Chris Hare

The Storied Future

The Storied Future podcast provides the knowledge and inspiration C-Suite leaders need to bend the future to their will. We interview experts, innovators, and purpose-driven leaders who have harnessed the power of strategic narrative to align everyone from the buyer to the boardroom around a shared vision of tomorrow.

Storied guests include:

Bracken Darrell, CEO of Logitech 

Heather Dowdy, Child of Deaf Adults and Director of Product Accessibility at Netflix

Mark Stouse, CEO at Proof Analytics, Former CMO at Honeywell Aerospace

Rishi Dave, Expert Partner in B2B Marketing, Bain & Company

Pete Sauerborn, Chairman and CEO, FTD

Ebbie Parsons, Managing Partner, Yardstick Management

Mary Shea, Co-CEO of Mediafly, former Principal Analyst at Forrester 

Jake Wood, Co-Founder at Team Rubicon, CEO at Groundswell

Erica Brinker, Chief Commercial Officer, Array Technologies, Former CMO at Honeywell

Aaron Mitchell, Architect of the Netflix 2% Pledge of $100 Million into Black-owned Banks

Jamie Cleghorn, Senior Partner, Bain & Company 

Kyle Arteaga, CEO, Bulleit Group

Host of The Storied Future Podcast

Chris Hare is a narrative advisor and coach for conscious CEOs, founders, and executives. He helps high-performing leaders navigate the transition from ownership to exit by unlocking the power of their stories in a way that enables them to uncover their why, travel through uncertainty, create what's next, and find purpose beyond profit. 

Chris also helps mid-market founders and CEOs increase company value through strategic narratives that enable them to successfully navigate transactions, transitions, and transformations | Sell-side pitch decks, coaching, and storytelling for M&A | Corporate narratives to align board to buyer around a new future in a way that makes the business strategy a reality | M&A alignment, digital transformation, channel conflict

Chris's storied impact:

-Building a strategic narrative for a mid-market paint distributor that's transforming their company from the boardroom to the frontlines

-Crafting the FY25 Microsoft AI for Energy Industry narrative pitch deck

-Creating a strategy and campaign designed to shift a narrative for an $XXX billion division of a $1 trillion company

-Architecting a strategic narrative for GoDaddy that aligned everyone from COO, CCO, CBO, CMO, VP of Comms, and the brand team around a customer-first vision of the future. Then created a data storytelling platform to help them bring this vision to life. 

“I won’t pursue any strategy in the future without having the narrative clearly identified, like we've done with The Storied Future.” Andrew Walsh, CEO, Applicate Commerce

“Chris and his team helped us craft a powerful strategic narrative that captured the spirit of the millions of everyday  entrepreneurs that GoDaddy serves.” Karen Tillman, CCO

Founder, Executive Narrative Advisor

Experience the power of Atomic Storytelling and discover how this proven framework has helped founders, CEOs and GTM leaders at mid-market companies and tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft to shift the future.

If you want to find and tell the story that will get you in the right room, increase the impact of your go-to-market strategy, close your next round of funding, transform your leadership, or unlock your purpose, this talk is for you. You’ll learn what Atomic Stories are, where you can find them, and how you can use them to create and fuel your Narrative FlywheelTM. You’ll also feel the difference this approach can make as you experience stories from leaders at Logitech, TOPGUN, NASA, Netflix, Amazon, and more.

Keynote Speaker - Atomic Storytelling

Mixing Board

Mixing Board is a community of communications and brand marketing leaders that share knowledge with each other and organizations that can benefit from accessing members’ expertise.

Member

The Outlier Project

The Bar X Project

Chief Storyteller (Pro Bono)

Microsoft

I led content marketing for two global engagement programs, co-owning customer journey and overseeing content audit, content strategy and content creation for delivery across the marketing funnel.

Senior Product Marketing Manager

Built a global marketing campaign—How to Crush Your Sales Quota—with 50+ connected assets designed to entice enterprise VPs of sales down the funnel and into nurture. Managed agency of record, content strategy, creative, budget, interviews with industry thought leaders, and site dev. Wrote copy on all three campaign sites and pre-roll videos, including a women's crew video that generated over 1.2MM views and 800 shares on Facebook. Signed and managed Motofish Images to create original sport photography and video. Created a library of assets to help bring the new Dynamics brand story to life.

Senior Content Marketing Manager

Amazon Services

Built a content marketing framework to discover and produce small business stories at scale. Drove execution from prototype, to framework construction, to scaling and production of 25+ interviews in less than 3 months—for ~$3K a piece. Constructed a content matrix to meta-tag all interview content across 45 dimensions, enabling the production of up to 75 individual content pieces from one interview.   

Produced an Amazon Services brand anthem video, weaving all five products into one story, and created a to-customer campaign delivered via the home page of Amazon as well as through email and social. Resulted in 250MM+ impressions. 

