Buyers Satisficing: Time Constraints, Not Fear, Drive Choices
It can be too easy to look at buyer research and come away with a perspective that buyers make overly-safe, incomplete, and sub-optimal decisions. Worse, it can be too easy as a marketer to see buyers as needing us to 'educate' them in their buying journey towards what we know is the better option of choosing us. While it's true that satisficing - picking the best acceptable option - is a common outcome, it's very important to understand what drives this and how that might be changing in an AI world. Satisficing doesn't come about because buyers are all skittish, but because of a reality that even big decisions have to be made with incomplete information and limited time. In a perfect world buyers would have limitless time and access to all the information allowing them to, as economics would say, maximize utility. But, that's not how it works, of course. We don't have time to validate the accuracy of every logo shown on a company page, to back-channel every case study, even to evaluate the biases or incentives of third-part review sites and analysts. We can't trial every software, or test drive every car, and so we have to accept that we don't have all the information and find shortcuts that give us confidence in that reality. We operate with what's known as "bounded rationality", where we make the best decisions within the constraints of available time and information. Put more simply, we gather as best as we can and then make gut decisions based on the rest, often leaning on people or sources we're willing to trust. What's interesting is that AI search is starting to expand what we are able to gather, where a single question from a buyer can pull from 10+ sources to give a balanced answer. It's early days and still limited in accuracy and prone to gamification for now, but the bounds of our rationality is expanding with AI and that's only ever good for consumers. As marketers, we always have to remember that we're not smarter than the audience, we just have some information they don't. It's not our job to guide them or educate them, but rather to make sure we are doing our best job making the brand visible, memorable, and recallable. AI is going to change parts of that, empowering consumers in many ways, but we should never lose the perspective that consumers are trying to make the best decision possible. If they choose what we believe to be a worse option, that's on us and not them.
Small Brands Must Build Perceived Size, Not Just Presence
The necessary trick of the small brand is to look bigger than you are. Many of the tools are simple ones, like leaning heavily on the logos and testimonials of clients, and more recently attention has gone towards AI by...
Measure Real Brand Demand in AI Search, Not Just Visibility
🚨 Track your brand's real consideration and demand in AI search. 🚨 This is, without a doubt, the biggest Storybook product release, and one I've been developing since I first launched the platform. The question of AI search has come...
Visibility Alone Won’t Drive Sales Without Brand Trust
Showing up in an AI overview is a form of distribution and not necessarily consideration. It’s highly potentially valuable, in the same way that getting on the shelf at Walmart creates big opportunity potential, but for many product that alone...
Search Data Reveals Pizza Hut’s Local Market Share Shifts
Branded search data has very powerful potential to track even highly localized market movements, and Pizza Hut is a really good example of this. As has been reported in recent days, the Pizza Hut brand has been struggling, announcing a...
Underinvesting in Brand? Search Data Shows Hidden Cost
Instead of being asked why we should invest more in brand, it might be more important to ask if we're actively underinvesting in it right now. Very typically, leadership takes the position that more (or any) brand marketing needs to...
Metrics Can Gamify Products, Distracting From Real User Value
Now that I'm tracking user and account metrics for Storybook , I'm really starting to appreciate how much they can make you gamify things that don't necessarily improve the user experience. For example, Storybook's data updates monthly, which means that...
Lightweight Rivals Can Swiftly Become Major Threats
Competitors can go from a nuisance to a viable threat much more quickly than many brands realize, and by the time it's impacting the sales conversations it can be much harder to address. For market leaders, especially ones who have...
Prioritizing Guided Onboarding for Complex Data Platform
I spent 2025 building out the best product I could for brand and category tracking, and my current next product focus is making sure that I surround it with a strong onboarding and training experience. The double-edged sword of adding...
Joining Insight Collective to Shape Marketing's Complex Future
My belief in marketing effectiveness has only grown as I've seen the landscape getting more and more complex for marketing. Through my own journey into it, and building the Storybook platform around the learnings, it's also connected me with some...
AI Efficiency Obsession Sacrifices Creative Quality
I was told a story this week about a big agency pitch, where a whole section was dedicated to how much efficiency they had found through AI. Effectively, how much self-inflicted commoditization they’d accomplished which they could pass on as...
Categories Are Buyer‑Defined; Demand Remains Finite
Categories are largely artificial constructs, and often quite subjective and fluid to buyers, changing over time and even in individual buying situations. What we get compared to to by a buyer is not up to us, and isn't decided by...
Urgent Pain Drives Price Sensitivity, Not Just ROI
Price is a really important element in marketing, and it's important to understand its role in demand even if you can't control it. Price impacts demand more than just about anything else we can affect in marketing, not only in...
Prioritize Share of Voice Over Short‑Term ROI
Companies are very quick to ask if marketing is getting enough return from its budget, but rarely ask if that budget is doing enough to maintain a presence in the market. When marketing is judged on the short-term efficiency of...
Innovators Need a Different Marketing Playbook Than the Masses
There's a lot to be learned about new product marketing through how people discover new music. Everyone knows people, and maybe you are one, who likes to find bands others aren't listening to yet, to be at the edge of...
