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For years, LastPass was the dominant player in the password manager category. Then, around four years ago, it suffered a series of serious data breaches. Trust declined, and competitors including Bitwarden benefited. Bitwarden's share of branded search has risen steadily since then, while LastPass's has fallen.
It would be easy for Bitwarden's marketing team to look at that growth and conclude that its marketing was responsible. Some of it may have been. But the bigger story is what happened to the category itself: a major competitor suffered a loss of trust, creating an opportunity that had little to do with the effectiveness of anyone's campaigns.
That case study anchors Episode 8 of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners, where Liam Moroney brings branded-search data to an argument Dale W. Harrison has been developing throughout the series: most business growth happens because the market is growing.
Marketing's role is often less about creating that growth than making sure a company participates in it and holds on to its share.
Most growth comes from the market you're in
Dale's argument is that companies often get more credit for growth than they deserve.
When a category expands, businesses operating within it can grow substantially without taking meaningful share from their competitors. CRM provides a useful example. The growth of Salesforce and other CRM companies wasn't simply a story of one CRM provider taking customers from another. It was also the result of businesses moving away from older ways of managing customer relationships, including spreadsheets and Rolodexes, and into a new category.
From the inside, that can feel like disruption. At the market level, it is often a shift in where existing demand is being satisfied.
That distinction matters because it changes how marketers interpret their own performance. If revenue is rising, it doesn't necessarily mean the marketing strategy is winning customers from competitors. The category itself may be doing much of the work.
The disruption myth tech can't quite let go of
Technology companies are particularly prone to attributing this kind of growth to the product or the marketing surrounding it. The assumption is that a sufficiently innovative product can generate its own momentum and create demand around itself.
There is some truth in that. New technology can replace an existing way of solving a problem, particularly when it is substantially cheaper, faster or more effective. Email reduced the role of fax machines because it provided a better way to communicate. The underlying technology changed the category.
Marketing can influence how quickly that change happens and which companies benefit from it, but it doesn't create every market force that drives adoption.
The same applies when a category suddenly becomes fashionable. Bitcoin and NFTs didn't grow because one marketing team discovered the perfect campaign, and their subsequent decline can't simply be explained by poor marketing. Social and economic forces pushed those categories up, and those same forces eventually changed.
The more useful question, therefore, is not simply whether marketing worked. It's what was happening to the market around it.
AI is accelerating the same process
The pace of that change is becoming particularly visible in technology.
Dale points to interactive demo software as one category that could be vulnerable to AI because the underlying problem doesn't necessarily require a sophisticated dedicated platform. If a buyer can create something good enough with a relatively inexpensive AI subscription and little technical expertise, the value proposition of a much more expensive specialist product changes.
He sees similar pressure building in marketing automation and intent data, where established products are increasingly being challenged by cheaper alternatives or by buyers questioning whether the underlying value justifies the cost.
The common factor isn't a brilliant new marketing campaign from a competitor. It's a change in the economics of the category itself.
What the data actually shows
This is where Liam's branded-search analysis becomes useful.
Looking only at Bitwarden's branded search data produces an appealing story: its share has risen steadily. That could easily be interpreted as evidence that the company has been doing something right in marketing.
But add the other major players to the picture – LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane and NordPass – and the story becomes more complicated. LastPass, which had dominated the category, has declined over the same period that several competitors have gained share. The timing lines up with the company's security breaches and the resulting loss of trust.
Then add a third measure: total branded search across the category.
That shows whether the market itself is expanding or contracting, rather than simply showing who is gaining share of the existing demand. The password-manager category has been affected by broader changes in security awareness and authentication, including growing interest in passkeys.
Each view answers a different question. Bitwarden's search share tells you how its position is changing. Competitor share tells you where those gains and losses are coming from. Total category volume tells you what is happening to demand overall.
You need all three to understand whether a company is actually growing its position or simply benefiting from a changing market.
Market share barely moves – until it does
Dale's own experience provides another example. In one hypergrowth category, a company he worked with grew by roughly a hundred times over eight years. Yet the relative ranking of the leading companies at the end was almost exactly where it had been at the beginning.
Everyone had grown because the market had grown.
That stability is important. Market share tends to be surprisingly persistent, particularly when the competitive environment remains relatively stable. Major changes usually require a significant disruption: a company makes a serious mistake, as LastPass did, or a competitor receives enough investment to materially change its ability to compete.
Without one of those events, companies can spend years moving up and down within a relatively narrow range while the category itself expands or contracts around them.
What a declining category looks like from the inside
The same principle applies when the market is moving in the other direction.
Liam's second data set looks at a mature content management platform category that has been around for roughly 15 years. The leading companies have maintained relatively stable positions while overall category demand has gradually declined.
From an individual company's perspective, that can be difficult to recognize. A business can maintain its market share and continue generating revenue while the underlying opportunity becomes smaller.
That's also why repositioning can become necessary. Optimizely's move to redefine its position partly reflects the reality that there is limited growth available in a mature category. Moving into an adjacent market creates access to a larger or faster-growing pool of demand.
A declining category doesn't necessarily disappear. Some categories settle at a much smaller level and remain there for years. Hundreds of thousands of Rolodexes and fax machines are still sold each year despite having fallen dramatically from their historical peaks.
The category may be smaller, but there is still a market for the companies that remain.
What this means for marketing
The practical lesson isn't that marketing doesn't matter. It's that marketers need to separate the effects they can influence from the forces they can't.
If a category is growing quickly, a company can achieve substantial revenue growth simply by maintaining its share. If the category is shrinking, maintaining share may still mean declining revenue. And if a major competitor suffers a product or reputational failure, another company can gain share without fundamentally changing its marketing effectiveness at all.
Understanding those forces gives marketers a more accurate way to interpret performance. The challenge is knowing which signals actually tell you what is happening in the market, and which are simply correlations that happen to appear in the data.
That's the question Dale and Liam turn to next: what is the difference between having more data and having more information? Episode 9 explores why the two are often treated as the same thing in B2B marketing – and why that distinction matters when you're trying to make better decisions from the evidence in front of you.
