Bold B2B Brand Journeys

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to listen to an episode of CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the accomplished marketing leaders of CMO Huddles, a community that’s always sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness. The CMOs on this episode are Joy Neely, Heather Salerno, and Will Meier. They share the B2B brand journeys behind their respective companies, from why it was needed in the first place to how they did it. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one podcast for B2B marketers. Alright, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddles Studio, the live-streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I’m your host, Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. Sadly, the word brand has a branding problem: too many C-suite executives and investors associate brand with wasteful spending that doesn’t drive revenue. To circumvent this, some marketers deploy euphemisms like reputation, which, by the way, is a great one, and that seems easier for execs to understand—but a rose is a rose is a rose, and with the beauty of a rose comes thorns. So today we’re talking about brand journeys, however thorny, with three amazing marketing leaders. With that, let’s bring on Joy Neely, Chief Commercial Officer at Medvantx, who is joining the show for the first time. Hello, Joy, and welcome.

Joy: Thank you so much, Drew. I’m doing great today. I am in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Drew: First of all, how are and where are you?

Joy: I’m doing great today. I am in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Drew: Indianapolis! Alright, that was a trivia question of states that have their capital start with the same letter, obviously, Indiana and Indianapolis. I’m really excited you’re on the show first. I know one, this is the first time, but you joined Medvantx in 2022 and I know that the company had recently changed its name, sort of as you got there. What’s the story behind that, and what was your strategic mandate when you started?

Joy: You know, it’s kind of an interesting story for Medvantx. It’s a company that’s about 20 years old that started out as an animal pharmaceutical company called Amira Farm and then quickly evolved into a company that provides patient assistance programs to pharmaceutical manufacturers that evolved to Medvantx. Served in that capacity for probably about 10 to 15 years, and then the founder actually sold it to private equity. At that point in time, a new CEO came in and kind of wanted to go a different direction and more of a B2B and change it to a B2C and e-commerce company. And I’ll just say it was a bumpy road. It did not go well. I came in shortly after another CEO came in, as we were working on rebranding the organization. He evaluated the company and said, “We need to go back to the roots.” And those roots were going back to Medvantx and still many existing clients knew the organization and the core service offering. So for me, it was rebranding the company back to Medvantx, kind of revisiting what a new logo would look like, relaunching with a new strategy. And just to be transparent, the organization had really never invested dollars into marketing. It was an exciting time to really have the opportunity to relaunch the brand with Medvantx.

Drew: What an interesting story. And you know, I hear this so often with PE firms that come in, they say, “Well, we want to get from here to there.” You may have seen my post last week about growth is not a strategy, and they just say, “Grow, grow, grow.” And so they bring in a new CEO, and things don’t actually work out because the fundamentals of the business where they were were misunderstood. By the way, one of the things I did want to mention for the audience is that you’re both really the head of sales and marketing, so it’s special to be able to talk to you because you get to make the real decisions every day. Do we spend a little more on sales? Do we spend a little more on marketing? And that makes this conversation that much more interesting. So putting on your sales hat as you think about marketing—what did you want for marketing? You know, your other side, right? As if you’re talking to yourself in two different desks. What did you want and particularly as it relates to the brand and the evolution?

Joy: I think marketing and sales definitely go hand in hand. I think as I experienced in my former career at Lilly and even working at CareMetx—and I know CareMetx is a part of the CMO Huddle group as well—it’s a great partnership. So I think if you have marketing set up where they support sales, you can definitely drive leads. As I think about the strategy we had of launching the brand at a conference with a PR press release, press campaign, launching a new service, there was a lot of surround sound from the marketing side of the house to support sales, and those efforts. And I really think for us, we spend a lot of time thinking about what are the support efforts that we have coming from our marketing team, whether it’s email campaigns, LinkedIn, what we’re doing on our website, or leveraging 6sense, which has been a great tool that we’ve had organizationally, to really support the sales team when they’re on the ground, whether it’s at conferences or meetings with clients. So I really think the two go hand in hand.

Drew: And so I want to go back to this launch. It’s funny. I remember years ago, working on a launch of the new debit card. And the Head of Marketing at the time said, “You know, you only get to launch once.” It sounds so simple, but it’s true. And what I loved about what you said, in terms of you launched it at a conference, so your target audience was gathered there. You had a new product to announce with it, which I think is really important too. So you can bring actual product news to the market, and then you had, I guess, the opportunity to follow up on it. So I’m curious, sort of, how did that work at the conference? Maybe you could give some more details there because I think it’s really interesting. You made the choice of launching in a conference, which I think is brilliant. Talk about that a little bit more.

