Liam Moroney

MarTech

Contributing Writer

Storybook Marketing

Owner

Revenue Collective

Member

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.

I really believe that demand generation language is simply not compatible with the concepts of brand marketing and marketing effectiveness.

Since it is the language choice of much of B2B, many have understandably been trying to repurpose it to fit brand/activation thinking and I completely understand the rationale, especially when it comes to leadership adoption.

But, the language is simply wrong and facilitates wrong thinking for numerous reasons. And I say this as someone who was a demand generation marketer at various levels for more than a decade.

Most simply, demand generation is sequential and deterministic in its language - demand is created, and then demand is captured. One before the other, and controlled by marketers.

For example, the idea doesn't hold up to the screenshot from a good report by WARC and Marketing Architects about the effectiveness of TV. The copy on the left speaks about broad audience reach and in-market activation - two things that can and do happen simultaneously and non-linearly - yet the copy sits alongside a graphic of a linear demand gen funnel.

Beyond this, demand generation language directly and unambiguously suggests that we are taking people from not having demand to having it for us specifically. 

We do not generate demand - it comes from the market itself and it is what we can probabilistically win a portion of through marketing. Even if you frame it as generating "demand for the brand" it still creates a picture of people being fully and progressively persuaded by our marketing like a scaled sales function.

And lastly, perhaps most pedantically, we are not capturing demand. It is not prey to be trapped nor is it aimlessly floating around and open to any marketer who can wrangle it in the moment. 

Buyers have full control, and any language that treats them otherwise is not good for marketing. 

We've already seen the impact of this language, with landing pages designed with nav removed to prevent distraction from conversion, like easily startled prey. Or the aggressive spend on competitor keywords, assuming you can simply swoop in and redirect people who are planning to go somewhere else in a consideration set that can be informed over years.

Demand generation is simply clunky and ill-fitting because it was created for a different model of marketing, one that became popularized by its claims of certainty and predictability in moving people to convert.

It never reflected the reality of B2B buying, and it doesn't fit well around the better theory of how it actually works.

Brand Marketer | Storybook Marketing | MarTech contributor

Brands grow because they tap into demand, not because they create it.

We've romanticised an idea that the best marketing taps into latent demand, generating growth for the company from effectively nowhere.

Not only is this naive but it also undermines just how hard it actually is to identify real demand in the market and earn a piece of it with a product that delivers value.

Candidly, much of SaaS in the last 20 years have been solutions hoping that there was demand out there, and burning huge amounts of VC funding in search of it. 

The success stories we all look to, when you look deeply enough, were usually great products and execution on top of great timing, luck and often deep financial investment.

And that shouldn't take away anything from their success - but it absolutely should cause us to be skeptical that their playbook can work without the luck and timing and funding.

Markets dictate growth more than any marketing, and it's for exactly this reason that market share is a tremendously difficult thing to move even when revenue is growing. 

Take a look at these two examples below showing brands from two different categories.

The first, who is seeing some slight decline is moving nearly exactly in line with their competitive set - in other words they are riding the wave of the category demand and that wave is going down currently.

Now, this doesn't mean they're coasting. It takes great effort to continue to hold your share position, and it's realistically what most market share pictures look like and what most marketing is doing.

Compare that to the second picture, where the brand is not only in a very fast growing category, but are massively overperforming against it and taking share.

What's crucial to understand about this picture is that it's also massively expensive, coming largely from a big funding found being burned at a high-pace.

The Excess Share of Voice (eSOV) growth theory of Les Binet and Peter Field absolutely plays out in the data, but it's also prohibitively expensive to accomplish.

The baseline of a company’s growth potential is the market demand itself. 

It's crucial to understand, and much more measurable than many companies might believe, with branded share of search being a great proxy.

We can't control the market, but we can and should be trying to understand it, because where the market goes our brands and growth must follow.

One of the more unintuitive things about marketing is how people seek out solutions, and how it changes with the purchase type.