Won the 2014 NA Seller Services Hackathon by creating an innovative new way to use mobile and social to add unique selection to the marketplace. Competed against 20+ teams from US and India in a Shark Tank-style pitch and live code demo.

Digital Marketing Editor

Developed creative for national campaigns, events, and customer marketing initiatives. Orchestrated a successful new business pitch into Amazon.com and wrote the winning pitch deck for a $1 million Microsoft RFP.

-Concepted and wrote copy for the Webby-nominated Volkswagen Group of America living case study
 for Microsoft Lync
-Wrote a humorous eBook on Marketing 101 for Windows app developers 
-Co-authored a white paper on the consumerization of IT for Microsoft
-Created campaigns and content for Microsoft CSS, Dynamics, EPG, MSDN, Office 365, Public Sector, SMB, Surface, Windows, Windows Azure, and more.
-Conjured up copy for video, direct mail, websites, and ads that reached millions of T-Mobile customers

Senior Copywriter

Write Brained Hare

Chief Idea Guy

Six8 Media

-Wrote and produced a full-length DVD for kids and teens featuring NFL-great Brett Favre
-Created a series of case studies for Microsoft COO Kevin Turner showcasing how SQL Server, SharePoint, .NET, SQL, Hyper-V, & BI are changing lives and businesses around the world
-Researched and wrote the brief for Microsoft SVP Andy Lees’ Worldwide Partners Conference keynote address video
-Authored a $1 million congressional funding proposal for Swedish Medical Center’s physical and IT security initiative 
-Produced a financial tips video for Seattle author Jill Keto that landed her a national appearance on FOX Morning Show

Principal/Writer+Producer

Integrated Talent LLC

Business Development Manager

CEO Narratives That Advance Business Strategies and Transform Leaders | Principal at The Storied Future| Host of The Storied Future Podcast

Stories have the power to transform you, your company, and the world. Yet, the most powerful stories are often the hardest to uncover. That's where I come in. Using the Atomic Storytelling™ framework, I unlock the potential energy in your life and career stories, and create a narrative that not only reflects your true self but also aligns with your professional journey, driving you and your audience toward an irresistible vision of the future—what I call Future Gravity.

Future Gravity May Be a Fit If You…
✅ Are navigating a transition (succession, exit, retirement)
✅ Want to build your influence online
✅ Have a story the world needs to hear
✅ Want to integrate who you are with what you do
✅ Want to build a different future
✅ Are tired of going it alone
✅ Are seeking to land a new role
✅ Want to launch something new
✅ Want to capture your legacy

What Future Gravity Can Do for You…
✅ Establish a differentiated thought leadership platform
✅ Earn trust in town halls, board meetings, and one-on-ones
✅ Transform your leadership
✅ Give the media a reason to interview you
✅ Build influence on social media
✅ Write the book or land the keynote
✅ Get sought out for the next job
✅ Make your purpose a reality

"Chris is a storyteller who unlocks the story of you. His deep curiosity and kindness opened up the aperture in my story, he helped me reveal myself to me. A most magical gift." Whitney Johnson, CEO, Disruption Advisors

“Most PR agencies are great for getting you on the road but don’t always go deep into who’s driving. Chris couldn’t be more different. He’ll put you behind the wheel of a storytelling Ferrari, crafted inch by inch to tell the most compelling story out there – yours.” Ali Winkle, CEO, Just Drive Media

Founder + Chief Narrative Strategist

The Storied Future helps brand, marketing, and PR leaders to spark conversation, build connection, and accelerate growth through strategic narratives and authentic human stories that move audiences to action.

Liam Moroney

MarTech

Contributing Writer

Storybook Marketing

Owner

Revenue Collective

Suas Marketing

Founder

RevGenius

Notarize

SVP Revenue Marketing

Vibes

VP Revenue Marketing

Rocketrip

VP, Marketing

Techstars

Mentor

Monetate 

Sr. Director, Growth Marketing

Co-Founder, Storybook Marketing | Full-service demand generation agency

I lead Storybook Marketing, a consultancy that specializes in brand marketing strategy, to help companies become the brand that buyers think of, using an evidence-based approach to marketing.

We offer customized services, consulting, team workshops and training, to level up marketing programs so they are capturing market share and not just leads.

It really feels like Share of Search is having a moment right now as a foundational marketing measurement.

WARC recently showed a great case study from adidas, where the brand rallied behind the metric and saw strong correlations between search and sales, measuring it for over 100 brands.

And we’ve also seen Kantar coming out behind the metric of late, with their own research showing a 90% correlation between search and salience. 

I’ve seen with the Storybook platform just how much it translates into B2B as well, from early stage startups to global enterprise brands, and how much it presents a picture of buying interest and not just broad brand awareness.
 