Joy: Yeah. So for us, it was almost kind of a “we’re back,” if you will, because when we went through that phase where we were VitalCare and then back to Medvantx, we still kept some of our existing customers. And I think some of our customers would say, “You’re a little bipolar right now. What’s going on? Who are you from a brand identity?” And many of our big clients were like, “We’re so happy that you figured out who you are, and you came back to the Medvantx brand.” But it also allowed us to reestablish who ourselves were with new clients in the market. So we had a booth. We had booth presence. We also invested in having a speaker at that conference as well. And we were strategic in terms of having it at the first day of the conference on the main stage. So we had more brand presence there. And then, you know, also had a press release. So we were able to leverage that on LinkedIn, leverage that on our website, and then strategically in front of that conference, advertise we’re going to be there, set up meetings, and then follow through from the meetings we had, and track that from a sales opportunity perspective. I will say it took some time to re-establish the brand, even for our website to track up with Google metrics and everything else over time, but by the end of the year, after we’ve been through, I think, like six or seven conferences, I would say there’s strong brand awareness. And our ICP is pretty small. I think our target audience is maybe 350 pharmaceutical manufacturers and diagnostics companies that we truly target in the patient support services space. So I think that’s an advantage for us, that we aren’t trying to boil the ocean. We know exactly who we’re targeting to be able to start building a brand with those customers once again and acquiring some new ones as well.

Drew: So how long do you think it took, sort of from “we’re back” to “we’re really back” and people know you’re back?

Joy: I would say it was from the launch at the March conference to late November of 2023 where people actually knew who we were once again, and we started really closing deals. And we do have a long sales cycle, but it took a full probably nine to 12 months to get there.

Drew: Yeah, and I know that there’s oftentimes not the patience and the recognition that this does take time. I also think it’s an act of bravery to go backwards, to go forwards, because I know a number of companies that we had a conversation in a Huddle recently where, you know, one of the Huddlers, somebody had just decided to change the name of the company just because, and there was no plan. And these were big businesses, and it feels like somebody had some courage to be able to kind of suck it up a little bit and say, “Yep, we’re going back.”

Joy: So I will give that credit to our CEO. There was discussion of, do we create a new name, or do we go back to an established brand that had positive brand equity in the market and build upon that? And I think that was actually the right call for our organization, because there was a lot of positive brand equity with Medvantx, the name, and I think some brand confusion when we moved the other direction, that really helped us continue to grow with some of our existing customers and then acquire some nuance because there was some familiarity in the market already.

Drew: Yeah, it’s a good, bold decision, and one the CEO has to make, you know, I mean, the marketer can recommend it, but the CEO has to embrace it. Alright, well, fascinating, really interesting journey. We’ll be back with you, Joy, but now we’re going to bring on Heather Salerno, CMO of Appcast, and an industry expert who’s graced our stage before, to delve into the topic of B2B rebranding. Hello, Heather, wonderful to see you again. 

Heather: So nice to be back, Drew. Thank you for having me. 

Drew: Oh my gosh. And by the way, you sound terrific. So how are you and where are you?

Heather: I’ll give everyone one guess by looking at the signs behind me. And yes, I am in Boston with the Red Sox and the Bruins, which is ironic, because my family is from upstate New York, so we’re actually Buffalo Bills fans. You can’t say that in front of Patriots fans, but yes, I’m in the Boston area.

Drew: Go Bills, the only team actually in New York, and my wife’s from Buffalo. So, there you go. So alright, so we’ve got you in Boston, but not a Beantown person. Alright, so let’s talk about your brand refresh and what prompted it, and talk a little bit about it.

Heather: Yep, sure, first a little bit of context is necessary. So I joined Appcast in 2019. Was the first head of marketing that the company had, and as I came in, there was sort of the shared consensus that Appcast needed kind of an elevated brand look and feel, new logo, new website. And so we embarked on a really comprehensive project between 2019 and 2020 to completely overhaul, I would say that was really an overhaul of our brand identity with extensive customer interviews, internal interviews, and working with an amazing external agency. And so that launched in 2020—that was great. And actually, I think that’s what I was on this podcast talking about last time. So, but that is important context. So we went through that in 2020. Between 2020 and 2023, we were going through some significant business changes, obviously COVID, but we actually experienced a lot of growth during that time. We acquired a company, we really went upmarket and changed our product offering. You know, this is sort of Appcast’s way, and I imagine many listeners’ way, but we move very fast. In retrospect, we didn’t really see this at the time, but in retrospect, what started to happen was, with this speed came sort of iterating on the brand identity on the fly, and, you know, and it’s hard because you want to encourage creativity, but these things would pop up and like, “Wait, how did we get here?” And so we basically got to a spot in 2023 where we said, “Hold on, this doesn’t look like this” and like it actually doesn’t look like anything. Like where have we gone since 2020? So we worked with our agency again, and kind of said, “Help us to solve this problem and kind of get realigned, and give us that kind of anchor again for 2024.”

Drew: Yeah. And I want to really put a punctuation point on this, because a lot of times, you know, look, a new CMO comes on, and there is a tendency—and I’ve seen this happen over and over again—we should rebrand. That’s like the first step. And to me, that’s not the reason to rebrand. The reason to rebrand is you made an acquisition, you had a new target audience, you had new products, and your story that you had developed in 2020 was no longer relevant to where you were going. That’s the reason, and it’s really important, there was a business reason, new product, new target, a new kind of offering altogether. So having done that, talk a little bit about the process that you went through on the refresh.