A lot of marketing thinking, especially in AI SEO strategies, anchors around the belief that buyers find brands by researching a solution category. 

In the LLM context, there's a lot of belief that buyers decide they are looking for a certain type of solution or try to solve a certain problem and default to AI to help build a consideration set, trusting its advice. 

As logical as this might sound, it's very often not even remotely true. 

In reality, decisions are shaped by a variety of conditions, across urgency, familiarity, risk, and complexity.

In complex purchases, the decision to consider a certain category at all is often due to awareness of one or a few brands, and so the evaluation journey is actually brand > category instead of category > brand.

Where purchasing from a category is a planned and expected purchase, brands are well-known long before in-market moments, and decisions are largely made which leads to evaluation anchored around day-one favorites.

But, in purchases where the need is unexpected and the category an unfamiliar one, solution search can be led by the category. But what matters now is the urgency of the need and the perceived differentiation in solutions.

In fact, perceived differentiation matters in familiar categories too, and the decision on which option to choose can come down to who is more available to meet a narrow window of need.

Below, you'll see examples of the difference in the amount of search for the category versus the brand in two distinct groupings.

In high-consideration goods, brand search can easily represent 90% or more compared to search for the category itself. The more the buyer is familiar and experienced, the more decisions are shaped through brands.

But in goods that have low buyer experience and where the category feels somewhat commoditized, the search is much more category led, often decided by the physical availability of an option more than the mental availability.

What all of this means is that we need to understand how our buyers enter the category - how much experience they have with it, how much they perceive differentiation, and what factors dictate decisions.

When we assume that our buyers follow a logical process, we can easily build linear and mechanical marketing programs that completely miss the messy and memory-driven reality of how decisions are actually made.

Many a marketing team is being pushed to answer a tough question - what are you going to do to increase results?

But long before that question could truly be answered, there needs to be an understanding about how much demand there is to be won. Only then can you put the current effectiveness of marketing into context.

This would and should be possible for a CMO to answer if they were actually empowered to run a 4P strategy and had access to real market research.

But it also requires leadership to understand that increased growth doesn't just manifest from the strength of marketing's persuasive efforts.

It needs to come from a market whose conditions allow for it.

For example, take this legacy SaaS brand in the enterprise CDP category, where branded search has been in steady decline for years. Fewer people seeking out the brand, resulting in smaller and smaller inbound numbers needing more aggressive tactics to make up the gap.

It would be easy for leadership to put this CMO on notice, demanding answers to how and where they'll change the situation.

But it might be pressure that is ignorant of reality - as this case very much is.

When you put the rest of the category into context, you see headwinds that are not so simply solved by a clever new campaign or an ABM play. 

The category, which was already competitive, saw a major new threat as a big tech vendor went fully in, very successfully taking the share lead inside of 3 years. 

But, even this new surge of competitor activity didn't change the much bigger problem: the category is declining.

At least this incarnation of it. 

When you look at how the brand is performing relative to this cohort, they're actually very successfully holding ground in the last couple of years. What share they initially lost to the new entrant they held firmly onto.

And this brings us right back to the question - where will the growth come from?

The answer, here and frequently elsewhere is not from marketing working harder at promotion but from an informed 4P strategy.

Are there adjacent sectors that are seeing growth? Are there geographies that are growing where we could focus efforts instead? How much investment is worth putting into stealing share in a declining one? How much of this is fundamentally related to the product?

Marketing is a 4P endeavor because dynamic markets demand that kind of understanding.

Much of marketing is in real need of its Galileo moment.

A great deal of the thinking and measurement of marketing, especially in industries like B2B tech, place the brand at the center of everything and visualize market demand being pulled to us through the gravitational force of our promotion.

Or, worse, seeing demand something the brand itself generates.

In reality, and much like the solar system, we are revolving around market demand with other brands and with much more stability through market share than it might feel like in the quarterly battle to hit targets.