Share of search is not a new metric, it’s worth saying, with the foundational work from James Hankins and Les Binet bringing it to light and legitimacy being years ago, but it feels like it’s the measure that is meeting the current challenges in marketing.

Brand marketing is being embraced again, but measuring it through attribution tools doesn’t work, traditional market sureys are viable or affordable for many, and econometrics isn’t the right answer for smaller brands.

What got me most excited about SoS was its accessibility. 

Small brands can access it just as easily as big brands, and it can be built in ways that fit any budget. 

There’s something wonderful about an approach that’s highly effective, broadly applicable to even niche markets, and available to everyone. 

I’m really excited about the momentum that it’s picking up, and the role that Storybook is playing in where we can take it.

Brand Marketer | Storybook Marketing | MarTech contributor

Meaningful product differentiation is always a temporary thing as competitors inevitably catch up, but it's also what gives rise to brands and even categories in the first place.

And, more importantly, it's also often a matter of pure semantic classification.

The big debate in marketing about whether distinctiveness is what really matters over differentiation, in my opinion, has a blind spot that comes from looking from the perspective of large brands in established categories. 

In the earlier days of product and category lifecycles, there is often real differentiation. There has to be or we'd never see new products.

But when products deliver value in their differentiation and gain market traction, it doesn't just disappear through more competition - it also evolves the category classifications themselves, which eliminates differentiation far more and in permanent ways.

Take the simplistic example of the milk category, where the release of non-dairy options brings clearly differentiated options - so long as the buyer considers them all in the mental category of milk.

Some options gain more popularity than others, which gives rise to new category classifications as marketers think of them - suddenly there is dairy and plant-based, possibly narrower again in the form of nut milks, and thus there is less differentiation as we see them in new groups.

But that doesn't guarantee that buyers mentally classify that way, and when they stop thinking of them as one category is subjective and a condition of category maturity.

The pedantic point is that once categories mature, whether it's milk or enterprise ERP solutions, once we create new classifications and categories of COURSE it makes differentiation a moot point.

But it doesn't mean it doesn't matter on the path to growth. 

It's not unlike evolution, where subtle change is common until one day it's meaningful enough and widespread enough to become its own species. Then, suddenly and because of a classification, everyone in that species is more similar than they are different.

But, all things evolve, including markets.

It is said that B2B tech is in a pipeline crisis, but I think we're really in a marketing crisis that requires harder conversations. 

There is no doubt that pipeline is very hard to come by for many right now, and the things that once seemed to work have stalled out. But there is much more to the story I believe.

In a great article, linked below, from Dave Kellogg around this topic there's a line that jumped out to me:

"Think holistically. You might only be the CMO, but you need to look across all pipeline sources. The job is to start quarters with sufficient coverage and notably not just to hit marketing pipegen goals."

The thing is, that shouldn't be the job, and it speaks volumes that we are "only" the CMO. But Dave is spot on that this is the current position for most.

Similarly, in the graphic below from a Kyle Poyar piece, research points to a world where we are operating in motions. This is what GTM has become, and marketing is usually a manager of a subset.

But, motions are simply a means to carry out an underlying strategy. They are tactical efforts yet this is what marketing largely is now. 

It's not even just promotion it seems, but worse - it's conversion.

What we're calling inbound is really just operational lead generation, and it misses the reality that all of this only works when there is strong underlying category growth and mental availability in buyers.

The motions of GTM are mostly a form or physical or purchase availability, where we are setting up entry points into a sales conversation. 

In healthy markets many of those will bring in buyers who aren't even strongly aware of the company because there's enough demand there, but it starts to fail once the market conditions aren't as favorable.

It's not an accident that a brand with 50% market share will see about 50% of the deals coming their way in the coming quarter. 

It's not that all of their GTM motions worked just as well as previous quarters to create pipeline coverage, but because the weight of their existing market share drives brand exposures and encounters, SEO/GEO list placements, and word-of-mouth that will put them safely in upcoming consideration sets.

These are the stable forces that smaller brands are trying to overcome when they want to grow, and when we reduce marketing to motions and selective channel ownership then we never address the root issues.

Similarly, the conditions of the market itself determine much more than any motion we can deploy. A 20% decline in category demand means less to go around for everyone, and that radically changes the difficultly level of hitting a target that isn't accounting for this.

Marketing strategy is company strategy, and the role of the CMO needs major rethinking because right now it's more akin to a VP of Demand Gen, if even that.

Which means we're depending on someone else to bring the market-level thinking, and it does not appear that those skills are in great supply in the non-marketing C-Suite.

A sad consequence of marketing's reduction to promotion is in how much it's distorted what we think marketing should be credited with and capable of.

For example, picking a good market to be in.

Deciding to launch a new product into a market that has enough and growing demand to buy it is a crucial aspect of marketing strategy.