Heather: So because we’ve had this established relationship with an agency this time through, was very different from last time in that when you’ve worked with an agency for many years, there’s a certain level of trust and a little bit of like reading each other’s minds, which is helpful. One thing that I really appreciate about this agency is that they tend to push us. And so, you know, we start here, they say, “Hey, you should go here,” and we end up here. But if they had told us to go here, we would, you know, wouldn’t have gotten that far. And so it’s really helpful that they kind of push us, even if we’re not always, like, you know, in love with their very first kind of out-there ideas. But to be honest, this was a really interesting situation because I don’t think that I went into this thinking, “Oh, we’re doing a refresh or rebrand.” It just sort of like, as we got into it, we were like, “Wait a minute,” exactly as you said, Drew—we had these significant things that happened with the acquisition, with the new product, and all of a sudden we’re like, “Wait, we need to take a minute. We have to actually think about this strategically.” So, for example, I didn’t know that it was even in scope that we were going to entertain having a new logo. And then all of a sudden, I was in a presentation where there was an extremely thoughtful proposal on why we need a new logo. I was like, “That makes perfect sense. I need to do some organizational change management and see what the appetite is for that.” But yes, it was one of the—it was very different from last time, I would say. The first time, it was much more of kind of the textbook, you know, I don’t even think it was that, “Oh, there’s a new CMO, we should rebrand.” It was more that there was a fundamental disconnect between Appcast’s identity and how we presented ourselves. We presented as sort of a cold, empty tech company when in reality, it was a very rich, warm company, and so we had to sort of, you know, fix that cognitive dissonance and have that alignment between who we are and identity.

Drew: Interesting. Feel free to name the agency.

Heather: That would be great. They’re Something Familiar, is the name. They’re based in Bristol, and initially we were like, “Wait, we’re working with a company in Bristol,” and it was during COVID. And my thought was, “Well, even if they were in Boston, I can’t get together with them anyway, so like, does it matter?” But yeah, they’re in the UK.

Drew: Got it. And I love the comment about pushing. I’ve done a number of podcast interviews on rebrands, and almost all the ones that sort of stuck and really actually made a difference, the CMO talked about the agency making them uncomfortable and that’s such an important thing for CMOs to remember—is that if you stay in the zone that you’re already in, why bother? So they’ve got to push you into a new place. And that sort of, “Uh-oh, new territory.” Now, doing a new logo is kind of a big deal because it’s expensive, it’s time-consuming, and you know it, you have to have a really good rationale for it. And what you talked about, there was a disconnect from a personality standpoint. But was that in the logo? Or was that an everything?

Heather: No, no, no. That was really for rebrand one that was with everything. One of the biggest contributors for this time was that. So in 2019, we also became part of the StepStone Group, which is a large company based in Düsseldorf, Germany. And their logos, they’ve been through a corporate rebrand, and all of their logos now have lowercase letters. And so really, the change from logo one to logo two was very substantial. This one was more kind of confined and tightly scoped to let’s align with StepStone. Let’s kind of continue the journey about approachability and personality. And we then embraced the lowercase ‘a’.

Drew: Alright, so there was a cause to do it. It’s so funny. Lowercase logos—while I love the look of them, they drive journalists crazy testing. AP insists on capitalizing proper nouns, period, end of story, no matter what you do. And so it’s just a hilarious little inside baseball thing. Okay, lastly, any aha moments for you along the process?

Heather: A little background again – prior to working at Appcast, I was at CEB, which was then acquired by Gartner. You know, at that very large, successful, well-run company, when they do a rebrand or refresh, there are teams of 100 people and 5,000 lines of Excel project plans. I actually remember even going from Corporate Executive Board to CEB, like the intense… It’s basically like, “Okay, we’re gonna flip a switch, and everywhere across the entire universe, Corporate Executive Board had never existed.” We’re now CEB, sort of like 1984, you know what I mean? We’ve always been at war with Eurasia. And so we made an intentional decision this time to not kill ourselves about that. We’ve got so many fish to fry, and we said, “You know what? There is such a long tail here.” We’ve got 10% of our properties that get 85% of our views on day one. We’re gonna like, when we flip that switch, the vast majority of things are going to be updated, but there’s going to be a long tail. For example, I didn’t even know I had this prop, but we still have these in offices, and that’s okay – the uppercase ‘A’. So we’re trying to, you know, we’ve kind of said, “Hey, by the end of the year, you’re going to roll those things back.” And I actually said that in an all-hands. I said, “I want everyone to know we’re committed to this. We’re doing this. We’re hitting the big properties. Do not panic if you see something that has the slightly outdated logo. We’re going to take care of it, and it’s okay.”

Drew: Okay, so sometimes you can relax about some of those things. Wonderful, great story. We’re going to now move on and bring on Will Meier, who’s patiently been waiting. He’s the VP of Marketing at FM, who’s also joining the show for the first time. Welcome, Will. How are you?

