Liam Moroney

Storybook Marketing

Co-Founder

RevGenius

Member

Suas Marketing

Founder

Revenue Collective

Notarize

SVP Revenue Marketing

Vibes

VP Revenue Marketing

Rocketrip

VP, Marketing

Techstars

Mentor

Monetate 

Sr. Director, Growth Marketing

NewsCred

VP, Integrated Marketing

Leading the NewsCred marketing team across functions: Demand Generation, Content Marketing, Event & Field Marketing, SEM/SEO. Member of the NewsCred leadership team.

VP, Marketing, Analytics & Insights

Defining and implementing NewsCred's content marketing performance analytics best practices. 

Working directly with our Fortune 2000 customers and across departments and functions at NewsCred to show the true business value of Content Marketing.

Director of Analytics, Center of Excellence

As a Program Director on the customer success team, I work directly with enterprise clients to build attribution models, develop demand generation and performance marketing strategies, and help prove the ROI of content marketing.

Client Advisory - Demand Generation, Marketing Attribution, Content Marketing ROI

Running NewsCred's demand generation department, managing the budget, developing the strategy, and reporting to the executive team on the results.  Reporting directly to the VP of marketing, led a team to oversee:

- Marketo + Marketing Automation process
- Development of lead generation strategy
- Email marketing strategy development
- Lead scoring, routing, and SLA process with Inside Sales
- Landing Page and Website development
- SEM/SEO Strategy and Implementation
- Budget management
- Data reporting to exec
- Development of new product development to support DG in content marketing

Demand Generation Director

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

Experienced marketing leader specializing in managing high-growth B2B marketing teams across disciplines - demand generation, content marketing, paid media, customer marketing, account-based marketing, SEM/SEO, analytics & insights, marketing automation, and marketing operations. 

Extensive experience in B2B MarTech and AdTech, with a track record of building and overhauling marketing performance engines towards aggressive pipeline and revenue goals.


Marketing vs Sales sourced pipeline is a competition that helps nobody, and reduces marketing to its most ineffective form.

Directly sourced pipeline has become the standard definition of an effective B2B marketing team, and it has trained an industry of marketers to think in terms of performance marketing and conversions.

The reality is that marketing influences all pipeline, and not in a way that diminishes the impact or value of sales.

Marketing's role is to create awareness of the brand, connect that awareness to pain points and moments that bring buyers in-market, and to instill a trust and confidence in the brand as a solution to those problems.

All of this is a benefit to all sales conversations, and is not an expectation that should ever be placed on a sales org that has plans to scale.

Sales-sourced pipeline should and does increase when there is increased brand awareness and improved brand associations. More people respond to outbound messages, more people accept calls with sales people. Asking sales to succeed despite a weak brand is a Sisyphean effort, not a heroic one.

Marketing helps sales when brand marketing is allowed to happen.

But, when marketing is told that their only influence occurs as a direct driver of opportunities, it creates perverse incentives and actions.

Marketing becomes about lead generation, about conversion optimization, about being a feeder of leads. In trying to be only a source of opportunities, it ironically stops it from ever solving the underlying problems that cause a shortage of opportunity.

The narrative that sales creates its pipeline without marketing assisting it produces exactly that outcome, to the detriment of growth.

A house divided cannot stand.

One of the most commonly sought outcomes from an investment in demand gen that I hear is "generating more from inbound".

It was a clear objective when I took demand gen leadership roles, and it's just as common now that I'm on the agency side. But there are some fundamental issues with it.

Most notably - what generates inbound?

This is actually an important question, because it's creating a growing confusion between what demand gen actually is and where it connects with brand marketing. 

The simple fact is that inbound - the legitimate kind that carries intent - comes as a result of increased brand awareness in the market, and a clear connection to moments that bring buyers in-market. Having brand salience and being thought of as a key consideration set option is what truly creates stable inbounds (as well as an improvement in all GTM areas).

So, if brand awareness is what drives inbound, where does demand gen come in?

The issue that comes after you accept the reality of inbound's relationship to brand awareness, is that it means demand gen can only really exist in a few ways:

1. It's actually just brand marketing with a different name

If brand is what drives inbound, then demand gen that drives inbound must be brand marketing, and the kind that thoughtfully pursues brand awareness and recall alongside key category entry points that tap into buyer demand.

