How to build trust and look credible as a B2B company
A car looks like a car. An off-road 4x4 looks like it belongs in the mountains. It has a purpose you can recognise instantly, even if you’ve never driven one.
A crossover SUV often doesn’t.
It borrows the symbols of an off-road 4x4, but underneath it’s usually a comfortable car with a raised chassis. Or put bluntly: it’s a vehicle that hasn’t decided what it wants to be.
SUVs have become an umbrella for many buyer desires - utility, style, perceived ruggedness, and elevated seating position. They try to do everything at once, which means they stand for nothing in particular. In contrast, an off-road 4x4 has a clear use case and design intent.
4×4, photo by Andrei Dan on Unsplash
Crossover, photo by concaverwheels
That’s exactly what many companies do when they reach for the most tempting positioning line in the world:
“We’re premium… but affordable.”
It sounds smart. It sounds like a competitive advantage you can build a company on. In the early days, it can even work.
Then reality arrives, and it doesn’t care about your intentions.
The romance phase: when “affordable premium” feels like a strategy
In discovery sessions with clients, we hear the same sentence again and again: “We deliver high quality at an affordable price. Our competitors are overpriced.” When we mirror it back with a label - “So you mean affordable premium?” - founders visibly relax. Their face lights up with that look of being understood.
Because it feels like the noble path. The founder isn’t greedy. The founder is building something excellent for a fair price - for people who deserve better options. Pricing low feels like a shortcut to momentum, and over-delivering feels like a shortcut to loyalty.
Photo by Farnoosh Abdollahi on Unsplash
That’s the romantic version of the plan.
Then the company grows, the stakes rise, and that “plan” starts producing a quieter outcome: a trust gap.
Not because the company isn’t good enough - but because it’s better than it looks.
The reality phase: “premium” isn’t features - it’s reduced risk
It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling a product or a service. It’s never a one-time purchase - it is an ongoing relationship. This requires ongoing investment in onboarding, support, reliability, security, and continuous improvements.
In B2B, “premium” isn’t a nicer UI or more features on the pricing page.
Premium is the buyer feeling safe.
Feeling safe that the implementation won’t fail, the team won’t disappear, and the product won’t break at the wrong moment. Feeling safe that security won’t become a headline. Safe that when something goes wrong, someone competent will pick up the phone.
That kind of safety is expensive to build. It requires talent, process, and time. It requires product velocity that doesn’t depend on heroic founder nights.
It requires a margin.
This is the moment founders start understanding why competitors charge more. Not because they’re all insatiable crooks. Often, because they’re funding the infrastructure that turns promises into outcomes.
This is where “affordable premium” starts quietly killing companies - because it postpones the choice you can’t postpone forever.
The fork in the road, founders try to avoid
Photo by Jack van Tricht on Unsplash
Every company eventually has to make a decision, even if no one says it out loud. As Alex Hormozi put it:
“Either solve the problems of a few rich people or a lot of poor people. But don’t get stuck in between trying to sell average products at average prices to average people. That’s where businesses bleed, and ambition goes to die.”
One path is to be meaningfully affordable, which usually means standardised value at scale. You win by simplicity, self-serve onboarding, and a product experience that doesn’t require a human to hold the customer’s hand. That can be a great strategy - but it isn’t “premium.” It’s efficient, sharp, and intentionally constrained.
The other path is to be truly premium, which means you charge enough to fund outcomes. You win through authority and trust. You narrow your ideal customer profile until it clicks. You invest in onboarding and support. You build a reputation that reduces perceived risk. That can also be a great strategy - but it isn’t “affordable.”
What quietly breaks companies is the third path: trying to stand in the middle, trying to communicate “premium” while signalling “don’t worry, we’re still affordable.”
That middle isn’t balanced. It reads like indecision - just like the SUV.
The “SUV positioning” problem
This is where the SUV metaphor matters, because what you’re describing isn’t a pricing issue. It’s a commitment issue.
You can see it in how the brand gets discussed internally. The language becomes hesitant and self-censoring: “Make it premium, but not too premium. Make it bold, but not too bold. Make it different, but still safe.”