Will: Hey, thanks, Drew. Great to be here. Doing well.

Drew: And tell me where you are. 

Will: Fort Worth, Texas. 

Drew: Alright, we made a pass to Mississippi. Yes. Fort Worth, Texas, Indianapolis, Boston, and New York City. Okay, so let’s talk about building a family of brands at FM, and talk about what you’re doing, what that means.

Will: I think in a lot of ways, leading outside, looking in, it feels like when you see a family of brands, it’s easy to think there must have been this beautiful, strategic vision from the beginning, and you built this family of brands, and it’s a wonderful ecosystem. For us, it was a journey that didn’t start out that way. When I was hired here at FM, there were 13 of us. It was only Musicbed, which is one of our more public-facing brands. The other two, Film Supply and Stills, were one of them was an idea, one of them wasn’t, and neither of them existed. So it was a journey, and really, even before I had gotten to Musicbed, it had begun a process of really growing as a brand, growing in terms of the customers we were selling to. So it started out basically at the entry level of the market, and as I had come on, we were moving into some of the middle tier of the market, trying to explore: Could there even be a market for us in the enterprise? As I’ve been here, we prize, which allowed in when we looked to launch Film Supply, to confidently know we can launch that business. We can position it with the opportunity for enterprise clients, and then do the same thing when we got to Stills. So it was very much an iterative process of saying, “Hey, I have these ideas for other brands that could fill a similar spot in the market, in a different industry. We have some learnings from our other brands we can take.” And then, as they’ve all come online, we’re now looking at how these three play in the ecosystem together. Is there cross-sell opportunities? How many clients do we have that need all three? Need maybe two of them? So it’s very much been an iterative process, and there’s been a lot of growth and change about, “Hey, can we step here? Maybe we need to actually go over here instead.”

Drew: And just to frame this and make sure I understand, are we talking about a house of brands, where you have multiple brands underneath the FM, or is this a branded house? FM, blah, blah, blah, wherever you go with that, I have a question for you.

Will: Yeah, great question. It is a house of brands. So Musicbed, Film Supply, and Stills are the main public-facing brands. And then FM is the parent company, which doesn’t have a lot of public-facing executions or points.

Drew: Got it. And do you have a sense of why you took a house of brands versus branded house approach that is sort of more typical in B2B?

Will: Yeah, I do. It was a very big topic of discussion before the last brand launch. And there was an option for both on the table where we would maybe start going the route of not so much a branded house, but saying, “Hey, would we line extend with Film Supply, which is a brand that licenses footage, and would we offer photos?” We do have clients that asked for it, and there was also an opportunity to split it out as its own brand. And I’m a big advocate, especially, I think for us, FM is unique where the brands we had in the market are positioned at the top. And so when we have a brand positioned at the top that can own the very top single rung in a ladder, and we’re looking at whether to line extend, inherently, we’re going to dilute some of that brand in some way, whether that’s extremely harmful or slightly harmful or maybe neutral. There was an opportunity for us to launch this third brand and say, “Hey, instead of line extending, we can pull it out on its own.” And then it has a chance and an opportunity to hold a single rung at the top of its ladder as well, and so now we have three distinct brands with three distinct offerings that can hold the most premium spot in their industry.

Drew: Are there mutually exclusive target audiences in each case?

Will: Yes, there are, for sure, and there’s also overlapping as well.

Drew: Because that’s where it gets really interesting because there are no economies of scale of having three brands, right?

Will: Yeah, yeah, it’s really challenging. I mean, I would say so marketing and creative are shared services, but yeah, it doesn’t diminish the amount of work that we have to do, or it doesn’t increase our ability to say, “Hey, let’s copy and paste that.” Even if we copy and paste it to some degree, there are still things that have to change.

Drew: Right. Because if you, particularly if you have different targets and different needs, and therefore you’re solving different problems for them. But it’s just so interesting. And there is no right answer here, folks. But when I asked Anne Lunas, who was the CMO of Adobe, probably three years ago, when I had her on my podcast, and they had just bought Magento and Marketo, both of which were $4 billion acquisitions. “Are you a branded house or a house of brands?” And she said, without question, not missing a beat, we’re a branded house. And so you watch the migration of these giant $4 billion brands, and you know, she gradually, over a two to three-year period, has been true to that, which I think is fascinating given the targets and so forth they have. So there are a couple of approaches here. Any thoughts at some point in time of attaching the FM name to these others? So there’s some consistency.

Will: It’s a conversation we’ve had as a leadership team, and I’ve had a handful of conversations with our CEO. The main question now is one of costs. So we are privately held. Our CEO is the owner of the company. And so when we look at investing, I’m responsible for those investments, and I say, “Well, if I can invest now in a brand that has a lot of equity, that has a lot of awareness, do I want to put my money into that, or do I want to basically take another startup and say, ‘We have to build awareness for that’?” So I do think there will come a time, and we’ve started small things where we can say, “Hey, if we’re at a sales event and all of our clients across all three brands are here, maybe it makes sense to have a dedicated landing page that has FM on it.” But there are a lot of situations where it’s hard for me internally—I cringe a little bit when I think, “Does anybody know FM? Are we going to confuse clients? Is this our first touch point? Maybe we shouldn’t bring this up now.” But I can definitely see a world where we get to a place where it is the right time to invest and we do find a lot of efficiencies for being under one roof, for sure.