We of course must work hard to hold that position, and overcome very serious forces if we want to increase it, but at the center of it all is the market and the consumers.

This reality is a really important thing for marketing and leadership to come around to because when we think of our brand as the magnet of demand then we run the risk of ignoring the market around us and seeing all growth as the result of how convincing we are, person by person, sale by sale.

It's what causes us to build fictional funnels of people who we think can be progressively walked towards coming in-market, or bombarded until they submit, and whose in-market timing is decided by how many touchpoints we get to them.

It causes us to ignore fundamental realities that buyers come in-market at predictable rates across categories, which brings very real limitations on how effective things like hyper-focused targeting and ABM efforts can be.

It causes us to ignore the realities that buyers operate with a repertoire of brand options and without real loyalty, even in high-consideration categories, instead of the rose-tinted beliefs we carry that we are creating demand for the brand where we are the only one they'll choose.

It causes us to ignore how much of our growth is riding the wave of category demand, and as such we mistake all revenue increases as a direct response to our efforts and expect it to scale linearly and indefinitely, while demanding that all marketing must prove value this way.

We are participants in a dynamic market, affected by its changing movements and by the movements of all those who share our orbit. 

For our marketing to be truly effective, it has to understand the dynamics of the world it is built for and into which it must go.

And, as it should always be, at the very center and with all the power is the customer.

It’s always framed as marketing earning their seat at the table, but what of the cost of not having them at it?

What risks does a company expose themselves to when there is not a trained marketing perspective informing the strategy? 

With product development, how can you be sure you’re not just building new features for the customers you already have and ignoring investment in what is needed to drive future customer growth?

This isn’t even a hypothetical - it’s a common approach in SaaS, where the roadmap is developed through customer and sales conversations, and easily ignores the larger market who don’t consider you at all and can look entirely different to your early  cohort. 

What about pricing decisions? Despite how it’s often done, pricing isn’t just a financial exercise weighing input costs against desired margins and optimal revenue contracts.

Value is a huge input into pricing, and is heavily shaped by the audience’s experience of both the problem and the solution. Failure to understand the customer’s value perspectives can cause you to undercharge as easily as overcharge or poorly package. 

And what of the buying experience? How many B2B sales processes are built around saving the sales team from wasting time by making the buyers jump through hoops? 

How much business is lost because of a process that is actively hard and unpleasant to buy through, which could have been avoided had a true voice of customer been present?

We’ve become so accepting of the narrative that marketers need to demonstrate why they should be in the board room that we’ve stopped asking if those in the boardroom are making poor decisions that a marketer could have saved them from. 

Everyone might have an opinion on marketing, but it doesn’t make them a trained marketer. 

And many a leadership team of smart non-marketers has made catastrophically short-sighted and myopic decisions exactly because they underestimated the importance of good marketing thinking.

Even in the most volatile, competitive, and funded of categories, market demand makes all the decisions without care for the chaos.

Take this example below, where the first image shows competitors and their branded search looking like a Shakespearean drama. 

A former leader declining into irrelevance. A new entrant experiencing explosive growth and dominance. A category looking very different inside of 4 years. And behind it all, somewhere in the realm of $200m invested into the category across brands in just those 4 years.

But at an aggregate level there's a different story, and one that seems oblivious to the infighting for that market share and investment towards it. While all that volatility was occurring between players, the market demand continued its pace all the same.

This is what makes the term demand generation so problematic.

All of that effort, investment, stealing, and growing was all in pursuit of available demand, which has luckily been in healthy supply here. 

Each brand story told on its own could paint a compelling picture of growth from nothing, and demand from nowhere. And, for sure, each success story is hard won and well earned.

But demand generation it is not.

The market dictates how much demand there is to go around, and that means everything when it comes to targets. If the company goals exceed that of the natural category growth then it means it has to come from the share of others. 