The evidence of this is in the failures, sadly, from the infamous New Coke launch to the underwhelming uptake of 3D TVs, or the Metaverse, the AI Pin, or VR headsets, and countless others.

No amount of creative advertising can save a product nobody is willing to pay for, and it turns out to be incredibly easy to overestimate who will.

Yet, marketing often has no say in this reality setting, and is often the execution function acting in good faith that the company leadership have sized demand correctly. 

I've seen more than my share of companies going upmarket, or expanding geographically on little to no market research, and then blaming marketing for the failure that followed.

Marketing is not about turning a wishful market outcome into a reality by selling it hard enough to the market, and many products have failed on the arrogance of a leadership team who didn't listen to the market. 

Marketing is also often denied credit for demand supplied by being visible in the market. 

While still in-house, I once had a CRO argue that marketing shouldn't get credit for the organic inbounds that we generated, since we didn't actually do anything to directly produce them. 

Marketing is often seen as a channel source, isolated to producing pipeline or customers from a select few attributable sources, which forces the question: who then is responsible for the broad awareness of the brand that feeds all sources?

The reason marketing should be a 4P endeavour is not just some power grab for CMOs to be responsible for product, but rather because companies so often fail because of bad 4P fundamentals.

And when you isolate marketing to just promotion, someone else still needs to manage the other 3 in unison and with trained skill.

We've made it so that marketing has to show that it has acumen to be at the financial table, which is fair, but so too must we make sure that owners of the Ps are actually capable themselves.

And, often, that's not the case.

Much as we’d like it to be, marketing is not deterministic or meritocratic.

Great ideas and execution often fail, and mediocre ones can thrive - the common variable is the conditions in which the marketing happens. 

Yet so much of marketing advice and thinking, from downloadable playbooks to reputable marketing science bestsellers, talk about how to grow as though it will happen so long as you follow their advice.

We see discussions asking “what’s still working in marketing?” and books explaining how brands grow, but neither tends to include the critical addendums of “in these current conditions” or “under the right conditions”.

It’s become a lost persepctive in much of marketing to begin with an understanding of the market before getting tactical.

Instead, growth is attempted from the inside out. 

Rather than trying to understand how many people might be buying a tool like ours or solving a problems like we solve, we pay technology and ad vendors to simply find them by monitoring behavior that might resemble buying. 

Rather than trying to balance how much we advertise with the brand exposures that our audience are receiving from competing solutions, our attribution tools instead talk about how many days it will take or how many exposures we need in order to turn someone into a buyer. 

When we operate from this position, we end up seeing our CAC and ROI change but lack any context about what might be causing it.

We stare down the barrel of big quarterly targets, often without any clue if the conditions are favoring us getting there, instead being treated like we’re doing less effective work in which we hold all the cards and control all the variables.

None of this is to say that marketing is futile and growth impossible, but to say that growth is conditional and situational. 

If have have amazing conditions giving us a tailwind, we can see amazing things with relative ease, but we have to act very differently if the conditions aren’t as favorable. 

Great businesses closed during Covid, not because of their poor marketing but because extreme conditions came their way without warning. Similarly, many online businesses were overcome with demand they certainly didn’t generate.

Does it make one better than the other - of course not. In fact, both may well have been running identical plays.

This is the nature of markets.

We can’t control them, or even predict them, but we can better understand them. 

And I truly believe that those who see the world from that bigger market position are best set up to make effective decisions about marketing strategy.

If we accept that mental availability is what’s needed in order to grow a brand, then we also have to put that into the context of the zero-sum market it needs to happen in.

The main reason that brand awareness alone doesn’t guarantee growth is because that awareness needs to be connected to and recalled during buying situations.

Otherwise, it’s just a brand you’ve heard of but never think of, and that’s much of where mental availability has come to popularity. 

But because buyers typically only hold a few brands in their mental consideration set, being recalled during more situations also means someone else needs to be recalled less.

And that is a very non-trivial part of the equation, because it means the efficacy of our efforts are directly affected by the efforts or our competitors.

If, while we’re putting effort into reaching the broadest audience with our distinctive assets, creating associations with Category Entry Points (CEPs), then we also have to be balancing that with how much everyone else is doing the same. 

Because if everyone else is matching our reach efforts, then nothing is likely to change much. 

That’s where the thinking of Les Binet and Peter Field still has so much relevance - Excess Share of Voice (ESOV) is a major variable because we need to be upsetting the balance of things if we are to change the balance of things.

One of marketing’s biggest flaws, I believe, is in how often we forgot that our efforts are part of a complex system. 

Just because someone likes our ad and finds it funny doesn’t mean they’ll buy us over the competition they hear about much more often. Just because they come to recognize our brand assets doesn’t mean they’ll think of it more unless it’s more familiar AND more seen and experienced than before.

That’s a function of reach, but crucially in relation to the reach of alternatives.