Drew: Yeah, I think it’s a good thing to start to think about now, because once you’ve separated those, bringing them back under an umbrella is hard and complicated, and there’s no ripping the band-aid effectively.

Will: Yeah. And I think it makes me think of what Joy was saying, where it feels really nice to think, you know, if we do that, let’s just do it all at once, and we’ll just cover 100% the first month. And I think the reality is, we’re looking at such an extended timeline of, let’s find a few places where it makes sense and it will happen a lot more gradually, right?

Drew: Yeah, and it does. I mean, there’s no doubt there on that one again. I sort of point to Adobe, and was probably, you may still find Marketo, you may still find Magento in some aspect of it, but it’s Adobe. It was initially, you know, Magento by Adobe, right? And then it was something something something, Magento or Adobe, something something, and then eventually the name. So there’s a path for migrating brands that is available to you, and it’ll be interesting to see how that works out. Okay, love all of this. We’re gonna now take a quick break so I can talk about CMO Huddles, and then we’ll be back with all three of the CMO guests. So let me talk about CMO Huddles.

Launched in 2020, CMO Huddles is a close-knit community of over 300 highly effective B2B marketers who share, care, and dare each other to greatness. Given the extraordinary time constraints on CMOs, everything about CMO Huddles is designed to help leaders save time and empower them to make faster and better decisions. So let’s bring back Joy, Heather, Will. Heather, you’ve been with us the longest. Maybe you could share an example of how CMO Huddles has helped you.

Heather: Absolutely. The part that I find most valuable on a day-to-day basis is the Slack channels. So just knowing that there are hundreds of B2B marketers who are available if I have a big question, a little question, if I’m looking for a tool, I was, you know, dealing with career pathing, wondering if people would be willing to share kind of talent matrices and competencies, and people are willing to share that with their peers and colleagues. So I’ve just found it to be a very generous community.

Drew: I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Joy, any way that CMO Huddles has helped you?

Joy: Yeah. I would say, through the different Huddles, I’ve met a few different individuals. We seem to be in the same huddle groups over time, and we’ve had one-off conversations to brainstorm or work through different challenges that we’re facing. So I found that to be great from almost a peer mentor perspective.

Drew: Yeah, I love that, and it’s one of the really secret things about CMO Huddles is that we’ll arrange one-on-ones for folks, and it is just such a shortcut. Will, I know you’re brand new to the community, so I’d be really hard for you to have an answer, and I don’t want to put you on the spot, but hey, go for it.

Will: So I do have one thing you just mentioned, the one-on-one connections. I haven’t been here long, but I think in my onboarding call with you, something I said, a challenge that I was currently working on with our sales team and our sales leader sparked something you thought of. I think it was Scott over at Sprout Social. We connected, and we were talking through, how do we scale ABM really well and work with sales really well. He had a couple of great tips from his experience at Sprout and also Zendesk. So that was a fantastic connection and really helpful.

Drew: I love it. All right, well, if you’re a senior B2B marketer and need a shortcut to B2B greatness, take a second to sign up for our free starter program at cmohuddles.com. Okay, now we’re back. All of us are back, and let’s talk about how you involve the leadership team and employees during this process. And since Will, you were last, I’ll let you start on this one.

Will: Yeah, one thing that has been really important for us on our team is testing first and starting small and saying, “Okay, if we have a hypothesis on the marketing team, or we have something we think could have broader implications and impact on the business, but maybe there’s hesitancy across leadership, or it’s just really, really new. We haven’t done it before, finding a way to test it small, and then bring that back to leadership and say, ‘Hey, we’ve been testing this either with this segment of our customers or in this area. And here are the results.’ It looks like it’s worked really, really well.” I’ll let the leadership team look through that data, and then we’ll say, now we’re going to take that to a broader scope, whether that’s everybody or a larger portion. So that’s proved really helpful to have that data and say there may be some gut here, but it’s not just gut. We have a test. We have data to back it up.

Drew: Right. I love it. And it also allows you to take the initiative on a small basis. Joy, what about involving your leadership team?

Joy: I’d say a mix of leadership and then other cross-functional partners. One thing we’ve started doing is around like SEO, keyword optimization—pulling in a larger group for that on at least a quarterly basis to make sure we aren’t missing anything that we might not be thinking about. And then a second example as well is, you know, as we’re developing our board decks, pulling in different folks from a developmental perspective, to at least have a role, at least contributing to the slide decks as well, just so they get that opportunity for exposure, and then also presenting on lead team meetings.

