As intelligence becomes ambient, credibility grows scarce. When everyone sounds like an expert, the market needs new ways to decide who to trust. It defaults to shared ways of interpreting a space.
In economic terms: markets price what they understand. Authority determines what they understand.
Authority, in this sense, is the ability to shape how the market defines what matters, what counts, and who leads.
Authority doesn’t come from claiming product superiority, reciting purpose statements, or repeating tired bromides about digital transformation.
It comes from advancing the story. Companies that shape markets do so by making arguments, grounding them in original proof, and reinforcing them over time.
That proof can take many forms: proprietary data, customer outcomes, operating insight, or research the market hasn’t seen before. Over time, argument and evidence compound until the market adopts the frame as its own.
Markets price what they understand. Authority determines what they understand.
The pattern
You see this pattern across business history. Microsoft reframed itself from a software vendor to a cloud platform company, and its valuation followed. Adobe shifted from packaged software to a subscription-based creative platform, changing how the market understood its growth. More recently, Nvidia has been reframed from a graphics chip maker to the foundational infrastructure layer for AI.
All three did the hard work of building new capabilities, shipping products, and proving value with customers. But how the market understood that work mattered just as much.
From expertise to authority
I’ve seen this play out repeatedly inside companies. Early in my career, I served as managing editor of Voices on Society, a digital thought leadership platform designed to raise the public profile of McKinsey’s Social Sector practice.
At the time, McKinsey wasn’t widely known for its excellent work serving nonprofits and multilateral organizations. As we built a global audience of more than two million readers, the platform made that capability visible—and helped shape how development challenges were understood.
Voices on Society told those stories from inside the work itself: why health systems fail at the point of care when incentives and behaviors don’t line up, why agricultural output stalls when systems break between seed, farmers, markets and financing, and how education reforms fail, not for lack of good ideas but when delivery systems can’t execute at scale.
We showed how these problems play out—across ministries, NGOs, supply chains, and communities—and what it takes to make them work.
The firm’s expertise and capabilities were always there. What changed was how they were understood.
Reframing a category
A few years later, I saw the same dynamic in a very different context. When I joined Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the company had just split from HP and faced a familiar problem: deep technical capability, but no clear market frame. It was known primarily as a server vendor, competing in a classic red ocean market.
Our work focused on translation. Through Enterprise.nxt, a global thought leadership platform for business and IT leaders, we translated HPE expertise into narratives executives could understand and act on. Product strategy, research, and executive voice were aligned into a single story about hybrid cloud and high-performance computing—at a time when the market was defined by incumbents like Dell and Cisco, and increasingly reshaped by hyperscale cloud platforms.
As the market adopted that story, HPE was named one of the world’s top 50 global brands. The technology and customer traction mattered. But so did the story the market told itself about what HPE was becoming.
Building the system
The clearest example for me was ServiceNow. When I joined in 2017, the market viewed ServiceNow primarily as an IT ticketing system vendor. Over time, the story evolved: first to workflow platform, then to AI platform for the enterprise.
We didn’t just tell that story. We built systems to support it. We created Workflow by ServiceNow, an editorial platform that delivered original perspectives on enterprise AI and business transformation to a global audience of business leaders.
We built global research franchises that tracked enterprise AI maturity, the impact of AI on labor markets, and how AI was reshaping security and risk. We translated product and customer insight into narratives executives could use.
We did this work continuously, across channels, over years. As our framing took hold, analysts adopted the language. Customers described their problems differently. Competitors repositioned in response.
Revenue growth followed. But it didn’t start there. What changed first was how the market understood the company.
Authority as infrastructure
That’s what I mean by authority. It’s not volume or visibility. It’s the ability to shape the mental model the market uses to make sense of a category.
Most companies treat this as messaging or a campaign. In my experience, it behaves more like infrastructure. You need a way to extract proof from real operating insight. Translate that proof into a clear, defensible frame. And reinforce it until the market starts to repeat it back to you.
Defining moments
That’s exactly what Walled City is built to do. We work with companies at moments that shape how they are perceived: launches, pivots, major product transitions. These are the moments when the market is actively forming a view of what you are and why you matter.
Frames aren’t fixed. But shifting them takes more than messaging. It takes evidence, argument, and consistency over time.
That’s how you claim the frame.