INBOUND '24 Insights: AI, Brand Building and the Importance of Storytelling

This year’s INBOUND was a huge win for HubSpotters looking to leverage AI in their day-to-day activities, across Sales, Marketing, and Service. From the launch of Breeze, HubSpot’s new AI product powering the entire platform, to powerful Marketing & Content Hub upgrades, our heads were spinning with so many improvements. 

This year, Brian, Ever Wonder’s Founder, and I, Conor, Director of Digital Marketing & Automation, traveled to Boston to immerse ourselves in all things HubSpot. We attended education sessions, learned about brand-new features, made memorable connections, and returned eager to share the spoils.

It was difficult to choose, but here are the top 4 sessions we attended: the HubSpot Spotlight Session, Disney’s Josh D’Amaro on Storytelling, Tyrone Heath and Kate Newstead on Driving B2B Tech Brand Growth, and the main man Ryan Reynolds on Maximum Effort in Marketing. These sessions were as inspiring as they were filled with practical insight. 

Key Sessions

Yamini Rangan, Andy Pitre and Dharmesh Shah: HubSpot Spotlight Session

Every year at INBOUND, the Spotlight Session on the main stage is where HubSpot unveils its biggest product updates. This year, HubSpot released Breeze, a built-in AI that drives the entire customer platform. Breeze equips customer-facing teams with AI tools to enhance productivity, scale growth, and uncover actionable insights. 

With Breeze Copilot to assist with key CRM tasks, Breeze Agents to automate workflows across content, social, prospecting and service, and Breeze Intelligence to enrich data, you’ll get more done—faster. Along with this, some key feature updates to Content and Marketing Hubs were announced, including AI-powered Case Studies, Video and PDF Remixing, a new Marketing Home and Analytics suite.

Some of the key takeaways from Yamini’s session regarding AI:

• AI creates, humans curate.
• AI brings context, people bring connection.
• AI handles simplicity, people handle subtlety.
• Co-creation accelerates growth.

HubSpot have really outdone themselves with over 180 customer platform updates, all of which can be found in their Spotlight here.

Josh D’Amaro: Dream to Reality: How a Disney Story Comes to Life

Josh D’Amaro is the Chairman of Disney Experiences, one of the three main divisions of Disney, which brings the magic of Disney stories and franchises to life globally through theme parks, resorts, cruise ships, one-of-a-kind vacation experiences, and a wide range of products.

It was clear from the moment he started speaking that Josh has incredible passion for creating memorable experiences for Disney fans all around the world. Getting to live inside the stories and characters you love is an immersive encounter like no other.

Josh spoke of 6 ways that Disney creates true magical experiences by making great storytelling the foundation of everything that they do:

1. Emotional connection: the ability to deeply impact the person immersed in the story.
2. Innovation: the importance of curiosity in seeking out new paths, exploring and experimenting.
3. Relatability: the need for the audience to see themselves in the stories.
4. Attention to detail: the importance of sweating the detail, the North Star for Disney imagineers. 
5. Courage: take big swings at ideas, even if you’re not sure how you will pull it off.
6. Boundless thinking: don’t let history be the gravity that holds you in place; always look for the next big challenge.

The best storytellers... truly believe in their story.

—Josh D'Amaro, Chairman at Disney Experiences.

Tyrona Heath and Kate Newstead: How Small B2B Tech Brands Grow

In the competitive landscape of advertising, small B2B tech brands often find themselves up against industry giants. So how can these challengers stand out and succeed? 

Recent research by The B2B Institute in collaboration with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute uncovered transformative strategies for growth. This session explored how smaller brands can use these insights to outmaneuver the competition and gain market share. 

This was our favorite session of INBOUND 2024. An incredible presentation backed by insightful data on how B2B tech brands can cut through the noise and drive sustainable growth. 

