Jeff Klein, elevated to Subway’s U.S. CMO after an executive shake-up earlier this year, isn’t pretending the chain has solved its problems. In an interview with Marketing Dive, he lays out a strategy that doesn’t try to out-shout McDonald’s on value or out-health Chipotle on ingredients. Instead, Subway is looking for the gap between the two: a positioning play, not a volume play. That distinction is worth sitting with if you run marketing for a B2B company and you’re deciding what your thought leadership podcast is actually for.
Most B2B podcasts pick a lane that’s already occupied
Walk through any B2B podcast directory and you’ll hear the same three formats on repeat: the CEO interview show, the “state of the industry” roundup, the customer-success-story-as-podcast. Nobody is being reckless. Everybody is also indistinguishable. Klein’s point about Subway applies almost word for word: when you try to be everything to everyone in a category with two or three dominant players, you end up occupying no space at all. The QSR category has a clear value leader and a clear premium-quality leader. Subway’s answer isn’t to beat either one at their own game. It’s to define the specific unmet need sitting between them and build the whole marketing programme around that.
B2B podcasts fail for the same structural reason weak QSR positioning fails. A company launches a show because a competitor has one, copies the format, and ends up fighting for attention inside a category that’s already been defined by someone else’s content. The fix isn’t more polish on the same format. It’s asking what question your buyers are asking that neither the analyst-report companies nor the flashy-brand competitors are actually answering on air.
A shake-up at the top is usually when positioning gets fixed, not before
Klein didn’t arrive at Subway during a calm quarter. He joined in March and was pushed into the CMO seat after an executive shake-up, the kind of moment when a lot of companies default to caution: keep the current campaigns running, don’t rock anything, wait for stability. He did the opposite. He used the disruption as the reason to re-examine where Subway sits relative to competitors, rather than treating the shake-up as a reason to freeze.
That’s the pattern worth noticing for a marketing leader auditing a podcast programme, or deciding whether to start one. The moment you’re under pressure to show pipeline impact is exactly the moment most teams shelve anything that looks experimental, including a podcast. But a show built around a genuinely open position in your market, the argument nobody else in your category is making on record, is one of the few content formats that compounds instead of decaying. A blog post about your product category gets buried by the next search update. A weekly show that stakes out a specific point of view builds an audience that returns because of the position, not because of the format. At B2B Better, the podcast agency behind this blog, the first question we ask a new client isn’t “what should the show be called” or “who should host it.” It’s “what is the one argument in your market that nobody else is willing to make out loud, every week, for a year.” That’s positioning work, not content-calendar work, and it’s the same discipline Klein is applying to a sandwich chain.
The risk of copying the loudest voice in your category
There’s a specific failure mode here worth naming: mistaking the biggest competitor’s content strategy for the correct one. If the market leader in your B2B category runs a slick, high-production interview show with big-name guests, the instinct is to build something similar, just better produced. Klein’s approach suggests the opposite instinct: find the room competitors have left open, not the room they’ve already filled. A podcast that argues from an unoccupied position, even an unglamorous one, will out-perform a copy of the market leader’s format nine times out of ten, because the copy has to win on execution alone while the original position wins on relevance.
If you’re planning next year’s podcast programme, spend less time picking a format and more time mapping what your two or three biggest competitors already claim in their content, then build your show in the gap they’ve left.