Drew: I love it. Okay, so Heather, let’s talk employee involvement. And I would imagine, because you guys, the company was changing, and sometimes employees don’t keep up. How did that work for you in terms of the rebranding process?

Heather: We were really blessed to have an awesome program manager on the marketing team leading this whole initiative. And her name is Annie Pullen, and having her and her team kind of managing on a day-to-day basis, thinking through who are the different parties who need to go, you know, I kind of joked about the CG Gartner, 5000 rows spreadsheets. It’s a little bit of like pot kettle, but I guess the difference is, ours wasn’t 5000 rows, but it’s, you know, 250 rows. So they ran a very tight process.

I think one of the things for us, well, just an observation about how it’s different to do a rebrand after five years with a company, versus six months with a company. For the first time, you know, six months, I had very little confidence. There hadn’t yet been really established trust or, you know, and obviously, you know, working really hard and trying to make a good impression, but I’m still learning about the company. So the way I engaged with leaders, with the rest of the employees, was very much of like, “Hey, do you think this is right? Is this headed in the right direction?” Versus, you know, five years in, there was still a collaborative relationship and talking with lots of stakeholders, as Joy mentioned, but there’s a little bit more of leadership and confidence that I can bring to the table of like, “Hey, I’ve talked to customers myself, and here’s what I hear from customers.” And so it just had a real different feel five years later.

Drew: You know, again, I’m going back to that point that I made earlier, which is, you know, don’t rebrand in the first six months, unless you have to. What you’re really saying is you didn’t have sort of the moral authority at the point to really lead it in a way that you could the next time around.

Heather: I was much more hesitant. I was more kind of deferring, and felt like I had to, like, check each step. So this time, you know, I put the new logo in front of the CEO and said, “Here’s our rationale. Here’s what we’re thinking.” What do you think? He’s like, “That makes a lot of sense.” But in general, like, in terms of the brand, look and feel and the visual, like, I then had the confidence, or, frankly, the authority, because I had his trust, just to be able to make decisions. So it moved a lot more quickly, and it was more fun the second time around.

Drew: I’m sure, yeah. Again, there’s nothing like confidence and also the trust that the CEO has in you because you’ve been working together a while. You know, is important as it is. CEOs got a lot of things on their mind, and so if they are confident in your decision-making ability, they’re gonna let you run with stuff. So that’s awesome. I’m curious , any one of you can answer this, because employees are where the rubber meets the road when it comes to branding, in my mind. And so often they’re the last, they’re the afterthought, oh shoot, we got to update our premiums and oh shoot, we don’t have a training program so people understand it. I’m curious if, as you looked at these new brands or rebrand, did some special things for employees to bring them along with the changes? And Joy, I’m thinking of you because you sort of had that big launch, but I’m wondering where employees fit in.

Joy: Yeah. So when we launched, we did a town hall to launch the new brand. Just kind of roll it out that way. We also on our SharePoint, because we’re a Microsoft house, have a whole like brand site where you can download all the PowerPoint templates, all the logos, if you need a logo, etc. We’ve also partnered with sales training to ensure that as new people are onboarded, they at least get some brand guideline training. I mean, I will still say occasionally, you like, “Where did that template come from? That is not on brand.” We’re marlowe, that’s aptos, you know. So we feel like there’s constant coaching and reminder like “That’s definitely not on brand,” but we try to reinforce that. Also, as any new employee is hired, part of their welcome is they’re given a $100 gift card to use at our pop-up shop, so that you’re immediately given some sort of swag to order with the Medvantx brand. So I think that’s part of a way to quickly immerse yourself in the brand as well.

Drew: I love that idea. I love that because then they can choose. That’s a really important insight on premiums: is that if you just send them a hat and they’re not hat wearers, you’re basically creating garbage. But if you let them choose a mug or a hat or a t-shirt, you know it’s going to get worn. So, and that’s true whether you’re giving it to employees or customers. So I love the pop-up store.

Heather: I had something to add there too, just about employees. So you know how I said that we decided there was going to be a long tail, and it’s okay if some things didn’t get updated on day one? The employee piece, there were a set of things that were must-do on day one. And we had kind of told everyone at the all-hands the week before and the day before, like, “You need to block 30 minutes to an hour on this day to do these things. You need to update your LinkedIn profile with the banners. You need to update your email signatures.” One thing I’ll share, and I hope my CEO isn’t listening to this, but he is notoriously very slow at updating his LinkedIn headers. And we had a one-on-one on that day, and I said, “Chris, guess what we’re going to do today. You’re going to share your screen, and I’m going to show you how to update your LinkedIn header.” And when my team—Annie, Lindsey, Maddie—saw that he had updated that, they were literally like tears of joy, like, “Oh my gosh, the new brand is on our CEO.” So I do think there’s something about holding the hands of people who perhaps just, you know, they’ve been using LinkedIn forever, but they don’t know how to change the headers. But we were very clear of, like, “Hey, everything doesn’t need to be perfect. These five things need to be perfect, guys, because otherwise we look sloppy, and that’s not okay.”