That's a materially different game, and a very expensive one. What could easily be missed in this story is that the purple brand didn't become the market leader at this pace because of their marketing and sales alone - they needed the incumbent to fumble what they had at the same pace.

The same quality of marketing they did to get where they are now would not have worked in a flat-growth category with an incumbent leader who held their position with even mediocre marketing.

Market share dynamics and external factors play the biggest role in our success, and often a lot of luck needs to be on our side even with great execution done by us.

When we romanticize the idea that our GTM efforts alone will generate demand, we disconnect ourselves from reality.

In the end, we are participants in the market, not movers of it.

Market demand determines success more than any other factor, and the trends of a category should be a crucial input into a marketing strategy.

While every category is unique, familiar data patterns often emerge when you track categories, as seen in some examples below from recent ones I've built.

Some trends play out over long periods of time, like the slow decline of the marketing automation category has been seeing, while some happen suddenly and without expectation, like the new wave of demand hitting the cottage cheese industry as it is enjoying social media fame.

The trouble is, many companies set growth targets without any grounding in market insights, often assuming that previously experienced growth will continue forever without change.

For much of tech, significant YoY category growth was something that was taken for granted, and it was in plentiful supply for many for years. You could simply maintain your market position and find yourself growing 20%

But, markets eventually stabilize and budget allocation is a zero sum effort, and the available budgets being deployed fluctuate with market confidence.

For marketing to be strategic, we have to be looking to the market and understanding the dynamics of them, or we'll end up creating targets and expectations that are based on nothing but what we want to see happen.

Growth is determined by the market itself - a fact that skews a lot of how we think about the performance of brands and their marketing.

A company whose product is part of a fast growing category, like AI tools, will simply grow much faster than one in a declining one, such as legacy CDPs.

Of course, identifying where there is growing demand is a major part of good marketing strategy, but it can also be a fog that hides how effectively we're winning our share of it.

What if you are growing, but slower than the underlying category growth?

That's an indication that you're leaving revenue on the table which could be yours if you successfully held your market share position. 

Compare that to a brand who is actively over-performing against the category - a path that leads towards increased market share and which carries real long-term company value.

Take this example below of branded search data for a cohort of brands in the CDP category, which has seen more than 20% decline this year compared to last. 

Unsurprisingly, all brands in the cohort are seeing individual brand search decline, but not at the same rates. Once you account for the underlying category growth, you get a much more telling comparison. 

As Dale W. Harrison put it to me, it provides a "DiD (difference-in-difference) view...a normalized change in brand-aware search volume as a function of overall category movement."

Suddenly, even amidst a declining category, there are clear winners who are outpacing the category, ones who are holding their position, and ones who are underperforming.

Of course, what we don't know in this view is the relative marketing budget contributions of each brand, but for anyone in the table, it could provide an important data point to say whether the marketing mix is right.

For example, if a brand underperforming against the category slashed its marketing budget, it might well be an indicator to reverse that decision to avoid losing long-term share. But if they didn't, it could be an important signal that the competitive set has changed their game and the brand needs to match.

With all metrics, if we don't have something to compare it against, we can't truly know whether it's truly good or bad. 

Factor in the competitive set, and the overall growth of the category, and you gain a perspective that few brands truly have.

Not all brand search is related to buyer interest, but also contains search from customers, potential employees, etc, and trends in that data might tell us a lot about how the category and brand are performing.

For example, in a typical search picture a B2B SaaS brand will show groups of different search types, with very different intent:

- Login traffic from customers (e.g. "marketo login")
- Job hunters (e.g. "salesforce careers", "salesforce glassdoor")
- Brand reference images for decks (e.g. "hubspot logo")
- Shareholder interest and market curiosity ("adobe stock")

Often, we'll remove these from the view to get the buyer picture, but I've been doing research into the relationship between the login traffic and its relationship, because I believe it can provide a really interesting proxy for overall user and customer growth. 

Of course, searches for the login page are not anything close to the total number of users any SaaS platform has, since they're just the portion that uses search to get to their login page. 