2. It capitalizes on brand marketing

If brand marketing exists elsewhere and demand gen is a type of GTM strategy, then demand gen doesn't drive inbound but simply 'captures' it by way of conversion efforts. Which, for this to work, means that brand marketing must be at least equally as invested in for demand generation to be able to capitalize on anything, or you're just converting on a stagnant level of awareness.

3. It's a lead generation function

This one brings a bad taste to marketers now, but it's what demand gen certainly used to be. The intentional pursuit of gathering leads not actively seeking out a solution, creating lists for sales to work and for marketing to nurture. 

Between each of these three options, it seems pretty clear that number one is the most likely and desirable for success, and the most necessary since there are very few SaaS companies running brand marketing strategically.

But number two is probably closer to the reality of what's happening, and because of the lack of brand marketing, is what's causing it to fail across the industry.

Demand generation is a function that's still finding a home, and it might be time to entertain the idea that it had one all along, under a different name. 

And that maybe our semantics decisions have caused what makes it work to be neglected.

It feels like the time is finally, genuinely here for brand marketing in B2B.

I've never been one to prognosticate about the industry, but it feels very clear that the attribution-based-marketing strategy of the last 15 years has finally painted itself into a corner now that the tech industry has changed.

Without plentiful VC funding to hide numbers in, marketing is being pressured in a way that I haven't seen in my career.

There was already a waning patience for negative CAC growth over the last 2 years, but now there's no allowance for it. Marketing needs to show its impact on revenue, and the current structure isn't going to accomplish it because it's never been how marketing worked.

More touchpoints in the attribution journey won't prove marketing effectiveness, only more activity. It's a series of additional correlations without compelling evidence of causation. 

Additionally, marketing's area of effectiveness has been severely reduced to the things it brings in itself, ignoring the fact that brand awareness is a rising tide that lifts all boats in the GTM process, especially sales.

Tech claimed it had devised a new science in marketing, and now it's being peer reviewed with questions it doesn't have good answers for.

Marketing was always about brand, and the only way to change the current trajectory is to place it back as the foundation of a strategy where it always needed to be.

This is simply not a problem that can be optimized to success - it requires real systemic change.

Brand is not a luxury, but a necessity for growth. Those who can embrace marketing fundamentals are the ones who will succeed.

The danger with producing daily content on LinkedIn is neglecting to properly consume new information from others, and to especially reflect on our own positions. 

In the pursuit of being seen as an expert, it can be all too easy to stop improving with new information, stop evolving our ideas, and to become dogmatic in our stances. 

There’s a number of people on LinkedIn who have become entrenched in their positions, especially when they’ve built revenue streams and businesses around them. 

Once the idea they grew around evolves or becomes in need of scrutiny, many stop being educators and become crusaders in defense of their rhetoric. 

I frequently find my own positions on marketing being challenged, and I’m focusing hard on making sure I listen and reflect when I get it. 

Because if I can find holes in my own thinking, I improve with my positions. 

I know that for a fact, because so many of my current positions are the result of challenges that made me question my old ones. 

In fact, I’ve developed friendships with the people who pushed me well out of my comfort zone with their challenges. 

The truth is, there are several very different schools of thought in marketing, similar to the schools of thought in economics. 

And, just like economics, practitioners often fiercely debate them with each other. 

None of the ideas will ever be 100% right, and if we’re doing our jobs right all of the ideas should progress and evolve with new information. 

That only happens if we keep consuming and leaving room for new information.

B2B marketing almost certainly causes and suffers from reverse survivorship bias. 

Unlike normal survivorship bias, where results are are skewed by not including the negative outcomes, B2B marketing does the opposite. 

When we build marketing to serve a dashboard or attribution model, then we do a kind of marketing that often leaves us with lowest quality outcomes and prevents the positives. 

By building programs around the need to show leads and conversions, you end up with the people who are willing to give you their contact information while often eliminating the most valuable ones who were willing to consume your message. 

We bias ourselves into thinking that these conversions surface the highest quality but they often do the very opposite. 

As Dale W. Harrison often says, you can’t judge an experiment without a control. 

Who didn’t consume your content for the very reason that it asked for contact information to do so? How did that action bias the experiment?

But it extends beyond conversion efforts, too. 

Marketing designed to show a measurable and linear journey often retains the very people who don’t convert.  

Lurkers on social are frequently the ones who make purchases, and retargeting only those who engage with content can isolate efforts on the ones who don’t. 

It can literally abandon the very audiences that matter in an effort to be measurable. Marketing isn’t linear, and efforts to make it so can negatively bias the results. 