It’s also why I’ve come to be much more partial to Dale W. Harrison’s Brand Recall at Purchase (BRaP) because it is a much more clear reminder that we’re trying to enter an exclusive and zero-sum position. 

Marketing needs to be grounded to the rules of the market, because it’s all to easy to see our jobs as to increase what we think of as a static and isolated thing, be it brand awareness, mental availability, created demand, or some other concept. 

In reality, we’re always trying to take up space and upset the status quo - in how often buyers hear about brands and in who they recall. 

We grow through disruption of the current order, and that only happens when our efforts are directly weighed against them.

There has been a lot of debate in the marketing community about how exactly brands grow, despite books with that exact title, and what I think is crucial in that debate is the reality of how difficult market share itself is to move.

I've built hundreds of views in Share of Search now, across all kinds of industries, and for almost all mature categories the story is one of highly stable and holding market shares for the leaders. 

But when I find examples where that isn't the case, as in the dramatic example here, another sobering picture emerges:

When major market share changes occur, there are usually one of two things happening, and often both together. 

1. Someone needs to give away their position

When an incumbent owns the majority of the share, something typically has to happen far beyond a better competitor coming along, except for the rare generational leaps in technology.

Most of the time a leader falls is because of myopia, incompetence, scandal, or horrible luck.

Take this example, for the Password Manager category, where LastPass had a strong leader position until they saw major data breaches - a.k.a the literal last thing you'd want to happen to a password manager. 

The erosion of trust, along with other factors, had a very serious impact on their reputation and share, and it gave opportunity and rise to competitors happy to take it while they were weak.

Many brands saw huge growth in this fray, and all in a category that is only growing just 1.6% annually.

Which brings up the other condition that is often found where major new winners emerge:

2. Massively outsized marketing investment

Much of the growth we see in tech comes from the fact that competitors are showing up with an ability to command a Share of Voice (SoV) so far in excess of what they'd be able to spend with their actual revenue. 

Unfair as it is, that advantage often moves mountains, and when paired with a fast growing category makes for many a unicorn (so long as the growth continues).

When these conditions aren't met, then the world often stays as it is from a market share position, with brand growth being fed by the category itself. 

This, much as we'd like to pretend otherwise, and popular books would like to ignore, is the reality of markets. 

But not necessarily a bleak one. 

This is also why marketing NEEDS to be bigger than Promotion. We can't create better market conditions, nor can we change them, but we absolutely can understand them and factor them into the strategy.

Should you go upmarket? Or downmarket? Should you explore other geographies? Adjacent categories? Rethink pricing? Explore M&A? Invest more in R&D?

These are marketing questions as much as business ones, and marketing should be the voice that brings reality into the executive conversation.

In fact, it may well be the most important one currently missing in many a company strategy and its growth expectations.

I'm incredibly bullish about making Storybook the leader in brand tracking, and that means being more direct about its value.

Building the platform has been a genuine labor of love, and it has developed into what I believe to be the most detailed and most strategically insightful view of brand on the market.

It's already being used across an incredible range of industries, from early stage startups to true household name brands. 

I've seen the data pressure tested against internal revenue data as well as validated market share pictures, and each time it makes me more and more confident about the potential that the data has for marketing strategy.

Far more than knowing how many people are searching for your brand - it's a lens to better understand where the demand is and whether your brand efforts are effectively working towards winning a growing share.

I really believe this is the future of strategic brand tracking.

It’s often said in B2B tech that marketing’s job is to make sales easier, and I see that as a deep-rooted problem. 

Not just because of how self-minimizing this perspective is, but how strategically limiting. 

In a world where marketing has been reduced to just promotion, this mindset of a sales support function is somehow even more narrow. 

And that narrowness affects our thinking, where we don’t even ask the kinds of questions we might with 4P thinking.

Questions like: 

❓ Do we actually need a sales team?

❓ Are we organised around how we want to sell instead of how customers want to buy?

Of course, the answer is very often yes to needing sales, but the question is something which should be possible to ask, if not essential. 

It is often exactly the kind of question that is needed to be asked when brands are trying to carve out a part of the market for themselves. 

The books are littered with these questions, too: 

Dyson asked “do vacuum cleaners even need a bag?” 

Apple asked if smartphones even needed physical keyboards. 

Netflix asked if rentals needed a store. 

Salesforce asked if software needed to be installed. 

Saturn asked if buying a car needed to be such a negotiation. 

And Carvana and Tesla, back to the core point, asked if it needed sales at all. 

For sure, these brands might not been the only people asking these questions, or even the first to answer it, but the decision to answer comes from thinking about how best to serve the customer. 

Not how best to serve sales.

Category disruption is certainly not reserved for the tech industry alone. 

Real disruption - the kind that changes market share - is definitely not a common thing, but it does happen in young categories or ones experiencing strong underlying growth that ends up attracting competition.