But what is really interesting is that it appears to be a stable ratio, and one that moves in line with the rest of the brand search data. Which we'd expect, since growth in brand search interest should result in more users. 

But it gets really interesting as you look at the data across brand size.

The charts below come from averaged data I pulled on 494 B2B SaaS brands, looking at their overall branded search volume growth across 4 years and the growth in their login searches, and grouped by volume of search volume per brand as a proxy for size.

What's fascinating is that a story seems to emerge that matches company size and market share expectations:

- Smaller companies see branded search rising faster than login traffic, since awareness is being built ahead of adoption, and very in line with eSOV thinking.

- As companies get larger, the two lines start to move together. Login growth begins catching up with branded search as awareness is being maintained and is converting into regular platform use through category growth.

- As they get larger again, login growth outpaces brand grow. These companies seem to be scaling usage faster than visibility, suggesting a focus on activation, expansion, or word-of-mouth growth that doesn't show up here.

- For very large, established brands, both branded and login search level off together. This is very in line with a real market leader, whose market share drives growth by holding their position and taking consistent customer growth.

There is a lot more analysis for me to do in this data, but some the signals continue to reinforce two things in my mind: 

The relationship between search data and company growth in B2B gets more and more clear as I build more data.

And, as Dale W. Harrison has written so well about about, market share and the market truly dictates the fortunes of a company.

Call it irony or inevitability, but in building a brand tracking platform I ended up also building a demand tracker.

As it turns out, when you build brand tracking around search, especially with higher consideration and B2B goods, the result tends be a very demand-oriented view. 

Unlike survey-based tracking, search data is much less about what people know or think about your brand and much more about who acts on that knowledge by seeking out your brand in different ways.

The trends that emerge in that view are usually much more reflective of in-market or near-market buyers, and it's an area where traditional brand tracking often falls short.

In the famous words of David Ogilvy, "the trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say".

Awareness generated today in audiences is not enough. It has to be maintained and then recalled when they finally come in-market to be valuable, and that delay can be literally years in B2B. 

That's a lot of time to forget about you.

Successful brand awareness efforts truly result from what Dale W. Harrison has wonderfully coined Brand Recall at Purchase (BRaP).

Those brands who come to mind when buyers are ready are the ones who win, 
and increasing this volume is much more telling of your future pipeline than a snapshot of a campaign's increase in reach and engagement.

What matters is how many retain that awareness down the road, and this turns out to be the very view that shows up in branded search pictures. 

Combine your brand search and that of your category cohort and then you gain a really interesting picture about the overall category demand available and the trends around it.

Brand and demand are intrinsically linked, and that can be seen in data. 

But where measurement of brand and demand can diverge in unhelpful ways is when we measure awareness as it is achieved today but not follow how well it is retained and recalled in those crucial in-market moments.

Thats when brand efforts result in us getting more of that demand, and that's what comes through in branded search tracking.

The best ways to see market share dynamics play out is often not by looking at rapidly growing categories but incredibly flat ones.

One fascinating example is the streaming category in the United States, whose brand search data maps very closely to the real-market trends.

Growing at just 0.2% quarter over quarter with small recent declines, according to Kantar, the data is well mirrored in the search, showing just 0.4% overall growth in the last 12 months. And there little room to grow in penetration, too, with about 90% of US households paying for at least one streaming service.

In tech, we're very used to huge potential TAMs, so it's uniquely interesting to look at a category that has completely saturated theirs within a geo market.

Now, despite the lack of overall growth, there is still incredibly aggressive activity going on between competitors, from lower-cost ad-supported options to bundling of multiple streaming channels into one.

And we see this play out in the competitor share data in very zero sum ways:

- Hulu shows the most overall decline, however much of this is transferring to a growing Disney+ share as it bundles the service into its offering alongside others.