Ironically, marketing that’s trying its hardest to show that it’s working often creates exactly the marketing that doesn’t.

Right now, Taco Bell is running a very large and expensive campaign to address something that B2B tech rarely appreciates:

Changing how a consumer sees you and the box they put you in is IMMENSELY difficult. 

In the case of Taco Bell, this happens to be the perception that it’s an “after hours” restaurant. Which, it’s worth nothing is a postion they also worked hard to get themselves into. 

So, to increase share of wallet, they have brought in Jason Sudeikis (of Ted Lasso fame) to convince audiences why the chain is just as good when the sun is out. 

Now, back in B2B land, this same lesson should be applied to how difficult it is to get consumers to think of you outside of your core or original use case. 

Or how challenging it is (and often futile) to try to create a new category or label to better identify your solution, and expect the market to adopt it (while you kill your SEO by not having your disliked term anywhere on the site). 

Consumer behavior can be influenced, but is very very hard to change, especially when you’ve found yourself placed in a box. 

If Taco Bell needs a massive campaign, with the most likeable of celebs, just to get people to eat a few hours earlier, imagine how hard it is to convince people to adopt some term like Revenue OS or Marketing Intelligence Automation.

How can B2B companies expand beyond their core use case?

What are some strategies to influence consumer behavior?

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A very meaningful part of brand in B2B is in the pursuit of de-risking a purchase.

When you're spending someone else's money, and especially when you could suffer professionally from making a bad decision, buyers will often choose safety over opportunity.

Brand plays a significant role in reducing the perceived risk.

We all do standard things to address risk - case studies, client logos, reviews, etc - but I want to go a layer deeper, and look at risk and information access.

Taking a page from economics, I want to talk about how there are different types of unknowns even when you have all the available information. Bad decision making can often reveal itself only after you've made a decision, and that has marketing implications.

The better you understand your buyer's risk, the better you can market to address it.

LinkedIn announced that they are adding connected TV ad placements with the ability to target the same audiences as standard ads.

This is big deal, because it could potentially solve some of the major blockers that stop B2B marketers from testing CTV - most notably targeting.

There are some bigger reasons that B2B tech doesn't do CTV advertising, of course. The stranglehold of lead generation and near-term conversion metrics pressure have created a very difficult challenge for brand awareness marketing efforts to get funded.  

But, this CTV option might enable something of a Trojan Horse to get brand marketing happening, because it can show an impact on those same lead generation metrics, all under the same campaign umbrella. Marketing isn't linear, but in board slides it often has to speak linearly.

The quote from Penry Price in an AdExchanger article sums the narrative up pretty nicely:

"B2B brands need to make sure customers have a favorable opinion of a brand before they see a product ad on LinkedIn. By starting campaigns further up the funnel with CTV, brands can increase the odds of their digital ads actually driving sales."

The lede being buried here is that digital ads that push towards conversions don't effectively drive sales in B2B tech, and this problem is only becoming more apparent right now.

Brand awareness was always the necessary answer to growth, but the industry has been its own worst enemy in how we measure marketing.

This move will hopefully bring a lot of new brand awareness efforts into the channel mix, initially as a way increase the efficacy of the existing ads programs that are showing diminishing returns for many.

It's very much opening the door to allow more marketers to justify and experiment with brand marketing, and that's a major step forward.

The fact is, most marketers want to focus on brand awareness and understand its value. It's not the lack of wanting to do it, but the lack of ability to show the early indicators of its impact.

This might just be a convenient way in.

If you're willing to listen to me warble on for 6+ minutes, I'd love to talk to you about a thing called latent demand.

This isn't another invented marketing term, but a very real economic one, and it's finding its way into the debate about demand generation.

And, even if you're not as in the weeds of the debate, it's an idea that's definitely worth understanding more as a marketer.

I'm going to do my best to distill it, and how it relates to the debate.

So grab a cuppa, and let's talk latent demand.

A common denominator in successful B2B tech marketing is the ability to talk directly about the product in a compelling way. 

Otherwise known as advertising. 

It’s not that we’re inherently bad at advertising in B2B tech - it’s that most leadership greatly undervalues it over the skills to create leads and show metrics. 

And as a result we often build strategy from the outside in, because it’s the easiest path to metrics. 

TOFU > MOFU > BOFU strategies often start with general interest content that’s easy to consume and easy to convert on, and then gradually walks closer and closer to talking directly about the product through nurturing. 