But, the competition typically needs to be coming with either strong funding, reach, distribution, or all of the above for it to make real dents.

One really interesting category that shows how different kinds of brands can accomplish this, however, is non-alcoholic beer.

Below is a snapshot from the US market, using Share of Search and validated against real reported market share data. 

A fast growing category, the space has been steadily owned by Athletic Brewing, even against legacy beer brands, where it has owned about 20% of the market closely followed by Heineken 0.0 at about 18%.

This picture follows closely in the search data, despite it not being a product category that gets purchased online, which shows how well it acts as a brand proxy.

But, since late 2024, this category has been dramatically changed with two very different entrants.

The first was Bero, a brand owned by actor Tom Holland, and which has been getting heavy promotion through is celebrity along with advertising efforts on social media.

The initial surge in attention shows up clearly on the SoS view, and while the initial buzz has faded the brand has kept a presence with sales reaching $10m already (compared to Athletic Brewing's $100m 2024 revenue), making it a real player in the space and quickly.

The other brand was Michelob Ultra Zero, which came roaring into 2025 with all the distribution power that Anheuser-Busch has to offer, and it has reached 7% market share already by its own press release claims.

Two very different brands, but one common element - major reach ability at their disposal. 

How the category will look in 2026 is anyone's guess but, as a fan and consumer of Athletic, they are in for different competitive landscape, as their own search is trending down and new players are coming in strong, and with legacy beers all aiming for more of the market.

It is the very definition of disruption, and Share of Search data can paint a powerful picture that correlates with the financial reality.

And if you'd like to see how Storybook can build a view for your category, just send me a DM or fill out a form on the site.

My big passion with Storybook is about giving strategic shape to brand.

One of the big reasons that I believe brand gets underinvested is because the way our measurement has been set up favors short-term direct response efforts and causes brand marketing ones to look fuzzy and expendable.

I still see the narrative on LinkedIn from prominent voices that brand is what you earn the right to do after you get the demand gen numbers in a good place.

But that's a false dichotomy - often the very reason for the decline in performance marketing numbers is because of underlying issues that brand efforts needs to address.

Here's one example of where a tangible brand picture can tell a critical story.

The brand in question, when looked at through the lens of branded search, has been in decline for several years, especially within is key markets. 

That alone creates potential performance marketing problems, as there are simply fewer people searching for the brand quarter over quarter, which means automatic inclusion in fewer deals through Brand Recall at Purchase (BRaP) (credit to Dale W. Harrison for the term).

But that story becomes even more contextual when we look at the other competitors in the cohort, building a Share of Search view. 

The brand decline is not category-wide, in fact even looking at the search volume it's clear that the branded search has been transferred to the others, who had all been seeing growth over the last 4 years.

But, in 2024 something dramatic happened to an already challenging picture - one of the main competitors was acquired by a global brand.

Suddenly, there was a massive shift in the available reach and resources for that brand, and the search volume picture has shifted in quite extreme ways. 

Often acquisitions create initial spikes in interest but return to normal, but that's not what has happened here. In fact, the divide has only increased.

Now, there's no doubt a lot of extra context that could be missing here that explains the story, but objectively, our brand in question is facing very different and compounding challenges, and we can see that all in very tangible form in pictures like this.

When we have access to this information, we can much better make decisions about how we invest our marketing dollars, and how much needs to be allocated to brand and performance.

This, in my opinion, gives CMOs a truly strategic view that puts them in a position to drive the strategy, and in cases like this it might very well be crucial to success.

The biggest variable in the success of our marketing is always the conditions of the world into which it lands.

And, yet, so much of our marketing measurement treats marketing like it's all happening in a vacuum.

We look at the amount we put in against the amount we got back, inside of a usually narrow and arbitrary window, and the result is an ROI that marketing is held to and judged against.

But when that number goes in a negative direction, like many are seeing in a big way right now, we question what we can bolster that effort with that will fix it. Tighten up the targeting, layer in some intent data, maybe narrow the focus on a smaller audience and retarget them into submission. 

What rarely makes it in, however, is insights about how the world around looks. 

Is market demand still what it was? Has the competitive landscape changed? Has the activity of competitors changed? Have consumer spending or preferences changed?

Marketing has always been about the marketing, but as it's been narrowed more and more into a 1P function, so too has the view of our work narrowed. 

We have stopped being a voice of the market and customer, trading it instead for a voice of the tech stack built on internal insights.

But when we can gain that view, we have insights nobody else in the organization has. We can confirm or correct the beliefs of leadership and sales. We can better anticipate the road ahead and steer from the front rather than executing from behind.

Marketing strategy derived without insights from the market is blind hope.

Marketing does not happen in a vacuum, and our efforts are as effective as the market and competitive conditions that they meet.

We can do the same great work this year as last and see very different results if those conditions change.

