The first problem in marketing e-methanol is that almost nobody wakes up wanting to discuss e-methanol. A prospective buyer may care about lower lifecycle emissions, a policymaker about industrial capacity, a developer about financing, and a shipping company about a fuel it can actually use. Somewhere between renewable electricity, green hydrogen, captured carbon dioxide, and a commercial agreement, the molecule needs a story. Tanya van Soest's job is to find it.
At StormFisher, the Toronto-based developer of hydrogen-derived fuels, van Soest leads marketing and shapes messaging across media, thought leadership, stakeholder engagement, events, and content. It is the sort of assignment that punishes loose language. The product is technical. The infrastructure is capital intensive. The audiences arrive with different incentives and different levels of fluency. A catchy line may earn attention, but only precision earns the next conversation.
That makes StormFisher a revealing stop in a career spent translating complicated businesses. Van Soest has worked in marketing and communications for more than two decades, including 15 years focused on B2B software. She says the work has taken her through eight countries on four continents, across agencies and in-house teams, large enterprises and scale-ups, consumer and business markets. The sectors changed. The recurring task was to turn expertise into something another person could understand, remember, and act upon.
An editor hiding inside the executive
Van Soest calls herself a storyteller at heart and a “die-hard top of funnel” marketer. Those labels suggest imagination and reach. Her portfolio points to another craft: editing. She repeatedly enters situations where the raw material already exists but does not yet cohere. The work is to decide what deserves emphasis, what can be removed, and how the remaining pieces should fit together.
At SAP Customer Experience, where she published under the title Chief Storyteller, she wrote about the experience economy, digital disruption, and company culture. Those topics sit at the intersection of technology and human behavior, an old interest for someone who began her professional life around behavioral research at Concordia University. She studied there from 1997 to 2002 and worked as a research project coordinator and research assistant. Marketing would become her field, but the habit of looking for signals in human behavior remained useful.
Later, as a global communications and content leader at Botify, an enterprise organic-search platform, she worked across product announcements, press material, customer stories, website language, and flagship events. She curated Botify Connect gatherings in London and Chicago in 2023. An event is messaging made physical: speakers, customers, sales conversations, stagecraft, and timing all have to tell the same story. Her portfolio describes the outcome in commercial terms - stronger customer relationships, faster deal closure, and a clearer market position.
Not all marketing is equal. It's a journey from foundation to story to scale, and the tools and tactics deployed should be tailored to each distinct phase. The sooner, the stronger.Tanya van Soest
The line reads like a philosophy, but it is also a sequence. Companies often reach for tactics first because tactics are visible. A campaign ships. A post gets published. A dashboard moves. Foundations are quieter: positioning, audience choice, evidence, internal agreement, and a message the sales team can repeat without translating it again. Van Soest's order begins there, then moves to narrative, then to distribution and demand.
The working sequence
Fractional, with the seams joined
In 2024, van Soest co-founded The Articulate Collective with brand strategist and writer Robert Mighall. The firm offers part-time, interim, and project-based marketing support to high-growth businesses. The model answers a familiar scale-up problem: a company needs senior judgment before it has the budget, workload, or desire for a permanent executive and every specialist that executive might eventually hire.
The word “fractional” can imply a person sliced into calendar blocks. Van Soest and Mighall argue for something more coordinated. Senior leadership sits at the center, with a flexible network of specialists assembled around the problem. Their essay on the model compares the shift to software's move away from fixed, in-house infrastructure. Capacity can expand and contract. The harder requirement is that strategy and execution still feel like one system.
That point has become van Soest's compact warning to growing companies: “You can't scale what isn't aligned.” She has used the phrase when discussing stalled growth, blurry roles, siloed functions, and disagreement across leadership. Alignment in this formulation is not a workshop artifact. It decides whether brand, sales, finance, and operations pull in the same direction once activity accelerates.
Her appearance at Toronto's DIGITAL (TO)DAY 2025 made that argument public. The panel, “Redefining Client-Agency Partnerships,” placed her beside leaders from agencies, brands, and education. Van Soest arrived as chief executive and co-founder of the collective, but also as someone who has occupied both sides of the relationship. Her career contains agency work, in-house leadership, and the newer middle ground where an external operator behaves like part of the team.
Portfolio logicDifferent industries, the same trust problem
The collective model also explains the unusual breadth of her recent portfolio. At Credit Benchmark, she led a 2025 repositioning intended to turn a fragmented brand expression into a connected one, with the website carrying the new story. For electric-vehicle consultancy Amp&Axle, she revamped core website messaging. At hiring platform Willo, she oversaw customer success stories and led the strategy, survey work, development, and promotion for its Hiring Intelligence Report 2026.
The hiring work is especially revealing because the subject was changing under the team's feet. Across three annual reports, van Soest described a progression in attitudes toward artificial intelligence: uncertainty in 2024, skepticism in 2025, and a shift toward essential use in 2026. She appeared with Willo chief executive Euan Cameron on Recruiting Brainfood to discuss what the data meant for CV-centered hiring, automation, fairness, and human decision-making.
She also helped change Willo's “Happy Hiring” CEO newsletter. The earlier format bundled company news, product updates, thought leadership, and customer stories. In 2026 it narrowed to one theme per issue, explored at length. The choice sounds small, but it reflects a conviction: when content becomes abundant, depth and judgment matter more. More topics can create less meaning.
Search technology, hiring software, credit-risk data, electric vehicles, and e-fuels look like unrelated stops. The shared problem is trust. Each category asks a buyer to understand a system they cannot fully see, assess a claim they may not have the time to audit, and make a decision with organizational consequences. The marketer cannot manufacture that trust. She can organize the evidence and language that allow it to form.
The molecule and the marketA story must eventually meet infrastructure
At StormFisher, the trust problem becomes concrete. The company develops, owns, and operates commercial-scale renewable-fuel facilities. Its e-methanol pathway combines renewable electricity, green hydrogen, and captured carbon dioxide. Potential uses include maritime shipping, aviation fuel production, refining, blending, and industrial applications. The proposition connects climate targets to physical assets, long contracts, regulations, and supply chains.
Van Soest's role is not to turn that complexity into a fairy tale. It is to give each audience a way into the same reality. Cargo owners may enter through Scope 3 emissions. Fuel buyers may start with specifications and supply. Communities may ask about local infrastructure. Investors need the development story. Policy audiences need to understand how rules change project economics. A coherent brand keeps those entrances connected.
You can't scale what isn't aligned.Tanya van Soest
That is where her old brand-and-demand balancing act becomes useful. She rejects the choice between long-term foundation and short-term activation, qualitative insight and quantitative evidence. Clean-fuel markets need both clocks. Projects require years of patient credibility building, but they also move through immediate milestones: partnerships, policy decisions, financing stages, and buyer conversations. The story has to survive all of them.
Van Soest's career does not resolve the tension between art and science in marketing. It treats the tension as the work. Behavioral research and storytelling. Enterprise structure and scale-up speed. A senior leader and a flexible team. Brand memory and pipeline. A molecule and a market. Her value lies in keeping both sides visible long enough to build something joined up.
In an industry fond of louder claims, her most transferable idea is about order. Build the foundation. Find the story. Scale with tools suited to the moment. It is not a formula for making complexity disappear. It is a method for helping other people move through it.