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.

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.

Brand Marketer | Storybook Marketing | MarTech contributor

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.

Marketing strategy should ultimately start from the market-level, but the truth is we've pushed out much of that ability. 

With the reduction of marketing to just promotion, with the hyper-focus on performance, and with the way we judge marketing in measurement. 

We instead reward marketing that is doing the least amount possible to get a conversion, and for that marketing to be happening at a micro level. 

It's only further deepened with how much of marketing has become some form of "GTM Engineering", collecting data until we spot possible signs of buying and hoping that we can squeeze in at the last minute. 

But this type of marketing doesn't grow brands into market leaders, and it becomes very ineffective and inefficient when the market isn't booming. 

What changes markets is disruption at the macro level.

Brands who take up more space in the world, own more Share of Voice, and shift the balance of perception. 

The thinking and work of Les Binet and Peter Field on how Excess Share of Voice (ESOV) is every bit as relevant as it was when released a decade ago - maybe even more so when underlying growth has slowed in many categories.

Buyers choose the brands they think of, and they think of the brands they see and hear most about. 

The industry obsession with getting a placement in an LLM answer is assuming that buyers are blank slates and completely unaware of the category, which is not true, and completely the opposite to what research like Kerry Cunningham and the 6sense Buyer Experience Reports are showing. 

Most buyers form their consideration sets through their experience of being in the world and by how much those brands are present in them. 

That's the reality of the market, and why markets are slow to change.

Those who can't see and understand the full market picture are heavily disadvantaged in changing it.

Everybody likes a big swing ad campaign that draws huge views and social chatter, but what always matters is whether it changes buying behavior.

That's true for both the short-term and long-term effects.

One really interesting example of this is the now infamous "Snoop Goes Smokeless" campaign that resulted in the Solo Stove CEO stepping down.

In Adland it was celebrated, winning Cannes Lions, Clios, Webbys and more. It placed no 18 in Ad Age's 40 Best Ads of 2023, and it drove huge earned media metrics - 19.5 billion impressions.

What it didn't drive, however, were sales. 

In the financial reports, Q4 sales around the campaign ended up down 16.2%, a result that was bad enough to get the CEO to resign.

But, Adland didn't accept that it was a failure, talking about how it was a "top-of-the-funnel" awareness initiative, not designed for immediate, short-term sales conversions.

Except it didn't do that, either.

The Branded Search data tells a really clear picture here, and one that aligns with the company financials. 

That same quarter, where sales were down 16%, the brand search fell similar amounts compared to the year prior. And that didn't pick up as time went on. In fact, the picture is even worse now, with November 2024 down nearly 40%.

This is where brand marketing often gets into real trouble - if nothing positive happens in the short-term it probably won't in the long-term either.

When we measure big brand campaigns, looking at all the earned media and attention it got in the moment, we need to anchor that to something tangible in buying interest and behavior.

It's of course true that we put too much of the measurement value in how many sales happened in the immediate, but long-term brand impact still has to be rooted in something.

And, usually, short-term and long-term aren't anywhere near as divided as the Adland narratives make them out to be.

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.

Share of Voice (SOV) is not a concept you hear as often anymore, because performance marketing has shifted so much of our thinking towards precision. 

We think instead about how we can reach the exact right people at the exact right moments, but the space we take up in the world with our marketing is genuinely important. 

The reason that big brands tend to stay big is ultimately a structural one. 

The brand's share helps them to take up a lot of space in the world, both in the word of mouth generated by their existing share as well as the literal exposures caused by being there. And on top of that is their marketing spend to keep them visible and increase that visibility farther. 

This is why performance marketing hits very quick plateaus, too, since all of this structural advantage is what we would need to overcome in order to take share away from them.

That's what Share of Voice ultimately is - how much space we take up relative to competition, and how big that occupied space makes us seem when people are weighing options.

What makes it hard is that it need to be sustained - a one take LinkedIn takeover change the world much if most of those who see it won't be in-market for months or even years because it will be long forgotten. 

Share of Voice matters over the longer term, and to occupy a bigger SOV for any meaningful amount of time requires either healthy capital or a thoughtful segmentation approach to make budget go farther.

Markets are changed when they are disrupted, and that doesn't happen in hyper-targeted, last-minute message focused on conversion.

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.

The challenge with marketing science and effectiveness research is that it tends to be anchored around large brands, but wants to deliver advice to both large and small ones. 

This is not a criticism of the work, which is always excellent, but the natural bias that comes from data availability and the missing perspective about contstraints that exist at the small end which make initial growth much more difficult.

For reasons that are totally understandable, most data that we see from institutes like Ehrenberg-Bass Institute or the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) come from large brands within stable or mature categories, or self-reported data from large category leaders.

Even research done explicitly on ‘tiny’ brands - commendable efforts all - still rely on brands for whom there is panel data enough to do research.

This in itself skews the definition of ‘tiny’ upwards, with some survivorship bias group selection. 

What the research gets incredibly right, especially EBI, is in the things that DON’T work to achieve growth - such as trying to grow through increased loyalty over penetration.

That insight matters and bears repeating, since I’ve personally seen in tech how many rallied around ‘bow-tie models’ that promised big return through customer expansion in a fictional mathematical growth model.

But pointing out what doesn’t work isn’t the same as advice on how to accomplish what does. 

Growth through penetration, reaching as many category buyers as possible misses very important nuance at very small scale. 

Take B2B categories or long inter-purchase period consideration products, where maximum reach to maximum audiences can easily result in most of the spend being seen once and long-forgotten before in-market moments.

There are very real constraints that make this advice hard to accomplish, not the least of which is sufficient capital.

