So Yeah, We Tried Slack: The Anti-Corporate B2B Campaign That Actually Worked
Slack's 'So Yeah, We Tried Slack' campaign broke every rule of enterprise software marketing: no jargon, no ROI charts, no enterprise testimonials. Just honest, conversational accounts of how real teams changed the way they worked. It made B2B marketing feel human.
Enterprise software marketing in 2019 followed recognisable conventions. ROI calculators. Analyst quotes. Case studies featuring a Fortune 500 CIO explaining how the platform had reduced operational costs by a measurable percentage. The visual language was confident and impersonal: glass office towers, people in suits looking at screens. The implicit audience was the procurement team, not the person who would actually use the software every day.
Slack’s 2019 brand campaign operated from different assumptions entirely. Called “So Yeah, We Tried Slack,” it told customer stories in the voice of people who had actually used the product: team leads, designers, engineers, marketing managers. The language was conversational and specific. The stories were honest about the adjustment period, the initial scepticism, the colleague who was slow to adopt. The tone was completely unlike anything else in the B2B software category.
Slack’s Competitive Position in 2019
By the start of 2019, Slack had approximately 10 million daily active users and was growing quickly in the enterprise segment. The company had built this through a bottom-up distribution model: individual users adopted Slack, found it significantly better than the email and internal communication tools they had been using, and introduced it to their organisations. Enterprise sales followed user adoption rather than preceding it.
This model had worked very well. But Slack faced a structural threat that no amount of product quality or organic adoption could fully address. Microsoft had launched Teams in 2017 and bundled it with Office 365, the suite already installed in the majority of large enterprises. For an IT buyer, the relevant comparison was not “Slack versus Teams on product quality” but “Slack at its subscription cost versus Teams at zero additional cost, already deployed and integrated with existing Microsoft infrastructure.”
Brand investment was, in this context, a competitive necessity: individual user advocacy was the mechanism of Slack’s growth, and brand preference was what made that advocacy happen.
The Campaign Format
“So Yeah, We Tried Slack” was developed by Slack’s in-house brand studio. The format was deliberately simple: customer accounts of adopting Slack, told in the actual voice of the people involved. The phrase itself is a piece of authentic language, the kind of casual summary someone gives a colleague rather than a testimonial prepared for a press release.
The campaign appeared across digital channels, out-of-home placements in major US cities, and in print. The stories varied: a remote engineering team that stopped losing context in long email threads, a creative agency that reduced meeting time after moving project communication into channels, a customer support team whose response times improved. Each story was specific enough to be credible and general enough to be recognisable to anyone who had worked in a team facing similar coordination problems.
What the campaign explicitly did not do was speak the language of enterprise procurement. There were no uptime guarantees, no compliance certifications, no security architecture summaries. Those things matter to IT departments and Slack addressed them through its sales process and documentation. The brand campaign spoke to a different audience: the individual contributor who would advocate for Slack in their organisation and needed a reason to make the case.
The New York Times Open Letter
One earlier execution is essential to understanding the full brand posture. When Microsoft Teams launched in 2017, Slack ran a full-page open letter in the New York Times addressed to Microsoft directly. The letter acknowledged Microsoft’s scale and resources, made the case for what Slack was building, and ended by wishing them well in figuring out what their users actually needed. It was widely shared across the technology industry and established a brand voice that carried forward into 2019: confident but not aggressive, honest about the competitive landscape, treating Microsoft as a serious conversation partner rather than a target to dismiss.
Why the Brand Voice Mattered
Slack’s brand studio operated on a principle that the brand voice and the product voice should be indistinguishable. The loading screen copy, error message language, notification tone, customer success communications: all held to the same standard as the advertising. Authenticity was structural rather than aspirational because the brand lived inside the product. Slack’s investment was protected by the fact that the product delivered what the brand voice implied: direct, human, designed for the person using it rather than the procurement team buying it.
The IPO and the Microsoft Outcome
Slack went public via direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange on June 20, 2019, at a valuation of approximately $23 billion. The direct listing itself was a brand statement: Slack’s management argued they did not need the traditional roadshow process because brand strength meant institutional investors already understood the company’s story.
The following years illustrated the limits of brand advantage when facing structural distribution. Microsoft Teams’ user numbers grew rapidly through 2020 and 2021, driven by enterprise IT departments standardising on the Microsoft stack. Among individual users who had experienced both products, Slack consistently scored higher on satisfaction metrics, but user preference did not reliably override procurement decisions driven by zero-marginal-cost bundling. Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack in July 2021 for $27.7 billion gave Slack the distribution infrastructure it could not build independently.
What Slack demonstrated is that brand investment in B2B software is necessary but not sufficient. It makes bottom-up distribution work by giving users a product they advocate for and creates the word-of-mouth velocity that drives organic enterprise adoption. It cannot beat structural distribution advantages when those advantages are large enough. Brand must be matched by a distribution strategy the brand can actually support.
Key Results
- User Growth: Slack grew from 10 million to 12.5 million daily active users in 2019
- Enterprise Customer Growth: Customers paying over $100,000/year grew 67% year-over-year in 2019
- IPO Valuation: Slack went public via direct listing in June 2019 at a $23 billion valuation
- Brand Awareness: Campaign drove measurable increases in unaided brand awareness among target enterprise audience
- Acquisition: Salesforce acquired Slack in July 2021 for $27.7 billion
SWOT Analysis
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Key Takeaway
Slack's brand campaign succeeded because it matched the product's personality. The honest, no-nonsense voice of 'So Yeah, We Tried Slack' felt like the product itself: direct, human, slightly irreverent. In enterprise marketing where trust is built slowly, authenticity at the brand level can accelerate the sales conversation.
