Not Clever, Just Clear: Storytelling That Lands in Cybersecurity

Wiz started with a small team inside Microsoft’s cloud security group, frustrated by the tools they were using.

They weren’t trying to invent a new category or chase differentiation. They were working with well-known cloud security tools, which everyone says are “best in class,” and they still couldn’t get what they needed. The tools were too slow, noisy, and complicated to deploy at scale.

They didn’t leave to launch a new platform. They left because they hit a wall and wanted to fix it.

That story, not polished, not performative, just honest, became the backbone of the company’s voice. It seemed that in early investor conversations, they spoke to customers, and in every major launch that followed. The line was always the same: We had access to everything, and it still wasn’t good enough.

That kind of story matters not because it’s clever, but because it speaks to a real problem. And it’s exactly what’s missing from most cybersecurity marketing.

1. Why so much Cybersecurity Marketing Falls Flat

It’s not that security buyers don’t care about good marketing. They just don’t trust most of it.

A report from the Rinna Group found that overpromising in B2B messaging can lead to up to 35% higher customer churn, driven by mismatched expectations between buyer and vendor.

This isn’t just about tone or phrasing. It’s about a growing disconnect between how companies talk about their products and what security teams experience in practice.

You can see it in the habits:

• Leading with industry buzzwords instead of real outcomes
  
• Publishing whitepapers that never name a single customer problem
  
• Writing LinkedIn posts that sound like a marketing intern trying to impersonate a CISO
  

When every message sounds like it came from the same brief, people stop listening. This is especially true for people who’ve sat through 17 vendor pitches, lived through three failed deployments, and spent months justifying a tool that never delivered what the slide deck promised.

And here’s the thing: most of these companies have real, worthwhile stories. But they get buried under positioning, brand voice, compliance sign-off, and an internal need to “sound enterprise-ready.”

What it all boils down to is: not storytelling as a creative exercise, but as a way to close the trust gap that most marketing quietly widens.

2. What Story Means—and Doesn’t

Many cybersecurity companies say they want to tell better stories. However, they usually produce oversimplified case studies or brand videos built around a framework, not an experience. You can spot the difference quickly. A fake story starts with a made-up persona, adds a broad pain point, then closes with a clean solution tied to the product. It might follow a story’s shape, but nothing in it feels grounded in how people in this space work.

Real stories are different. They don’t start with a format; they start with something someone lived through.

Take this quote from a CrowdStrike case study:

“Before CrowdStrike, we had tools that were good at detection, but they slowed everything down. Analysts had to log into multiple systems just to triage a single alert. It burned people out.”

It doesn’t try to be clever. It names what wasn’t working, alert fatigue caused by clunky workflows, and why it mattered. It’s believable because it sounds like something a practitioner would say.

Cyberhaven’s team shared a similar story when they published details of a Chrome extension attack in late 2024. A phishing email led to OAuth access being granted to a malicious Chrome extension. That one access point allowed attackers to steal session cookies and tokens from users across more than 400,000 browsers. The victims didn’t click on anything. The threat was invisible until it wasn’t.

That’s what a story looks like in this field. It's not drama, just clarity and truth, something that helps the reader see a moment for what it was and understand why it mattered.

3. How to Find the Story in What You’re Building

Good storytelling in cybersecurity doesn’t start with a narrative framework. It begins with friction.

When companies like Wiz, CrowdStrike, or even startups like Island or Torq tell stories that land, they’re not inventing narratives; they’re pointing to a specific problem they lived through and naming what didn’t work. The clarity doesn’t come from marketing. It comes from memory.

But most teams skip that part. They jump to messaging like category language, differentiators, personas, and the story disappears.

To get it back, you have to ask different questions. Not “What do we want to say?” but “What did we learn the hard way?”

That kind of signal often lives in places teams overlook: early investor decks, internal Slack threads, sales calls that didn’t go well, or the uncomfortable postmortems that never made it into a case study.

For example:
When Island (the enterprise browser company) launched, its story didn’t start with features; it began with a question from a security leader: 

Why are we still trying to protect data inside the browser without touching it?

That line came directly from early customer conversations, and it’s still the spine of their product talk today.

These kinds of moments are easy to overlook. But that’s where the real story lives, not just what was built, but what it was built in response to.

You don’t need to manufacture a story structure if you can name that. The relevance takes care of itself.

4. Story vs. Spin—Where Credibility Breaks

Even when teams begin with something real—a hard problem, a failed attempt—it often disappears before it reaches your audience. Brand polish and legal reviews strip away specifics. What’s left is safe, but forgettable.

Security professionals notice. Messaging that focuses on generalities, such as “enterprise-ready,” “scalable visibility,” and “end-to-end,” fails to resonate with teams that’ve endured hollow launches and unmet expectations.

The real edge goes to stories that do more than claim value; they show it:

• Wiz: “We had access to everything, and it still wasn’t good enough.”
  
• CrowdStrike: a customer recounting how alert fatigue from clunky workflows burned out their team.
  
• Cyberhaven: a direct summary of how a malicious Chrome extension harvested session tokens.

These aren’t polished marketing narratives. They’re honest accounts. They work because they’re real, not because they're perfect.

If your story needs gloss to be interesting, it’s probably not a story; it’s spin.

5. What Good Looks Like—Beyond the Wiz Example

Wiz gets cited a lot for a reason, but they’re not alone. Some of the most effective storytelling in cybersecurity doesn’t come from the biggest budget—it comes from the clearest understanding of what buyers live through.

Torq: Describe what changed

Torq doesn’t lead with buzzwords. It explains how workflows improve. One breakdown showed how incident response time dropped from 30 minutes to under five. Not through abstract benefits—through step-by-step clarity.

Vanta: Name the cost

Vanta’s best campaigns don’t just talk about SOC 2, they focus on what it feels like to do compliance manually—the delays, the second-guessing, the team burnout. That tension does the work without needing exaggeration.

These stories works because it’s grounded. They don’t try to impress—they just name what was broken and how it improved. That’s what makes them believable. And that’s what most cybersecurity content is still missing.

Final Thought

You don’t need to invent a better story. You need to stop burying the real one. The best cybersecurity marketing doesn’t dramatize. It names what happened, what changed, and why it mattered.

That’s enough—if you let it be.

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