Gaining initial momentum at truly small scales is messy, segmented, differentiated as well as distinctive, and gradual before it can adopt the advice of large brand research. 

It may very well find itself affected by the same laws as big ones in unfair quantity, but gaining escape velocity into bigger leagues is a world of study itself. 

The research being done is critical, and I’m thankful for it always, but I do think we need more acknowledgment about the challenge it takes for brands to make it past the early evolutionary stages at all.

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.

“Aside from the price, I actually like the idea.”

In a post I read recently detailing a failed product launch from a YouTube celebrity, this line stood out.

In this short sentence, there's a huge amount of insight into just why marketing needs to be a 4P endeavor, and the real costs when it's not part of our thinking.

Price is one of the most important and impactful levers in marketing strategy, and a change in price can impact demand more and more quickly than even huge amounts of promotion.

There's great evidence of this all around us on all sides of the equation.

Despite more promotion than most could ever dream of, the Apple Vision Pro simply couldn't overcome the price tag of $3,499, especially when compared to the anchor price of other headsets around $500, however technically superior it was. 

In the other direction, much of the early growth in big tech, from Uber to ChatGPT, comes because of deep price subsidies to gain users, which would be impossible if not for the VC funding model. These brands often lose huge sums in a bet that market share gains will create future profit.

In consumer electronics, some of the biggest reasons for products to become mainstream has been due to the lowering of cost through innovation. From desktops, to televisions, to cars, mass production and improved efficiency was the big driver in a niche idea becomes a household standard.

In all cases, price was a huge lever in the success or failure of the product as well as the rate of its adoption.

But, when marketing is reduced to Promotion, price often becomes a static force that we just have to accept and operate around, when we should be able to question it and understand its role in the strategy.

Because often, price is the whole problem.

New innovative products like technology are frequently expensive to start, and this reality impacts the level of demand materially.

We also see this play out in the FMCG world, where heavy discounting at point-of-sale can drive quick sales but usually only temporarily and often not larger than the sales discount, especially if pulling forward people who would have bought later at full price.

In all directions, and in all industries, price is a critical lever, and one that changes just about everything.

And it belongs in marketing thinking.

If you want to disrupt the market, it's pretty important to understand how markets work and what facilitates disruption.

The truth is market dynamics are not very intuitive, and real market share change is highly dependent on the right conditions while overcoming powerful forces.

And the harder truth is that a lot of what modern marketing is built and measured around doesn't account for any of these, nor do we train marketers in in how to.

Marketing hasn't just been reduced to a promotion function - it's also being poorly taught to new generations by confidently untrained marketers, which distorts the profession further into something less and less effective.

So we end up with prominent marketing voices describing marketing in ways that completely contradict theory and economic reality, or worse, where they actively disregard the theory itself in favor of their own.

Add to that the handover of audience understanding to tech vendors and ad platforms, who claim they'll serve up our ICP on a platter and all we need do is make our compelling case.

If their claims worked, then markets would be in a constant state of chaotic disruption, yet that's not at all what happens.

When you look at markets from a distance, the reality is that most of them are far more stable than they feel at ground level. 

All that activity, all those hard won deals and sales, the exhausting campaigns, the tediously crafted content and copy, those targets we fight tooth and nail to hit, can all bring in company revenue without ever changing the share that each competitor has. 

Market disruption rarely happens in the precision performance efforts, nor do they compound into market moving ones. Most brands grow inside of pockets of share that can be won, while big players continue to hold most of it safely so long as they keep their momentum.

But those pockets also become harder to win in weakening markets, as the market becomes more conservative - conditions we're seeing a lot of right now.

Marketing is not a naturally intuitive profession, and training in it is genuinely important. 

Many of those who are proudly boast that they're a better marketer because they came from a non-marketing background make the profession worse in their advice.

Many of the playbooks that came from their wins don't account for the conditions and levers that were in place for them to accomplish their well-earned wins.

There shouldn't be elitism around how people come into marketing, but there damn well should be sufficient training to make you a well-rounded on.

The accidental and natural marketing expert is fiction. 

This is trained profession, and all marketers deserve good training.

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.

Innovation Storyteller @ The Recursive | Shining the spotlight on the emerging innovation ecosystems in Central and Eastern Europe | Pop Culture Tech Fusion 🚀✨

🌍 𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐩𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐫𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐧 🦾💡

🎵 𝘑.𝘈.𝘙.𝘝.𝘐.𝘚., 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘺 𝘐𝘳𝘰𝘯 𝘔𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘺 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘚𝘢𝘣𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘩 🎵

OK, now that the mood is set...

What do I and Robert Downey Jr. (aka Iron Man) have in common?

Glad you asked.

First, we both started out as actors (he's like 12% better than me at acting, in case you were wondering). 🎭

Second, we both like cats and alpacas. 🐱🦙

And third, we somehow both ended up as storytellers committed to the tech innovation world. 💻

Here's what I mean:

When Robert Downey Jr. left behind the mantle of Iron Man, he set out on a new quest, assembling a coalition of investors, donors, and storytellers dedicated to scaling technologies and restoring our precious planet. The Footprint Coalition was born, and his vision ignited a spark within me. 👣

That spark led to me taking on the role of Digital Content Marketing Specialist at Ocean Investments where me and my squad are looking to partner with forward-thinking entrepreneurs who have a great idea and want to operate at the frontiers of digital innovation. 🌌✨

Pretty damn cool, innit? 😎

So let's connect and leave a lasting footprint of progress together! 🤝

P.S. Remember what Iron Man once said, "Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with." 🦸‍♂️🚀

P.P.S. Feel free to reach out: 📧 snezhana.simeonova@ocean.investments 📧

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