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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 competitive landscape: a major player 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: much of a company's growth is influenced by the market in which it operates.
Building on Episode 7's discussion of evidence-based targeting, they explore why understanding category demand and competitive shifts is essential for interpreting marketing performance.
Why market growth matters more than marketers think
When a category expands, businesses operating within it can grow substantially without taking meaningful share from competitors.
CRM provides a useful example. The growth of Salesforce and other CRM companies wasn't simply a story of one provider winning customers from another. It also reflected businesses moving away from older ways of managing customer relationships, including spreadsheets and Rolodexes, and adopting CRM software.
From the inside, that can feel like disruption. At the market level, it's often a shift in how existing needs are being met.
That distinction changes how marketers should interpret performance. Rising revenue doesn't necessarily mean a marketing strategy is winning customers from competitors. Category growth may be contributing significantly, while marketing helps a company participate in that growth and maintain its position.
How changing markets reshape competition
New technologies, changing economics and reputational failures can all alter the competitive landscape. These forces can create opportunities for some companies while undermining the position of others, independently of their marketing activity.
The disruption myth in technology
Technology companies are particularly prone to attributing growth to their product or the marketing surrounding it. The assumption is that a sufficiently innovative product can create demand around itself.
New technology can certainly replace an existing way of solving a problem, particularly when it's cheaper, faster or more effective. Email reduced the role of fax machines by providing a better way to communicate. But that shift was driven by the changing technology and the needs of the market, rather than any single company's marketing campaign.
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. Wider social and economic forces influenced both.
Marketing can help determine which companies benefit from these changes, but it doesn't control every force driving category demand.
How AI is changing category economics
The pace of change is particularly visible in technology markets affected by AI.
Dale points to interactive demo software as one potentially vulnerable category. If buyers can create a sufficiently good demonstration using an inexpensive AI subscription, the value proposition of a specialist platform changes.
He sees similar pressure in marketing automation and intent data, where established products face cheaper alternatives and buyers increasingly question whether the value justifies the cost.
These shifts aren't necessarily the result of a competitor running a better campaign. They reflect changes in what buyers need, what alternatives are available and what they're willing to pay.
What branded search can reveal about market changes
This is where Liam's branded-search analysis becomes useful. By examining individual brands alongside their competitors and the wider category, marketers can begin to distinguish changes in competitive position from changes in overall demand.
When a competitor loses ground
The password manager category provides a striking example.
Looking only at Bitwarden's branded search suggests a straightforward success story: its share has risen steadily. But compare it with LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane and NordPass, and a different picture emerges.
LastPass had dominated the category before its security breaches. Its subsequent decline coincided with competitors gaining share, suggesting that changes in customer trust played an important role in reshaping the market.
Liam also examines total branded search across the category to understand whether overall interest is expanding or contracting. Broader changes in security awareness and authentication, including the emergence of passkeys, add another layer to that picture.
Each measure answers a different question. Individual brand search shows changes in visibility, competitor share provides context for those movements, and total category search indicates whether overall interest is growing or shrinking.
Together, they offer a more complete picture than any one metric can provide.
Why market share can remain surprisingly stable
Dale describes working with a company in a hypergrowth category that grew roughly a hundredfold over eight years. Yet the relative ranking of the leading companies was almost unchanged.
Everyone had grown because the market had grown.
Market share can remain remarkably stable when the competitive environment doesn't change significantly. Major shifts often require a disruption, such as a competitor making a serious mistake or another company receiving enough investment to change its competitive capabilities.
Without those events, companies can spend years maintaining similar positions while the category expands around them.
What a declining category looks like
Liam's second data set examines a mature content management platform category that has existed for roughly 15 years. The leading companies have maintained relatively stable positions, even as total branded search across the category has gradually declined.
From an individual company's perspective, that trend can be difficult to recognize. A business might maintain its share and continue generating revenue while the underlying market opportunity becomes smaller.
It also helps explain why repositioning can become necessary. Optimizely's efforts to redefine its market position partly reflect the limited growth available in a mature category. Moving into adjacent markets can provide access to a larger or faster-growing pool of demand.
Declining categories don't necessarily disappear, either. Rolodexes and fax machines are still sold despite demand having fallen dramatically from their historical peaks. Some markets settle at a much smaller size and continue serving a narrower customer base.
What this means for marketing performance
The practical lesson isn't that marketing doesn't matter. It's that marketers need to distinguish the results of their own activity from changes in the wider market.
In a growing category, a company can achieve substantial revenue growth simply by maintaining its share. In a declining category, maintaining that same share may mean falling revenue. And when a major competitor suffers a product or reputational failure, other brands can gain ground without fundamentally changing their marketing effectiveness.
Understanding category trends and competitive movements therefore provides essential context for interpreting performance. It helps marketers distinguish what their activity may have influenced from the changes happening around them.
But interpreting those signals creates another challenge: how do you know which data actually tells you something useful?
That's where Dale and Liam go next in Episode 9, Data Does Not Equal Information, and AI Is Not the Solution, exploring why collecting more data doesn't necessarily lead to better information or better decisions.
