What tech brands get wrong when they try to act like Big Tech

There is a type of brand deck that I have seen dozens of times across markets — Budapest, Warsaw, Dubai, London. It opens with a statement about “transforming industries,” mentions a platform that is “redefining” something, and closes with a mission that sounds like it was borrowed from a 2019 Salesforce keynote. The company behind this deck has 12 employees and a Series A that it closed 8 months ago. The communication strategy has been written for a company three times its size and twice its age — and it is actively working against them.

This is what I call big tech cosplay. It is not a branding problem in the classical sense. It is a positioning failure driven by aspiration, and it is one of the most consistent mistakes I see from VC-backed tech companies in 2026 — across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.

The logic behind it is understandable. Founders watch how AWS, Stripe, or Palantir communicate and conclude that this is simply how tech companies talk. The language feels serious. Authoritative. Scalable. So they adopt the vocabulary — the “ecosystems,” the “end-to-end solutions,” the “intelligent infrastructure” — and wait for the market to take them seriously. What they get instead is a brand that reads as vague to journalists at TechCrunch or the FT, unconvincing to enterprise buyers, and completely invisible to the narrower audience that actually matters at their stage.

The core issue is that Big Tech communication is built on institutional credibility. When Microsoft says it is “empowering every person and organisation on the planet,” the claim lands because two decades of market dominance fill in the gap between the words and the proof. There is no gap to fill. For a 40-person B2B SaaS company operating in three markets, the same rhetorical structure produces the opposite effect — it signals that the company does not know what it actually does for whom.

Specificity is the one thing big tech brands systematically avoid, because they cannot afford to. They serve everyone. A startup that tries to do the same is not being ambitious — it is being illegible to the press, to investors during due diligence, and to the buyers it most needs to close. The most effective startup communications I have seen over the past two years run entirely counter to the enterprise playbook. One company we worked with — a RegTech firm operating with mid-sized banks across Central and Eastern Europe — replaced their “next-generation compliance infrastructure” positioning with a single concrete claim: they cut the time their clients spend on AML reporting by 60%. That number became the centre of every pitch, every media angle, every piece of earned media the founding team put out. Coverage followed within three months, including a placement in the Financial Times that referenced that exact figure.

The other mistake nested inside big tech cosplay is the obsession with category creation. Every other startup is now “building a new category,” which is itself a phrase that has become a category of meaninglessness. Category creation is a long-term capital allocation strategy — it requires sustained content investment, analyst relationships, and time horizons that most growth-stage companies cannot afford. Most startups do not need to create a category. They need to win a specific buyer in a specific vertical with a specific argument. That is a different brief, and it demands a different PR and communications strategy altogether.

The irony is that the companies doing this well at a smaller scale are often the ones that sound the least like tech companies. They write about problems in plain language. They share numbers their customers care about. They take visible positions on things that matter to their buyers — regulatory shifts, procurement bottlenecks, market consolidation in their sector — rather than making generic claims about innovation. When I look at the startups that consistently earn Tier-1 media coverage without a press office the size of a mid-sized law firm, the pattern is almost always the same: a clear, narrow, provable claim, repeated across every channel without embarrassment.

Big tech can afford to be vague because scale creates its own gravity. Startups need the opposite — the kind of precise, credible narrative that builds trust before the company is large enough to command it by default. Investors read your press coverage before they take the second meeting. Enterprise procurement teams Google you before they sign. The media presence you build at Series A is not a vanity exercise; it is infrastructure.

The goal is not to sound like you belong in the same sentence as Google. The goal is to be unmistakably useful to the exact person reading your pitch, your press release, or your homepage at that specific moment. That is a harder brief than copying the tone of a company worth $2 trillion. It is also the only one that works.