Founders think this is a nuance. It isn’t. It’s fear.
And buyers can sense it.
That’s why companies stuck in the middle start hearing contradictions in sales conversations. Some prospects treat them as expensive, because the company tried to look premium. Others treat them as risky because the company didn’t fully signal maturity.
The worst part is that both groups are reacting rationally: the brand is telling two stories at once.
How to know if you have this problem?
If any of these sound familiar, you’re paying the trust tax:
You get on calls and spend the first 10 minutes “explaining yourselves”
You’re often treated like a smaller, earlier-stage team than you are
Prospects like you but “need to think about it”
You feel forced to compete on price more than you should
Referrals convert better than cold traffic (because trust is borrowed)
That’s not random. That’s your brand under-signalling your real capability.
The outcome is predictable. Sales cycles stretch. Objections multiply. Discounting becomes normal. Deals close only when the founder compromises. Delivery suffers because pricing never funded the promise in the first place. Churn increases. The team burns out.
The company stays small.
The hidden cost: the market punishes “in-between” more than “cheap”
Many founders believe the biggest threat is looking cheap. In reality, the bigger threat is looking undecided.
A clearly affordable product can still win, because the customer understands what they’re buying and why it costs what it costs. A truly premium product can win because the customer understands the value and the reduced risk.
But “premium and affordable” without a clear trade-off creates uncertainty.
And in business,
uncertainty is expensive.
It slows decisions, triggers procurement scrutiny, invites comparison shopping, and makes “we’ll think about it” the default outcome.
That’s why the middle becomes invisible. Not because it’s objectively bad, but because it doesn’t land anywhere in the buyer’s mind. It isn’t a category. It isn’t a clear story. It isn’t a decisive promise.
Clarity creates authority. Indecision creates friction.
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash
What to do instead
The fix isn’t “raise prices” as a reflex. The fix is choosing what you’re actually going to be premium at - and being honest about what you won’t.
Premium can mean speed, reliability, depth, specialisation, design, service, compliance, or outcomes. Pick one, then build your business model around delivering it consistently.
Then align the trust signals:
decisive language (not apologetic)
a visual system that’s memorable (not generic)
a website that feels modern and grown-up (not “template energy”)
proof that matches the claim (case studies, numbers, process)
This is how you close the perception gap.
Back to the SUV
The SUV wants the symbolism of an off-road 4x4 while keeping the comfort of a car. It looks capable without being fully accountable to capability.
Photo by Christian Wadstein on Unsplash
“In-between” positioning does the same thing. It borrows the symbolism of premium while refusing to commit fully. It tries to look established without being decisive enough to be memorable.
That’s why it becomes a slow form of death: not because the company is weak, but because the market never gets the clean signal that says, “These people are the safe choice.”
If you’re reading this and thinking, “We’re better than we look,” you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common growth bottlenecks for genuinely good teams. The fix is not “more content.” It’s almost always clarity - and a brand system that makes that clarity visible in seconds.
That’s what we build at Cosmonavt: strategy, brand identity, and motion, treated as one system. The goal isn’t to look fancy. The goal is to make your company feel inevitable: a clear category, a clear promise, and clear confidence.
We usually start with a focused kickoff where the founder helps set the truth - what you’re premium at, who it’s for, and what you refuse to be. Then we translate that into a visual identity and a modern, animated presence that signals maturity the moment someone lands on your site.
If you want to see whether this is your bottleneck, send us your homepage and one competitor you’re compared against. We’ll tell you, plainly, where the trust is leaking - and what would move the needle fastest. We do 3 free brand/ website audits a month for founders - send us your project link.
P.S. “Affordable premium” is a term we coined after hearing the same ambition repeated: high-quality product, fair price. The ambition is good. The trap is staying undecided long enough that your brand becomes neutral - and neutral brands don’t get chosen quickly.
Ivena Hlebarova is a brand designer and the co-founder of Cosmonavt. She is fond of great stories in any shape or form and is endlessly curious about how shapes, forms, and colours influence our perception and how to help brands communicate humanely with people.