Drew: Right? So everybody has a standardized signature, and that’s such an easy one. One of the things that I’m waiting for someone to say on this show is that they used AI to create an employee rebranding training quiz with some education and answers and if they flunked, they had to do it again, because it feels like that’s such an easy thing to do right now. But I haven’t heard anybody say they have that yet. Feel free. This is your opportunity. Okay, we’re gonna move on. Any resistance, whether it’s internal or external, when you’ve made some significant changes, and how did you handle it? And this is as much advice for others going through the process as your specific circumstance. Joy, any resistance?

Joy: Pretty much everyone loved the new brand and loved the logo. We did have one individual who sent an email, thankfully directly to me, not like the whole company. It was like the end of our logo. If you look it up (Medvantx), it looks like a person purposefully in a pill, because, you know, we’re trying to get patients their medications. You know, it’s the end of the patient journey to get them their medications. And his perception was that it looked like an overweight person holding a bowling ball. And I was just like, “Well, thank you for that feedback. That’s not any of the insights we got anywhere else along the way. But you know, I appreciate your insights.” And he’s someone that I could always count on to share exactly what he was thinking about all the tactics. So I think an n of one is okay that maybe they didn’t love the logo.

Drew: Well, and also I feel like that individual could have some fun with Rorschach tests.

Joy: But everyone else, when you tell the story about the logo and serving patients and the medication, think it’s a great story.

Drew: I love it. Will, Heather, any other sort of resistance or situation that you had to handle?

Will: I don’t have specific ones, and the changes that we’ve gone through have been a little bit different from what Joy and Heather have gone through. But what I found is similar to Joy saying like inviting that in and saying, “Hey, if you have those concerns, I’d love to hear them,” because sometimes I have the same concerns too, and it might be, “Hey, we don’t have perfect data that says it’s going to be 100% successful and there’s zero chance of failure.” It’s something we have to embark on together. And sometimes, if it’s someone, especially internally, who’s like, “Hey, this is a new customer base for us,” or “We’re going in a different direction,” I like to point back to the reasons that we’re going that way, and if there’s been any pain that we felt because of it. So if you can remind people you’re talking to, “Hey, part of the reason we’re going this way is we haven’t had the enterprise revenue we’ve wanted. Hey, part of the reason we’re going this way is we haven’t really had success in this area in the past, so right now, we don’t have success. If we move this way, there’s a chance we have success.” Here’s the plans we have laid out, and then I still like inviting in. “If you look at these things and you still have concerns or you have something specific you want to point out, we’re always receptive to feedback.” And I think that’s been really helpful in the past, just to make sure that we’re open to what people have to say, and then also remind them, “Hey, this is the strategy,” or “Here’s the pain we felt before that we’re hoping to alleviate.”

Drew: Right. Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. I’m kind of obsessed with employees. I’m going to stick here for just a second longer. Did any of you do an employee survey in advance of these changes?

Heather: We did a survey where we, I think it was primarily around the website look and feel and asking for input. So we had a survey, we had interviews, and the same thing with customers as well.

Drew: Yeah. Because one of the things I talk about in the book is this notion of pre and post and being able to show that you brought the employees along with you. Alright, so I’m going to move on. Unless you, either of you want to, Will or Joy want to weigh in on that one. Okay, we’re going to keep moving. So the next sort of thing is executive team buy-in. Let’s assume they’ve all bought into this, and then sort of the trickle-down effect, and I’m curious if any of you implemented that. Where you had trained the trainers, we got the executive team, and then you sort of worked your way. And I know we’re not dealing with huge companies here, but I’m still that is typically, if you have thousands of employees, you need that kind of process in order for it to trickle down. How did you make sure that they understood where the brand was going? Joy, because you did that town hall, you did the launch. But how do you keep going and sustain that?

Joy: Yeah. So for us, we had the town hall. We also have the next level down is a lead team meeting that happens every couple weeks, and then, from that, the leaders are expected to then have meetings with their teams, and then one-on-ones through our HR team. Similar to what Heather shared, we have cascaded email, kind of the steps of like, “Here’s how you’re going to update your email thread. Here’s how LinkedIn, here’s the link to the brand guides,” all those sorts of things. Is follow up. So that way we are kind of all on the same page. I do like what Heather said. We’re like, “Here’s the core five things.” We probably should have been that narrow and strategic as well to make sure it wasn’t too overwhelming.

Drew: Yeah, and I love that, because you could have the first five and then you could go to the next five, but you’re right, and I’m going to that 80/20 rule that sort of Heather was speaking to is you don’t have to have it perfect, necessarily, but you have to have certain things. You have to have customer touch points perfect, because otherwise, that’s where it gets really it’s really sloppy quickly. Heather,.