- Netflix is ultimately the source of everyone's growth, as it slowly declines in market share, even as it adds users and revenue through a combination of new tiers and password sharing crackdowns.

The one area that the search doesn't map exactly, it's worth noting, is with Amazon Prime Video, because users are mostly acquired as part of the overall Prime subscription and so don't compete in the same ways.

Which is interesting, because it's also something we see in big tech such as Salesforce, Adobe Oracle, etc, where a lot of the growth of products happens through through the larger install base often more than directly competing in the market.

The bigger point, though, is that that revenue growth and market share growth are often quite different pictures. 

You can be growing topline revenue while losing share, and you can be growing share while seeing slowed new revenue growth.

What's crucial is to factor in the underlying growth of a category to understand the context of your growth story, especially when it comes to where it's going to come from next. 

Because, when you see an example like this one, when that underlying market growth is essentially zero, you see just how different market share gain is.

Even in an innovative tech category like this, with massive investments, huge product launches by way of new shows, and wild attempts to grow users like password crackdowns, the market share picture still looks largely the same at the other side of it.

The true source of long-term growth is the market, and not the marketing.

Brand search has been in decline for years but revenue’s still growing. So should you even care?

I had this real conversation with the CEO of a prominent $50m ARR SaaS company a number of months ago, with the image below showing the actual data from that brand.

What made it notable was that this data didn't concern him. 

If anything he felt like it aligned with strategic company efforts in the last 6-12 months - reduced headcount, narrower ICP focus, ABM account focus, bigger deal sizes. 

And this was all true. They are doing a much more efficient job of producing the same pipeline through a much smaller team, which came at great and necessary effort. It's a similar story across a lot of VC-backed SaaS.

It's worth noting, too, that a heavy driver of brand visibility is his LinkedIn content, following the classic founder-brand playbook.

But alongside all of this was a very common SaaS perception on growth:

"Nobody searches for the things that we’re building"

Growth, he said, all comes via community inquiry, peer referrals, his social media presence, and network effects. 

This, in my opinion, is half-true but fully problematic.

While new and novel solutions often don't have direct search for the category, search is still the residual trail of brand memory. And growing brand memories that can be recalled is a necessary piece of real growth.

Search is just one proxy, but it tells you whether people continue to and increasingly remember your brand enough to understand it better, and whether people are recalling it when they need what you do - even if discovery and purchase happens somewhere else.

It means your brand is being recalled less often, in fewer buying moments, by fewer people over time. 

That's a pattern that catches up to all the efficiencies you can find, and which can't be overcome with an organic social founder-brand. Certainly not at $50m ARR, anyway.

Moreover, it might be a bigger indicator of the market itself.

Are you in a declining category, or is the decline isolated to your brand's visibility in it? Is it region specific or part of an overall trend?

This, in my opinion, is one of the issues we have in SaaS. We see the world through the eyes of disruption instead of market demand.

We believe growth can come from word-of-mouth groundswells mixed with efficient conversion tactics, increasingly paired with AI. We equate LinkedIn communities with the whole market. We launch smaller and smaller events to fewer and fewer people.

That’s the problem with so many grassroots growth tactics in SaaS. They scale enthusiasm, not awareness.

They turn warm networks into warmer networks while the wider market forgets you exist, or never learns at all.

And when branded search keeps declining, that’s the signal: you’re winning within your circle, but disappearing outside of it.

I have a new product update to show that I'm incredibly excited about:

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If you're like many brands I talk to, most of your business might occur within a single country market, which can make brand tracking a limited insight effort. 

Or you might be responsible for a single market only as a brand manager.

Now you can see the direct brand search demand for a single market at a highly-granular level, visualized for real insight gathering.

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Much of where brand gets neglected by leadership comes purely down to the passive nature of the language, especially compared to performance marketing.

When we talk about the outputs of brand marketing, it's often in terms of passive states like brand awareness, or being top of mind (these are actually stative terms if you feel like being pedantic).

