What Does HubSpot’s Rebrand Mean for Business Owners?
Yes, says one marketer, the platform’s methodology is under pressure from AI, but there has to be new methodology to take its place.
Good morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
Julian Scadden thinks blue-collar businesses need to make money now—before things get really bad.
Car prices are high, and—driven in part by private equity—car dealerships are selling at record rates.
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You heard it here first: “Dark sweet cherry” will be the next flavor to go viral.
MARKETING
This marketer thinks HubSpot’s AI-inspired shift from Inbound to Unbound is a misstep: “Inbound was never just a conference. It was a philosophy and a movement, and for a long stretch, it was the closest thing mid-market marketers had to a shared language. I remember my first Inbound. I ran into Brian Halligan in the hallway with his dog, and the whole thing felt exactly right. We all wore a little orange that week. We all left with the sense that we were part of something bigger than a software demo. For a lot of us running marketing in companies that were too big to wing it and too small to hire a Fortune 500 team, Inbound was where we went to feel less alone. That context matters for what I am about to say. The reasoning is sound. The name does not land.”
“The data is sobering. Google’s AI Overviews now appear on roughly 30 percent of search queries, up from under 4 percent in January 2025 (Seer Interactive, 2025). When they appear, organic click-through rates have dropped 61 percent, from 1.76 percent to 0.61 percent (Seer Interactive, 2025). Roughly 58 percent of Google searches now end without a single click (Similarweb, 2025). Gartner projects a 25-percent decline in traditional search traffic by the end of 2026 (Gartner, 2025).”
“So yes, the methodology that gave Inbound its name is under real pressure. HubSpot is right to evolve. The question is what they evolved into, and who the new promise is actually for. Inbound worked as a name because it was a methodology and a product and a movement wrapped into one word. You said ‘inbound’ and you meant something specific. You meant HubSpot. ... I understand the instinct to protect brand equity by changing one letter. The original name was load-bearing. The new one is decorative.”
“The mid-market CEOs and marketing leaders I work with are running companies between $20 and $200 million in revenue. They have one solo marketer trying to cover six functions. They have a CEO who got burned on a past marketing investment and has lost patience for the next pitch. They have a team that got handed 40 new AI tools in the last 12 months and zero framework for deciding which ones matter. When HubSpot tells this audience they are unbound, the message does not land the way it was intended. It sounds like a permission slip to do more, try more, experiment more, in a world where ‘more’ is already the problem.” READ MORE