That doesn't just mean what our competitors do differently, but also the macro trends in demand from consumers and the market itself, and all of this in balance is what we need to be understanding and calibrating our marketing strategy for.

What makes me optimistic is just how accessible this view has become through brand search data, so much so that it's where Storybook has firmly planted its flag. 

Unlike some of the more expensive market research and survey data, a share of search picture is available to every brand, even in the most niche categories when you know how to build it.

Because of its strong correlation with the real market share picture, I believe that it can be what market leaders can use to bring a true market level picture to the executive table and to develop more effective strategy.

And there are some simple questions that we can ask of this data to help properly put our brand and efforts into context, and that can help set up the best conditions for success.

Share of Search - Are the conditions right for growth?

A big part of my narrative these days has been on the difficulty in moving market share, and it could easily be mistaken for a narrative that growth is impossible, and of course that's not true.

Companies grow in revenue all the time, often dramatically, and every now again we do see the tables shift as leaders get unseated, especially where there is massive technological innovation.

But the truth is that disruptive events are quite rare and often require more than just a better solution to come along, but also need the incumbent to be in a vulnerable position. 

Even then, they usually require a substantial investment in marketing to capitalize on it.

Quoting Les Binet in a recent WARC podcast, "if you want to move the dial for a medium sized campaign in the UK, you need not millions, not just tens of millions, but hundreds of millions of exposures".

Excess Share of Voice (ESOV) is a very expensive endeavor if you want to maintain it for long enough to make a lasting impact. 

These are the reality of conditions that change markets, and they're often ignored as marketing teams are being pushed to create these outcomes while being efficient and perfectly attributable.

And this is why marketing strategy is so critically important. Why a 4P mentality and training is so fundamentally valuable.

Because, and especially, if you don't have all of these perfect conditions in your corner - a strong category, weak incumbent, and deep pockets - then you need to operate around them to find the paths to revenue growth.

And there are plenty, because this is where small brands usually turn into medium-sized ones.

Knowing how to spot underserved segments, and go where the buying is actively happening. Knowing how to create perceived differentiation and how to gain traction in niches enough to start looking at the bigger pie.

We've lost a lot of this because marketing doesn't often get to play in these conversations.

But it's where marketing is uniquely qualified to.

Much of how marketing works is quite simply not intuitive, a fact that is lost on all the non-marketers who throw their opinions into the mix on how we should do our jobs.

And the truth is, for me certainly, great marketing is as much about knowing how to see and operate in the realities of the market, to go where the opportunity is, as much as is about crafting great messages to win it.

Growth is a relative thing, and what can look positive in isolation might tell a very different story in context.

That's especially true when it comes to brand growth, and where a share of search view of the competitor cohort can give critical strategic context. 

Take this example view of a decade old tech company operating in a competitive B2B SaaS category. Looking at their branded search in isolation, they have been reliably growing year-over-year for the last 4 years, with a healthy 12.4% growth in the last 12 months.

The problem, though, is that the collective search of their competitor cohort - as a proxy for the category itself - has been growing much faster. 

If we take this to be the underlying growth of the category, then this brand is actually losing visibility rapidly, down a hefty 11 points in search share in the last two years, and with most of that happening in the last year alone.

As you can see from the lower chart, with the category and brand trends plotted in a normalized view, the divide is rapidly increasing in recent months as new and well-funded competitors are more aggressively or more effectively spending.

Of course, there will be always be realities where brands simply can't outspend competitors, but the impact of that does need to be accounted for in growth expectations and segmentation strategy.

And, very often, it can be less about the size of the marketing budget and how it's balanced between short-term conversion efforts and brand marketing.

Should the underlying growth of the category slow down or stop, the loss in share happening here will have very real consequences, as fewer deals come their way, which makes this a very real problem to address now.

I firmly believe that the story and data which gives marketing's its strongest position at the executive table is not zooming deeper into the pipeline, but farther out in the market itself where marketing has always historically been.

When a company doesn't know the macro trends happening around and in the category, then growth targets are based on little more than hope.

Marketing can and should be the grounded voice that puts it into context.

With the Semrush acquisition news, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the SEO competitor cohort from a Share of Search perspective.

What stuck out to me was how brand searches for the category leaders are down in 2025, despite all of the AEO/GEO conversation. 

Clearly, all of the brands are going all-in on the AI search future, but it seems plausible that brand search is going elsewhere to evaluate alternatives while these brands strengthen their positioning and capabilities around AI.

What's also been fascinating is just how stable the market share has been in the last few years in what is absolutely a competitive category (though I can hear Dale W. Harrison in my ear telling me I shouldn't be even the least bit shocked).

Semrush, Ahrefs, and Similarweb have all held its place as the leader with remarkable consistency, collectively owning nearly 85% of this cohort search.

The volatility, as it usually the case is in that 15%, where Moz has been declining in share while SE Rankings climbed up quickly this year.