Compare that to the very active nature of things like demand generation, demand creation, and lead generation.

In fact, even the more modern brand marketing term of mental availability still paints a picture of a developed state of being, while the performance side of marketing is seen as producing outcomes. 

It's not much of a surprise that leadership would take generation over availability when given the option. Ironically, we market good marketing quite badly internally when it comes to brand.

But we marketers also create false choices for ourselves like brand vs demand.

Behind the passive framing of brand awareness or mental availability is a very active outcome - recalled brand memories during buying moments. 

And, crucially, this can be an immediate outcome of good brand marketing, resulting in incremental sales even in people who are actively in-market today.

But our language choices can make it seem like brand marketing is a primer that pays of in the future only; slowly creating memories, perceptions, or feelings that make are inactive unless a performance marketing efforts leverages them.

Which, unsurprisingly, can lead leadership to think that performance marketing is the core growth lever, and brand efforts are a nice-to-have tailwind to add when appropriate.

For all that we obsess over word choice in the marketing we put in front of our audiences, we don't think enough about the impact of the words we use to describe our profession, both to leadership and to ourselves as marketers.

Brand marketing does not create static states of being, but rather attempts to develop memories that need to be maintained, refreshed, strengthened, and enabled to be recalled when it counts.

That's anything but a passive effort.

There's always been a narrative about how B2B companies lag behind when it comes to marketing, but there's a deeper problem in tech.

Often, and increasingly, the VC-backed SaaS world has pressures in place that make it nearly incompatible with long-term marketing.

The obvious piece is the fact that many founders aren't looking to build an enduring profitable business but a race towards an exit, with rapid revenue growth being the path to accomplish that. 

We end up with terms like T2D3 (Triple, Triple, Double, Double, Double), the playbook for increasing your annual revenue to reach $100m ARR in 5 years. 

Only that is seemingly now turning into Q2T3 (quadruple, quadruple, triple, triple, triple) because the road to $100m is expected to happen in months thanks to the AI bubble we're all watching unfold.

The madness from the 'growth at all costs' era is back and on steroids in many cases.

And that pressure is as true for those who can't shoe-horn the company into an "native AI" box as those who can, if raising VC money is a big piece of the company model alongside diluted ownership.

Quoting David Kellogg in a recent Pavilion post, company founders have to "be relentless in sales model optimization. You are fighting for your corporate life"

Massive short-term pressure to show massive growth rates does not make it easy to think about long-term marketing, and even less easy to commit to it. 

Not only because the industry have never been good at thinking about being around for the long-term, but now it's hard to even remain around because of what it is taking to be attractive to VCs.

To put it bluntly, the industry often operates with a wildly unnatural approach to launching a business. Where marketing assumes there's a desire to build  enduring companies, it's finding itself dealing with speculative assets instead.

Of course, this is not universal in SaaS and there are many who are not doing this, but it is a reality across the industry and comes along with the way many businesses are often funded in it.

Marketing has it hard at the best of times, but it's made much harder when it's dealing with an alternate reality to how marketing usually works.

People don’t really forget brands as much as they stop remembering them.

The brand memory doesn’t get wiped from our brains, but rather decay in strength and eventually go dormant, needing to be refreshed if they’re likely to be recalled.

Anyone who sees an ad from their childhood knows this reality well, when they exclaim “I had totally forgotten about them!”

The memory is still there in some form, otherwise you wouldn’t recognize that potentially decades old brand memory anymore. In fact, when that nostalgic memory refreshed, it almost certainly triggers a host of connected memories along with it that haven’t been used in a long time.

A lot of advertising is in pursuit of refreshing memories, to bring them ‘closer to mind’. Not because we forget brands but because we forget to remember them.

On the other side, advertising is needed to build new associations with categories or situations it isn’t naturally connected to.

For example, a company with new product line or operating in a new area needs to build mental associations with that category, or it is unlikely to be recalled during those category buying moments.

