An Interview with Valentina Bagniya, CMO at SOFTSWISS
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“Technology itself is not a differentiator anymore, because any innovation can be replicated with ease.”
Valentina Bagniya, Chief Marketing Officer of SOFTSWISS, heard this from one of her CTOs two weeks before our conversation. The statement captures a fundamental shift happening in iGaming B2B right now.
Five to ten years ago, technology and functionality created the iGaming B2B market. Innovation was the differentiator: build a better feature, and customers would come. Today, that playbook is obsolete. AI can replicate features in months. Regulation creates trust frameworks. Marketing channels are flooded with noise.
The old growth engine was sales-led: long contact lists, industry events, looking people in the eye to know if you could “steal horses together.” But with social media and AI tools amplifying reach, stories now travel faster than sales teams can. Regulation created trust frameworks that reduce the need for in-person validation. The growth engine had to evolve.
In a commoditized market, brand is the competitive advantage.
The new reality is brand-led: stories that travel faster than sales teams, differentiation that can’t be copied, trust that arrives before the first meeting.
Valentina saw this shift firsthand when she joined SOFTSWISS five years ago from major FMCG brands like Nestlé, British American Tobacco, and Heineken. Today, she runs one of the most sophisticated in-house marketing operations in iGaming B2B, overseeing a 70-person team. That investment signals something important: in a commoditized market, brand is the competitive advantage.
The shift is creating clear winners and losers. Choosing what worked for you so far is no longer safe.
Walk into any iGaming trade show and you’ll see lots of booths, lots of energy, lots of smiles. Everyone saying the same thing: seamless integration, best customer support, trusted. Eighty to ninety percent of companies look identical.
Here’s what I noticed after a year analyzing iGaming B2B companies through Braintail: many actually have strong differentiators that could help them stand out. But they don’t talk about it. They don’t flaunt it, they don’t position around it. They choose to speak the same language as everybody else.
Valentina’s diagnosis gets to the root cause: “Companies don’t invest a lot in research, in understanding their target audience. For some reason, somewhere, companies decided that seamless integration, best customer support are the key features that our target audience needs. And doing this, they really miss something very special. Something that can help them be different and build a really strong brand.”
“If you don’t invest in brand, the price is your business. You can lose everything.”
Many companies think brand equals logo. They skip straight to aesthetics, not strategy. They don’t have positioning statements. Even worse, many are investing heavily in marketing without investing in brand. Marketing spend in iGaming B2B has grown significantly over the past two to three years. But as Valentina points out, “Investing in marketing and investing in brand are a bit different.” A lot of money creates buzz, but it doesn’t help you differentiate strongly.
The consequences are harsh. Within two to three years, companies not investing in brand building will survive only to serve small businesses, be acquired, or stop operations. “Based on Gartner reports, bigger companies tend to trust bigger companies. Companies are becoming bigger, more international. And such companies will prefer to work with strong brands in B2B, not with small businesses.”
“If you don’t invest in brand, the price is your business. You can lose everything.”
On the other side, companies with strong brands are winning differently.
“Strong brands sell themselves. When you have a strong brand in B2B business, brand comes first. Brand goes forward before the first meeting.”
People know about you—they know that you’re reliable, that you bring safety, that you’re secure—before people meet. Sales people go after your brand message.
Please understand correctly—Valentina doesn’t want to diminish person-to-person communication. It’s extremely important. If you have a strong brand but not a professional salesperson, your brand probably can’t save you. Both are important. But when you have a strong brand, it comes before your sales people arrive. And this can help you decrease the price of growth.
Winners enjoy lower cost of acquisition and prospects who shortlist them before talking to sales. They avoid what I call the “Cousin Vinnie effect”—where buyers ask one guy who knows another guy, and end up with whatever solution someone in their network was successful with a year ago, regardless of fit.
Do you manage how your target audience perceives you, or let others create their own vision?
For companies with strong brands, marketing spend drives compounding returns, not just temporary buzz. Stories travel through networks faster than sales teams can make calls. Sales teams focus on closing deals, not educating from scratch.
The perception shift moves companies from invisible to top-of-mind. From “same as everyone” to distinctive. From competing on features to competing on positioning.
Critically, the message shifts from purely functional to emotional. “The message should not be built only around functional strengths of your product, because functional strengths are very similar. The message should also be about emotional connection between your brand and your customer.” In iGaming, that emotional connection is about trust and security.
Your brand works 24/7, reaching people you’ve never met, in places your sales team can’t go.
Unlike technology, which replicates quickly, brand takes years to build and compounds over time. It becomes a competitive moat. Your brand works 24/7, reaching people you’ve never met, in places your sales team can’t go.
“It’s difficult to enter our industry now because it’s becoming more saturated,” Valentina notes. “But companies themselves can stand out more.”
The mistake most companies make: “Companies start with, ‘Oh, we need to create a logo,’ because they think if we create a logo we create a brand.”