Often, by the time the marketing even shows the product it’s by way of a hard pivot into sales enablement. 

Brand awareness isn’t effective unless it’s inclusive of brand understanding. How your product works needs to be well-woven with why that matters and how that solves problems. 

In my opinion, a stellar and often under appreciated example of advertising done right in B2B is Dave Gerhardt’s marketing of Exit Five. 

It’s not marketing the value of community, but the very specific community of Exit Five. 

The marketing never wavers far from the actual benefits of being a member, the insights members get, and why the community exists (i.e. because nobody went to school for B2B marketing). 

All the content vehicles are effective paths to creating sign ups, and they’re well built to not aggressively push that outcome.

Who Exit Five is, why Exit Five is worth it, and when Exit Five is worth considering are deeply considered in the marketing. It’s a masterclass in focused brand awareness. 

Heck, Dave even had a jingle made. 

Good advertising and copywriting is very hard, but those who focus on it create the kind of brand salience that truly drives results. 

But it starts with your product and audience, and ends with metrics. 

Not the other way around.

Problem unaware means there isn't a current problem.

We often define this as a stage in marketing, with our job being to highlight and expose problems, in order to make them painful and solved by us.

But, if there is a pain that a customer hasn't become aware of themselves, then it's mostly likely not a problem they need to solve right now. What you're much more likely to be exposing is an unrealized gain they could have - e.g. better deliverability, more time saved, lower cost per lead, etc. 

The one possible exception to this is security, where you may be an educator about risk that the client isn't aware they're exposing themselves to. But even that isn't highlighting a pain, but merely offering safety and protection from a potential pain.

What we often think of as problem unaware is simply a buyer who isn't aware what they're leaving on the table, or leaving exposed to risk or pain. 

There is of course, a particular audience who will take advantage of unrealized gains when they learn about them, but it generally requires that they are without current pains to distract them and with accessible budget for opportunity creation. 

Which is a completely different type of buyer, and type of sales motion.

And, notably, one that is generally much, much harder to find scale with.

B2B buyers are not perfectly rational, but they are very pragmatic.

While those two phrases may have similar connotations, they are actually quite different in terms of marketing strategy.

If a B2B buyer was truly rational, they they would always choose the best option, researching every available solution, and only make decisions at a pure features, functionality, and price level.

But they don't. Not even close.

In reality, they narrow down their choices long before they even begin a real evaluation process. They are led by decisions of pragmatism, risk aversion and mitigation, and their selection set is almost always the familiar options and not the objectively best value and quality ones.

A great example of this is research done by LinkedIn and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, where they looked at B2B companies who needed a new financial service, which is without a doubt a highly considered purchase.

Of those in the study, 47% simply went straight to their existing bank. More interestingly, 75% of those who claimed to shop around also ended up with their existing bank.

Good enough is often better than perfect, and familiar is safe.

There's even a nearly 70 year old economic term for it - Satisficing (a portmanteau of satisfying + sufficing).

So, what does this mean for marketing? It means being memorable, remembered, and associated with the solution beats touting all of the reasons you're the best - even when you are. It means strong creative can beat strong claims. Distinctiveness beats differentiation. 

We operate in a very product-led industry, and companies often fool themselves into thinking great products sell themselves and win by being better.

But the reality is that a great product with terrible marketing will usually be beaten by a mediocre one with incredible marketing. Bad products catch up with the marketing quickly, of course, but good enough ones rarely do. 

Marketing wins when it keeps the brand close to mind when the need arises, and that happens through brand. Buyers are pragmatic because they have to be.

The best solution is the one you know - and that means brand.

Moving upmarket is much more difficult from a brand perspective than it is from a features and functionality one. 

Tech loves to look upmarket as a major growth area, attracted by bigger deals and budgets, but then grossly underestimates how much brand perception and association is the real blocker. 

It’s no small feat to build out the features required for enterprise, of course, but SOC 2 compliance doesn’t remotely overcome the buyer perception of being an SMB solution. 

For a great example of this, you need only look to Hubspot. 

One of the strongest brands in all of tech has spent a decade earning its way into the category of enterprise MAPs, and still hasn’t achieved it.

Despite major tech advancements and major acquisitions to shore up their position, the perception of being the option for SMBs has never fully left them. 

This is no fault of Hubspot, it’s worth noting, but the clearest example of how challenging it is to change perceptions. 

It’s also worth acknowledging that Hubspot has very much won market share in increasingly larger tech companies, but not without immense investment, and patience. 