Dyson’s initial foundational brand memories connected to vacuum cleaners, but have extended to connect to adjacent categories like hairdryers, handryers, fans, etc. 

Those memories aren’t all kept in one place and updated like a brand filing cabinet, but rather triggered from different scenarios and thoughts.

The trouble is, many leadership teams treat advertising as a progressively built sales effort. Where every ad should be moving people closer to buying, compounding knowledge that the buyer has about the brand until they’re sufficiently convinced. 

And, so, there is often little effort placed on just making sure the memories are fresh, and a major underestimation in how long it takes to form new associations.

Marketing is often treated as a scaled form of sales, but it operates in the world of memory much more than the world of persuasion.

The more we are tasked with trying to convert people, the less investment there is to prevent becoming a dormant memory…if we were ever even thought of in the first place.

Brand campaigns, when effective, shouldn't just result in a big spike at launch but increased impact over time, especially where buyers come in-market frequently.

American Eagle definitely enjoyed a big initial spike with the Sydney Sweeney campaign, but what's happening now that the controversy has settled?

The September search data shows an increase of 7.2% compared to the same month a year prior, but that's anything but remarkable even for a mature brand like AE.

In fact, when you look at December 2024 search data, there was an increase of 19.9% compared to 2023, all other months being essentially flat during that quarter. 

The result, according to their quarterly earnings was a 3% overall increase compared to the previous year and, according to their CEO, "record sales in December".

That's a very different picture to their recent earnings report, where overall sales were down YoY, even with the campaign bump coming at the tail end. 

The next earnings call will be the real answer, of course, but the early data suggests that all that earned attention from the campaign and its controversy isn't changing the fortunes of American Eagle just yet.

While 7.2% is still not a small increase to hold 2 months later and is surely meaning revenue, it's not without precedent for the brand, and much less impactful than its holiday activation efforts that didn't have the brand campaign support.

All things considered, the campaign looks like a lot of short-term attention but little lasting impact.

But, time will tell.

Companies send signals to the market all the time.

Sometimes it’s to say we’ve changed - new and improved. Sometimes to say we do more than what you think. Often it's to say we’re not who we used to be.

It happens with alcohol brands saying “not your dad’s cider” to insurance companies distancing themselves from “your mom’s insurance provider.” Even legacy tech vendors want to remind us they’re still cool, still innovative, still in the game with the startups.

Unfortunately, more often than not, the mechanism for sending that signal is a rebrand.

New logo. New colors. Maybe even a new name. 

The idea is that to put something out there that the market will notice, and think “You look different. What’s new?”

But that’s not really how people interact with brands. Most customers don’t keep tabs on us. They don’t follow our journeys. They don’t notice our new outfits.

What they do rely on are brand assets - the colors, logos, shapes, mascots, sounds - to form and trigger memory. To spot us in a crowd. To recognize us at a glance. These aren’t decorations but mental shortcuts.

So when we wipe those away, we’re not signaling change. We’re clearing the cache. Where we think we've made ourselves noticeable, we've in fact made ourselves invisible.

People search for the old name and can’t find us. They walk past the booth at the event because it no longer looks familiar. They skip over us in the aisle because they are quite literally filtering out unfamiliar packaging from view.

Of course we need to evolve, and of course we need to send new signals.

But throwing away the very assets people use to find and remember us isn’t a signal.

It’s a reset.

I'm really excited to be joining some incredible people in a session at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Creative Effectiveness Day this Thursday in NYC.

In the session, “The New B2B Playbook: How Creator-Led Advertising Builds Distinctive Brands,” I'll be joining Jessica Ji from NVIDIA to talk with Pedr Howard from Ipsos, and Vita Molis from The B2B Institute at LinkedIn.

B2B, especially tech, is very much finally in its brand era, and it's a real privilege to be able to discuss distinctive brand building at an event like this, and with people as impressive as this.

If you're attending, shoot me a DM, and we'll meet up!

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