LastPass Didn't Lose to Better Marketing. It Lost to a Data Breach.
For years, LastPass was the dominant leader in the password manager category. Then, about four years ago, it suffered a string of serious data breaches. Trust collapsed, and competitors like Bitwarden absorbed the fallout — branded search share for Bitwarden has climbed steadily ever since, while LastPass's has fallen just as steadily. Bitwarden's marketing team could be forgiven for believing their campaigns did that. The uncomfortable truth: almost none of it was marketing.
That case study anchors Episode 8 of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners, where Liam Moroney brings real branded-search data to back up an argument Dale W. Harrison has been building toward for weeks: marketing very rarely grows a business. The category does. Marketing's real job is just not to lose the share you've already got.
99.99% of growth is riding someone else's wave
Dale's claim is blunt: the overwhelming majority of companies that grow are not taking market share from competitors — they're rising with the underlying growth of their category. Usually, that growth comes from draining an adjacent category dry. Early-2000s CRM adoption didn't beat competing CRMs so much as it drained the Rolodex category down to almost nothing. The business felt like disruption. Structurally, it was a category transplant.
The disruption myth tech can't quite let go of
A lot of tech strategy still runs on the assumption that a sufficiently revolutionary product creates its own momentum — that it will, in Dale's words, generate “its own magnetic field and gravity” and pull buyers toward it. Disruption is real, but it happens at the engineering level, not the marketing level: someone introduces a fundamentally cheaper, faster, or better way of solving a problem people were already paying to solve elsewhere. Marketing didn't kill the fax machine. Email did. No amount of marketing was going to keep a 2005 fax machine company growing once a better solution existed — and no amount of marketing genius explains Bitcoin or NFTs suddenly taking off, any more than marketing incompetence explains them collapsing. Those were fads: external social dynamics driving a category up, then letting it fall back under its own weight.
The current version: AI eating categories whole
The same dynamic is playing out again, faster. Dale points to interactive demo software as a category especially exposed to AI, precisely because a demo doesn't have to work perfectly — it only has to look good. A $20-a-month Claude subscription and zero programming experience can now replace a $15,000-a-year demo SaaS package for a lot of buyers. He sees the same pattern in marketing automation (bloated, overpriced, and increasingly seen as legacy), and especially in intent data, where companies have been paying $200,000 a year for a product that, according to Dale, is undergoing real collapse now that buyers have had a few years to notice it doesn't work.
What the data actually shows: reading share of branded search
Liam's contribution is a live worked example, tracking branded search share — people specifically searching for a brand name or product name, not generic category terms — as a fast-moving proxy for market share. Looked at in isolation, Bitwarden's own branded search chart tells a flattering, entirely true story: strong, sustained growth. Add the rest of the category — LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane, NordPass — and a second story appears. LastPass, the long-time dominant leader, has been declining for four years while nearly everyone else in the category rose. That's the direct consequence of the breaches, not of competitors suddenly getting better at marketing.
Layering in a third view — total category volume, not just share — adds a final piece: the whole password manager category has also been accelerating in growth, partly because rising data-breach awareness has pushed more buyers toward passkeys and better security generally. Three slides, three different stories, and only the combination of all three tells you what's actually happening.
Market share barely moves — until it does
Dale's own career supplies a data point: in a hypergrowth category he worked in early on, the business grew a hundredfold over eight years — and the relative market share ranking between the top players at the end was identical to where it stood near the very beginning. Everyone was, in his words, “riding the same rising lake.” Market share is remarkably sticky. Real ideal customer profile shifts almost always come down to one of two events: a company badly mismanages its own product (a LastPass-style breach), or an outside investor drops a large enough pile of money on a competitor to buy awareness that wasn't there before. Absent one of those two shocks, the ranking holds for years.
What a declining category actually looks like from the inside
The episode's second data set — a mature, roughly 15-year-old content management platform category — shows the opposite end of the spectrum: years of essentially flat, locked-in market share between two dominant leaders, with everyone else fighting over a small remaining sliver, while total category demand quietly accelerates downward. It's exactly why Optimizely's recent rebrand makes strategic sense: partly to draw fresh attention, partly to reposition into an adjacent category with more room to grow.
Even declining categories rarely disappear completely. Roughly 600,000 Rolodexes and 200,000 fax machines still sell every year — a small fraction of their historical peaks, but a real, stable, ongoing business for whoever still serves that niche. Categories don't die. They re-stabilise at a new, smaller equilibrium and often stay there for decades.
If you want to build this kind of share-of-branded-search view for your own category, the tool behind today's charts is one Liam has built and uses with clients at The Insight Collective — reach out to him directly if you'd like to see what it shows for your market.
The show is taking a short break for the Fourth of July and the following week while Dale's still travelling in Europe — back with a new episode on the 18th.