Meanwhile, half the tech industry is trying to break into major new markets and segments next quarter through a press release and a couple of site pages about enterprise. 

The same challenges exist for expanding functionality, use cases, personas, and even geographic markets. 

One of the best things about the tech industry is its ability to innovate quickly and impressively, thanks to very talented engineering and product teams. 

But just because you can build it doesn’t mean you can convince new audiences to trust it, and the fault doesn’t lie with marketing. 

It lies with a misunderstanding of it.

Just because you get an enterprise lead to download an ebook doesn’t open up a door to sell to them.  Just because you sponsor an event for enterprise audiences doesn’t give you instant credibility. 

Building perceptions is highly challenging, and requires real intention. The more non-obvious the association with your current position, the more difficult. 

And most importantly, the answer isn’t to create the target and send marketing to achieve it. 

It starts with marketing, and starts with the 4Ps.

There's a demand generation idea that brand marketing is simply having people know who you are, and that demand creation is the second leg of that race to get them to see you as the primary solution.

It's been commented on my posts and broadly supported, and I personally think it's a very flawed concept. 

Why create an intentional silo between these two functions? 

I can see no benefit to that act except to solve the boundary problem that demand generation has developed. Demand creation needs clear constraints because it's too often blurred into everything else that marketing does.

But, more than that, there are some major risks that come along with this delineation:

1. What if one function is missing?

In my experience, there are far more teams with a demand generation function than there are with both brand marketing and demand gen. Which, by this logic, would imply that there is a whole lot of marketing that's telling people who don't know you why you're better than the brands they do know.

It means demand gen without a brand marketing counterpart would be an ineffective effort, because recognition a prerequisite to demand gen success.

2. Why create recognition without solution association?

There's little value in creation of brand recognition in a silo, just to have people recognize your logo in an aided awareness test and maybe some general idea of what you do, and then following it up with some demand creation work.

That's like building a department store and only getting someone else to figure out where the emergency exits should go after it's done.

Not only is there risk that it might be too far gone in the wrong direction before the association work comes into play, but it adds a major and unnecessary delay in time-to-value. 

I'd have to assume the argument against this point is to say they should happen simultaneously, but again - why should this be done in siloed efforts? That creates complexity and risk that didn't need to be there.

This feels like marketing separation for ulterior reasons. This division of brand marketing is like the Judgement of Solomon.

Brand marketing is an umbrella of activities because of their interdependence.  Separation of this simply because it helps a narrative doesn't help marketing.

There's a lot to be said for growing slowly in order to grow fast.

That's what the last 12 months have been for Storybook Marketing. Our first year was a very intentional effort to figure out every detail in the agency, and we did it by staying small and thoughtfully growing.

Everything from: 

- how we wanted to price
- the offerings we wanted to focus on
- the capabilities we lacked and would need to build
- the ones that we shouldn't build but should partner on
- the client types we best deliver for, and those we don't

Coming into 2024, we had figured out a lot by staying lean, and in doing so had even built a very healthy business with some incredible long-term clients.

And now we're finally ready to scale Storybook.

We've built out the structure and capabilities, we've got new full-service offerings coming, and I'm incredibly excited about what comes next.

Over the next couple of weeks you're going to start seeing a number of things from me detailing what it will look like, including some very exciting partner announcements, an updated website, and new content.

All of the things I've been talking about in my content is deeply woven into what we're going to be doing - being a partner to move marketing programs from a conversion and lead gen driven position, to running more effective evidence-based marketing that creates the kind of awareness that impacts revenue.

I'm very excited to start telling you about it over the coming weeks.

(If it already sounds like something you don't want to wait on - connect with me and DM me, and we can chat!)

A lot of B2B tech suffers from major pricing problems.

Out of the 4P's in a marketing mix, price is anything but trivial. Developing a thoughtful pricing strategy comes from marketing research and understanding what the market will bear but, in my experience, that's anything but what has happened in much of tech over the last decade.

Instead, a lot of tech pricing came from the pressures of VC investment and return expectations, or from stubborn and arrogant founder mindsets born in a time of too much funding.

Pricing was more about what would meet absurd valuations and growth targets than it was about a marketing-led approach. The sheer amount of tools in tech that should have cost $15k but were bloated to meet a bizarrely common $50-$70k price point is staggering.

Pricing was more about locking customers into annual contracts to show the precious ARR vs understanding how audiences were willing to buy.