Latent Demand: Unseen Needs Outpace Traditional Unmet Wants
The concept of the problem-unaware buyer is a long-standing one, especially in tech, where the dream is to unlock and dominate a whole new market through innovation. It falls often into the category of latent demand - a very real...
Measure Category Health, Not Just Internal ROI
As you take on 2026, many will be looking at their full prior year of performance metrics to answer "what worked best that we can lean more into?" I think there's a critical view to add, and it's a highly...
Effective Brand Marketing Is Product‑centric, Not Just Quirky Campaigns
There's a very big difference between trying to get someone to start thinking of you and preventing them from forgetting you - and a lot of the brand marketing we talk about is the latter. Big brand campaigns, the ones...
Disruption Thrives at Market Fringes, Not the Status Quo
There's a famous quote from the economist John Maynard Keynes, that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." He was speaking about investing but it has just as much application to marketing, because many a better...
Budget Limits, Not ROI, Often Stifle Brand Growth
Sometimes, the answer genuinely is that marketing doesn't have enough budget to do what the company is asking. It's not a popular answer to give, and there's even a tired cliche about how marketing always wants more money to spend,...
First‑mover Edge Fades Fast without Relentless Innovation
First-mover advantage is just that - an advantage. But it is anything but a guarantee of staying the leader, and that couldn't be better displayed than with the news of the iRobot bankruptcy filing and buyout announcement. The Roomba was...
From Experiment to SaaS: Storybook’s 2026 Momentum
I didn't fully appreciate how good it would be to hit send on an email like this, and to see the spike in user activity that follows across such a wide variety of industries. As the year is coming to...
Share of Voice Drives Brand Dominance Beyond Performance Marketing
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...
Marketing Science Overlooks Small Brand Constraints
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...
True Market Disruption Requires Economics, Not Marketing Hype
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...
Price Beats Promotion: The True Driver of Adoption
“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...
Macro‑Level Disruption Beats Performance‑Only Marketing
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...
Growth Shifts When Market Conditions Change, Not Brand Effort
Growth is highly dependent on the conditions that surround us, and they are often a combination of factors. Take this global Share of Search example for Roborock and the robot vacuum category, where a strong upward trajectory in branded search...
Brand Tracking: Strategic Lens for Real Market Demand
Brand tracking too often gets reduced to a data story that feels very far from revenue impact and too much about feelings. But it can actually be an incredibly strategic lens to understand demand in the market and how we...
Marketing's Influence Prevents Short‑Term Brand Decline
The narrative that marketing needs to earn a seat at the table is perhaps the most ludicrous bit of industry gaslighting ever. Marketing is a load bearing function, and one that needs a position of influence to stop companies from...
Marketing Success Depends on Conditions, Not Just Tactics
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...
Differentiation Is Fleeting; It Reshapes Categories Permanently
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....
AI Push Drops Brand Searches, Top SEO Tools Remain Dominant
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...
Maintain Market Share by Maximizing Overall Brand Exposure
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...
Athletic Brewing Leads Non‑Alcoholic Beer Disruption, Outsmarts Legacy Brands
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...
Integrate Market Research to Navigate 2026 Volatility
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...
Rethink Marketing: Beyond Sales Support to Customer‑Centric Strategy
It’s often said in B2B tech that marketing’s job is to make sales easier, and I see that as a deep-rooted problem. Not just because of how self-minimizing this perspective is, but how strategically limiting. In a world where marketing...
Brand Health Drives Performance: Measure Beyond Short‑Term Metrics
My big passion with Storybook is about giving strategic shape to brand. One of the big reasons that I believe brand gets underinvested is because the way our measurement has been set up favors short-term direct response efforts and causes...
Marketing Brings Market Context to Executive Decision‑Making
Marketing is uniquely able to bring a critical perspective that is very often missing from the executive table - that of the market. The data that drives much of company decision making is typically internal and isolated, but it massively...
B2B Marketing Crisis Demands Holistic, Cross‑Pipeline Thinking
It is said that B2B tech is in a pipeline crisis, but I think we're really in a marketing crisis that requires harder conversations. There is no doubt that pipeline is very hard to come by for many right now,...
Storybook: The Future of Strategic Brand Tracking
I'm incredibly bullish about making Storybook the leader in brand tracking, and that means being more direct about its value. Building the platform has been a genuine labor of love, and it has developed into what I believe to be...
Demand Outpaces What Performance Marketing Can Capture
There's a very big difference between the amount of demand for a certain category and how much of it can be 'captured' by marketing efforts. Look at some of the big focus areas in B2B marketing today and you'll see...
Marketing Must Reclaim Market Research for Real Growth
It’s an almost insultingly obvious first step in marketing that you should gather some insights about the current state of the market as an input into growth plans, yet that’s not an ability given to many marketers. The removal of...
Login Searches Reveal Hidden Growth Signals in Brand Data
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...
Flat Streaming Market Reveals Fierce Share Battles
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...
Creator‑Led Ads Define B2B Brand Era
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...