But your brand is not your logo. Your brand is how your target audience perceives you. If you don’t work on your positioning statement, people will create their own vision of your brand. Your key task is to manage this process.
The right approach starts with deep research. Understand your competitors’ messaging, not just their product. Uncover real customer insights—what they actually want versus what you assume. “Maybe they want not seamless integration but secure business operation. And seamless integration comes on the 10th place after secure business operation, after cheap user acquisition.”
Understand your product. “Sometimes marketers don’t understand what they need to promote. And this is a big mistake because it doesn’t help them to take out the real benefits.”
“Your product success lies between your customer insights and what your product can give. When you can match them, your message becomes very strong.”
After research, develop a positioning statement first. This internal document answers: What are the rational benefits of your brand? What are the emotional benefits? “These emotional benefits are becoming more important because rational benefits are almost the same for every company.”
Then create your logo, visual identity, marketing communication, PR, digital materials, website—all based on your brand positioning.
“Please don’t start with logo. Start with analysis and then with strategy. If you don’t do that in the beginning, after a year or two, you’ll have to come back and do it. So just do it in the beginning.”
This is exactly the discovery work Braintail does—finding the differentiators companies don’t know they have or aren’t talking about, then translating them into clear positioning that resonates with target audiences.
“Strategic thinking and strategic approach. Those who start with discovery already understand this is the first stage of long term brand building.”
You have to plan for years, not months. Your role as a brand manager, a marketer, is to think long-term. Sales teams think about results here and now. Brand managers create context that makes sales conversations easier one to three years out.
“You will create good context for sales team in a year, in two, in three, and make their job much easier. Because trust will come before your sales person.”
Stay consistent. “A lot of rebranding, logo changes, visual identity changes don’t work positively. For your target audience, they just create buzz, noise, but not stable perception.”
“What I see sometimes, especially with leaders, they want to cover everything. It’s very difficult for them to prioritize. They want to say everything about your brand. You want to work on this market, on that market, with this audience and that one.”
But this doesn’t build strong brands.
“You have to prioritize. You have to choose what exactly you want to say. You have to choose who is exactly your target audience and which market is key priority. Because you cannot work everywhere. At least in the beginning. Probably later you become like Coca-Cola or Apple, but in the beginning you have to prioritize.”
“It’s crucially important to be aligned with your leadership team.”
You have to be sure what you’re doing is absolutely accepted by your leadership team and the team you work with. These people will help you implement. Without their help, you cannot translate everything correctly to your target audience.
The risk: “If you as a marketer say about your brand one thing in marketing promotion, and then your sales person starts the conversation from absolutely different things, this creates misunderstanding and doesn’t work on trust building.”
All company employees are your first brand ambassadors. They need to understand and accept what you’re doing.
“Unfortunately, very often we marketers have to say, ‘Guys, what we’re doing will influence our business positively in one year, in two years.’ And this is some kind of weak part of brand managers, that not all can use numbers to prove what they’re doing.”
But measurement is possible. “If you do proper job, you’ll see how brand awareness metrics directly influence sales metrics.”
At SOFTSWISS, they track branded keyword clicks and organic traffic as brand awareness metrics. “What we see is that the pace of growth of branded keyword clicks and the growth of branded keyword clicks influence directly the growth of sales. This is how brand building influences sales. Absolute direct interdependency. If your brand is growing, your sales are growing.”
“If your brand is growing, your sales are growing.”
Final advice: “Stay curious, be ambitious, be brave. But these things are key for building really strong brand.”
“I’m absolutely sure that within the next three to five years, with help of companies like yours, the industry will change. More and more really strong brands will grow that differ not only on company color but on what stands behind it.”
For two to three years, SOFTSWISS’s trend reports have emphasized brand importance in B2C and B2B. “Two years ago it was a trend when people started to understand, ‘This is the thing that can help me grow better.’ But it’s not even a trend anymore. It’s just an essential part of industry development.”
Why is brand only now becoming essential? First, it wasn’t needed for many years in the relationship-driven, technology-first era. Second, professionals who can develop positioning and think strategically about marketing didn’t enter the industry until recently.
But that’s shifting.
“I’m absolutely sure that within the next three to five years, with help of companies like yours, the industry will change. More and more really strong brands will grow that differ not only on company color but on what stands behind it.”
Valentina’s New Year’s resolution for 2026: read 60 books, up from 50 in each of the past two years. Particularly detective novels.
“For me detectives are like marketing. You need to investigate, analyze—you see I’m again about analytics—understand each detail. Because in marketing, any details matter, especially if you’re working on brand positioning and understanding insights of your target audience.”
Her tip: “Read detectives. They will help you understand marketing better.”
As we closed our conversation, Valentina offered: “First of all, my congratulations on your one year anniversary. I really wish you good luck because I’m absolutely sure that the job you are doing in our industry is super useful. I’m very happy that such companies started to enter our industry. It’s very important for us, so thank you for your job and good luck in 2026.”
The shift is happening. The stakes are clear. The path forward exists.
The question is: will you manage your brand, or let the market decide for you?
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