It will be very interesting to see what being in the Adobe portfolio does for this category. History in tech tends to show that being owned by big tech isn't aways the advantage you'd expect, especially over the long-term.

For those deep in planning for 2026, I truly believe that one of the most valuable things you can bring in is research about the broader market.

There are a great many ways to get it, and of course Share of Search is my personal preference, but what we frequently lack is a picture of the conditions of the market and our place in it.

When we look at historical data in target setting, we're often making a bet that the conditions will remain as they were such that we'll see the same kind of outcomes, but the market has been much more volatile for many.

And there are a lot of conditions that can change:

Overall demand for our solution set can decline, especially if confidence about the economy changes or if there is category disruption like with AI in tech.

Competitors come into funding and get acquired, which can change the balance of the budgets they are able to work with, the reach they're able to have, and the share of voice they're able to command. 

New competitors can arrive, sometimes entering our category and often taking demand into adjacent ones.

That's a lot of ways to upend the conditions that were present in our historical data. 

Past, as they say, is not prologue.

Building category views and narratives with brand search data is highly accessible, and Storybook can deliver it in in a fully managed dashboard in as little as a week, with a view backwards of up to four full years across every brand and region.

We can't predict the future, but we can do better than looking only at the past in our internal metrics. 

It can provide a lot of context about what we should do, and allow us to track it as we go do it in 2026.

As buyers, we base a lot of our perceptions about the landscape on how much we hear about brands relative to each other. 

Not just in terms of advertising, but in overall brand exposure, including how often we see brands out in the world, mentioned by peers and influencers, etc.

It's one of the reasons that market share is so hard to move, since a brand ten times bigger than you will create ten times more brand exposures than you simply by its current share.

So, when we focus so much of our advertising spend on showing up the least amount necessary to convince someone, we can end up showing much less in the world than is actually needed to maintain our place, much less grow it.

That's why it's so important for marketing think from a market-level perspective, factoring in all of the things that happen around our promotional efforts, and which play a huge role in how effective they are.

Marketing is uniquely able to bring a critical perspective that is very often missing from the executive table - that of the market.

The data that drives much of company decision making is typically internal and isolated, but it massively impacted by the conditions of the world outside. And when decisions are made without external context, it often makes bad bets.

But, when marketing can speak from the perspective of the market, we can put many of these internal metrics into incredibly important context, including our own.

Are we seeing a rise because of things we're doing, or because of conditions in the market? Similarly, is our decline or rising costs of acquisition the result of our work being less effective or because it's no longer meeting external changes?

The age-old fight is for marketing to justify why it needs budget, but what if marketing were able to show that its current budget is sufficient to meet the market conditions?

What if it were able to bring early trends of threats and opportunities, instead of being reactive to the things happening in the sales numbers?

There are many ways to get views of the market, with my own focus area being using Share of Search insights, but however we get it, what matters is the narrative we can tell.

Myopic thinking and rose-tinted beliefs about where the market is and where it's going has led to many a company failure.

Marketing should be the voice of the customer and market that can help ground the company thinking. Far from trying to show we have a reason to be at the table, often the marketing one is the most important one of all.

Growing market share is a disruptive effort, but what that disruption looks like in marketing practice is often now what we expect.

The word 'disruption' has been largely stripped of meaning by Silicon Valley, where every new VC-backed tool promises to change the way we {insert thing here}, and whose marketing is often about big viral moments.

True technological disruption, in reality, tends to only come along once a generation, and most of the time successful outcomes disrupt a very different way.

Where brands increase their share of voice in the market for a prolonged period through well-planned media and distinctive creative. An effort that's no less expensive than big flashy moments in time, often much more, but which upset the balance of a market that likes equilibrium. 

It can happen through injected capital investments in marketing or achieved the decline of an incumbent's. Major shifts usually enjoy a mix of both.

The trouble is, that tech disruption thinking has embedded itself in a lot of marketing thinking, and those big moments now win over the more true kind of disruption that changes categories.

I saw just this thinking today, given as explicit advice to produce "a single, concentrated burst of story, POV, and firepower that the entire category must pay attention to", if one desires to be a market leader.

While there's truth in there somewhere, this so-called "lightning strike" marketing only creates disruption in the moment, and moments pass quickly as far as the market is concerned. 

In fact, when you're dealing with solutions people might buy once a year, or even once every 3 years, that week of viral attention is usually lost to the sands of time.

Real disruption can be much less obvious, and can feel much less exciting since it often involves sticking to a consistent look and message for the long haul.

But, just as the consistent lapping of waves can erode a cliff, so too can consistently holding a bigger presence in the market and minds of buyers erode market share.

Big moments absolutely have their place, especially in activating on better brand awareness and recall, but they are not usually the movers of markets.

The brands people think of first tend to win, and changing that order doesn't happen in moments but steadily and consistently over time.

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