Here are some of the key takeaways:

The limitations of Product-Led Growth (PLG) in Theory: Brands Need Physical and Mental Availability in order to grow 

• PLG Misses the Forest for the Trees: Marketers should focus on making decisions easier by strengthening brand recall, as most people rely on memory to choose products. Investing in Mental Availability ensures your brand stands out and reduces the need for lengthy evaluation. A winning strategy optimizes recall, not analysis.
• PLG is for today, Mental Availability is for a lifetime: PLG tactics like free trials and simplified sign-ups reduce friction but are pointless without demand. Physical Availability helps sales, but it’s ineffective without Mental Availability to make customers notice your brand. Relying only on lead-gen ads is like fishing without bait—you need Mental Availability to truly attract customers.
• PLG is a fixed cost, Mental Availability is a compounding investment: Companies should invest in Mental Availability early, as brand building takes time. Strong brand marketing offers a lasting competitive advantage, reducing reliance on expensive performance marketing. Smart investments allow you to shift resources to strategies that grow over time.

The limitations of PLG in Practice: The Marketing Law of Growth

• The Double Jeopardy Law: Loyalty is tied to brand penetration, meaning smaller brands suffer doubly: they have fewer customers, who are also less loyal than those of larger brands. This is why PLG tactics focused solely on retention will eventually hit a ceiling limited by the brand’s penetration.
• The Duplication of Purchase Law: This law demonstrates that brands share customers with competitors in relation to that competitor’s market penetration. Similarly, brands chiefly grow by acquiring new customers from larger competitors, but their defecting customers are also more likely to switch to those larger brands.
• The Law of Buying Frequencies: This law states that a brand's customer base will consist mostly of light buyers and fewer heavy buyers. Your customer base will resemble that of your competitors. B2B tech brands grow mainly by acquiring more new customers than their competitors, not just by upselling or cross-selling to existing ones. Success comes from serving customers more profitably than the competition.

These incredible insights were based on research by The B2B Institute, which you can download (ungated) here.

Ryan Reynolds: Giving Maximum Effort

Closing out INBOUND 2024 was an inspiring session with actor-turned entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds and Dr. Marcus Collins. Taking the audience behind the scenes of his ventures beyond acting, Ryan gave insights into his marketing agency, Maximum Effort, and his diverse projects.

His marketing career started by chance, with budget constraints of Deadpool sparking his creative potential. Walking off the Deadpool set on the last day of shooting in full costume, he bootstrapped promotion for the movie remotely from home. “Necessity as the mother of invention became a North Star to me”, he says. 

Partnering with George Dewey, he founded his own marketing agency, where his unique approach applies storytelling driven by emotional connection. Reynolds emphasized the importance of building a strong brand identity, using examples like Nike and Apple, and shared that sparking joy in audiences is a powerful strategy.

He highlighted the value of embracing failure, being patient, and “moving at the speed of culture”. As a company, Maximum Effort prioritizes timely execution over perfection and fosters diversity in its team for deeper cultural insight. Looking forward, he predicted marketing will become faster and more agile, but human creativity will remain crucial to successful campaigns. His final counsel: trust your instincts, stay authentic, and create content that resonates with joy and connection.

Marketing is magic to me. It offers so much possibility in terms of storytelling.

— Ryan Reynolds, Actor and Entrepreneur

Takeaways and Hot Takes

The common thread running through all of these sessions was how fundamental human connection and storytelling are to business growth. As Yamini Rangan said “AI creates, humans curate”. Breeze Copilot and Agents will change how we work day to day in HubSpot, providing instant context and mining the CRM gold we need for successful Sales, Marketing and Service initiatives. Breeze Intelligence paves the way for more accurate, complete data which is the cornerstone of success across all key functions. The integration of Clearbit into HubSpot is predictably crafted, not cobbled, and the interface for enabling buyer intent looks impressive. 

However, while AI will assist us in doing our best work, it cannot provide the true connection that we crave as human beings. EQ > AI: emotional intelligence is greater than artificial intelligence, and true connection takes work. Co-creation is the only way forward in this new landscape, by doubling down on telling great stories, and using AI to disseminate, repurpose and retell them in new ways.

The opportunity has never been greater to stand out from the crowd, be bold, and take big swings to differentiate yourself in your market. As we say in Ever Wonder: win customers with harmony, not noise. We build, grow, and accelerate brands that go to market with confidence and pride, becoming beacons for customer evangelism.

Contact us today to unify your customer experience for truly scalable growth. Don’t let your history get in the way of boundless thinking, courageous action, and true emotional connection.