a broader narrative about business impact and long-term belief, not just counting impressions and clicks.

One important payoff from that work is resilience. Brands that have invested in trust and credibility are better positioned when something goes wrong. People have context, they’ve seen proof and they’ve heard a consistent story over time. Conor posed a simple question that’s worth sitting with: what does your advocacy program actually look like?

If you’re leading marketing or communications for a cybersecurity brand, you don’t need to act on every idea from the conference. A few focused moves go a long way:

• Clarify your one-sentence story and test it with people who don’t work for you. If they can’t repeat it back, simplify.
• Choose one world-building experiment – a distinct content series, a new visual direction, a different format for thought leadership – and treat it as the first episode of something, not a one-off.
• Pressure-test your brand against the five credibility pillars and pick one area where you’ll show more proof or transparency in the next quarter.

If you’re wrestling with how to make your brand feel clearer, braver and more believable in a noisy market, I’m always happy to compare notes. Our cybersecurity team at Highwire works with companies across the ecosystem – from growth-stage to public – to build brands people trust, remember and want to be part of. You can learn more about our cybersecurity practice and reach out if you’d like to talk about what this could look like for your team.