While product marketers do play an impactful role in working on pricing and packaging, so much of it is about making the pricing palatable because the ship had long sailed on the unchangeable variables.

Anyone who has taken a 101 economics class knows that price has a direct impact on demand, yet it's often the immovable object around which demand must somehow be moved instead - and we know too well how that has worked.

Pricing that doesn't include marketing creates an incomplete marketing strategy and a potentially impossible marketing task.

At first, I wasn't pedantic about the term "demand creation". I felt like I got the meaning of it, even if it wasn't technically accurate.

I changed my opinion of this, however, because I believe it steers marketing towards bad strategies that have good intentions.

What we ultimately all want to accomplish, no matter what side of the term we fall on, is to convince our target audience that we're the best option to solve their problem and to do so with demonstrated value over the trickery of older tactics.

And because of that, it can feel like pointless infighting to debate semantics.

But, those semantics result in very different types of marketing, with very different outcome potential.

Here's an example:

Perhaps you believe that your solution solves a problem for which there is a known pain but no previous solution available to address it. In economic terms, you have located some "latent demand", and through marketing education you access a pocket of demand that was not previously realized.

As it would be positioned - you generated new demand.

This same situation, seen through the more traditional lens could make the case that you were, in fact, channelling demand away from an existing active demand category. 

That known pain may not have been solved by the exact solution you provide, but the budget you would be accessing to pay for it might come from an alternative solution that is more established.

This was the exact solution when I worked in content marketing nearly a decade ago. This new category of marketing was being funded by digital advertising budgets that were trying to solve the same problem with less effect - engagement with audiences.

We solved a marketing problem in a new way, but by channeling demand that already existed and was being solved in a less effective way (according to us).

And, over time, dedicated budgets began to become common as the category matured. It took over a share of the demand that was already there, but didn't create any new demand in itself.

But, between these two ways of thinking the marketing would have been entirely different. One was preaching "new and never before seen" while the other was connecting to the problem which was being less successfully solved by other efforts. 

Both approaches were seeking to change behavior, but the ways they would accomplish it would have had very different levels of success - especially if the demand was not actually latent.

Pedantic? Definitely.

But details do matter, especially if your understanding of the problem are off.

We're all trying to get to the same destination, but if we're misreading the map then we will just get lost.

I believe that trade shows have been some of the most impactful drivers of brand awareness marketing in B2B tech. 

We think of them as pipeline drivers, but they’re likely the driving force behind the clear brand associations and recall, especially considering how we use the other channels. 

Trade shows are the rare times in tech marketing where we directly and accurately describe our product and its use cases. Where we fully show the product itself. Heck, when we tell people directly what it costs. 

And all of this is surrounded by our branding in a physical setting, where brand recall is highest and longest lasting. 

Compare that to most of our digital efforts, where we often only talk around the product in our content, or gate it to create more leads, or provide incomplete product information on the site to force demo requests. 

We let the desire for conversions prevent us from creating brand associations and recall. 

Now, event marketing is expensive, no question. And the point I’m making isn’t that we should put all of our budget into them. 

Rather we should look to the type of marketing we do there that works so effectively, and apply more of it to the rest of our efforts. 

With many prospects, I hear how events are a big but inefficient driver of pipeline, and they want to augment that by improving their inbound engine. 

Perhaps that should start by looking at how we talk to the market at those same events, and not simply looking to replicate the lead gen aspect.

When terms become ubiquitous, they quickly become meaningless. 

For example, the term Account Executive was once a more palatable way of saying salesperson, but now it’s no different in interpretation. 

But the real culprits in tech are words like Platform and Operating System. 

When employing a 4P strategy, there are lots of reasons why a platform might the best solution and name, over something like an application or tool. 

But usually the rationale is based on market and buyer research, and sales potential. 

Tech, however, loves to take good 4P process and attempt to reverse into that parking spot. 

Platform choices are too often made to improve valuations (i.e. so you can sell the company whose product you haven’t sold yet). Or to justify a larger price tag than it would otherwise be worth, in order to realize that valuation (and hoping the price is right for the market). 

Or, stranger still, calling it a platform because of a sales superstition that platform get priority. 

But, in the end, when everyone is a platform then nobody is. It just becomes the new way of saying app. 

When we worry more about hyping up the tool than we do about spotlighting the pains it solves, then we are doing it to impress investors more than customers. 

Tech often determines the limits of its growth potential by trying to impress with what you’ve built over why you built it.

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