Heather: Well, one big pain point for us is we had a new corporate PowerPoint template, and so it was very clear, like on day one, if you’re creating a new presentation, you’re going to use the new PowerPoint template. That part’s easy. The issue is, for all of the hundreds of existing PowerPoint templates. And how do you get those updated to look aligned? And that was really like, especially like the ones that are used a lot, those were in that kind of, we’re going to make this right for day one. So we have some graphic designers within our marketing team who personally worked on the ones that were most important. What we found was really useful, though, was to do a whole bunch of training sessions. And frankly, it was almost like PowerPoint tips about, here’s how to go into, I’m going to mess up the terminology, because I’m still not great at this. But like, you go into master view, and then you get this, you know, and you paste this in, and then if you click, like, click this one button and magically it updates the entire deck, right? And so we actually did kind of a preview of that on an all-hands with our graphic designer, Madeline. She did an amazing job. The CEO was like, “That was fascinating. I had no idea PowerPoint could do that.” And then she, with that little hint, she was then invited to a whole bunch of teams to go and teach folks, here’s how you can do that to your own deck. Because the problem is, as we all know, everyone has their decks on their laptops, and it’s not scalable for marketing to update them all. And so that’s a little bit of like teaching them to fish was a real winning strategy for us.

Drew: There’s a benefit to that long term, because they’re, you know, PowerPoints evolve, and they’re constantly changing, and they’re putting in some customer information. And next thing you know, you have really very different presentations. I’m, you know, thinking at the time, I’m wondering if, again, is there a general AI application where everybody could upload their current presentation and have it spit out one in the new template. I just feel like these are things that, if they don’t exist now, they’re things that a creative person could figure out how to use it for. Because you’re right, it’s not scalable for you to go out everybody send us their things, but if you could send them to a ChatGPT where there’s a GPT that will do that for them, that would be cool. Alright, we’re wishful thinkers here on CMO Huddles. I just want you to know we’re not afraid to look beyond what is currently possible. Alright, speaking of currently possible, let’s talk metrics, and what metrics you use, either to get buy-in or to know that things are working. So let’s just talk about that, and Joy. Why don’t we start with you in terms of, obviously, you’re changing your name and so, but you, as you mentioned early on, you have a small target audience. What were the metrics that you decided on before the launch and after in terms of measuring success?

Joy: What’s interesting is, I came in right kind of in the middle when this launch was already started. So I didn’t get to choose. It was like, “You’re going to execute this. We made some decisions without you. Now you get to execute the launch for us.” A lot of it was based on our partnership with our website organization, and looking at, you know, we’ve set up this new website, website health, our SEO metrics, those sorts of things were really what we looked at in terms of overall performance. Transparently in our organization, like revenue is the core driver. So, you know, more of our metrics are based on sales than marketing. Probably not what you want to hear, but you know, that’s the story that is typically to be told. You know, for me and the marketing team, we love to look at those things. But if I’m talking to the CEO and our board, they want to know what’s happening on the revenue side. And as long as revenue is looking good, I can get the marketing dollars I want to support that.

Drew: Well, exactly. And by the way, as a head of sales and marketing, you get to choose, yeah, because in theory, I mean, you know, in theory, all marketing is meant to support revenue. It’s just not all of it is direct.

Joy: You just need to know who to tell the story to.

Drew: Interesting. And so Heather, metrics?

Heather: Yeah, I don’t have a great answer to this. I mean, we’ve been looking at some brand health metrics and looking at kind of the growth of, you know, LinkedIn followers, growth of people who type Appcast into Google and really just trying to get more kind of systematized in terms of the metrics we’re looking at on a quarterly basis. But I would say we’re kind of at the beginning of our journey here, and have a lot to learn.

Drew: Cool, yeah, it’s funny as you’re thinking talking about that. Grant Johnson has been working on this brand monitor thing, and I’ll connect you with him on that, because you’d be an interesting use case for that. Right now it’s just a Google sheet, but it’s really interesting. There are enough data points existing for you to have some sense of brand health, even without a brand tracking, I guess.

Heather: That’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that I have. I’m like, this shouldn’t be this hard. Like, we haven’t prioritized it yet, but I’m sure it is an answerable question.

Drew: Yeah, the challenge I see with a lot of CMOs on this area is that you do that work and then nobody believes it or cares, because they’re still just looking at revenue. But there is correlation. If you have no awareness, your conversion rates are going to be a lot lower. If you have no site traffic, your lead flow is going to be lower. I mean, there is a correlation here. So being able to create some kind of surrogate brand health just feels like a very helpful and important thing. Alright, well, we’re at the point now where it’s time for final words of wisdom. And we’ll do this in reverse order, okay, so that means, Heather, you’re gonna give us some words of wisdom on running a rebrand or making the case for branding. So go for it.

Heather: I’m actually gonna give the exact same advice I gave last time, okay, which is, choose an agency that you like, because you’re going to spend more time with them than you think, and it’s really important that they are awesome at their jobs and awesome to work with.

Drew: Yeah, and I just want to say, having run an agency that’s focused on branding, we don’t do that anymore. Renegade is not an agency—Renegade Marketing, should I say? But it is invaluable to have a third-party and a neutral perspective on this who’s looking at it just clinically, so that they can give you sort of really honest feedback, which is very hard in those situations. Okay, so let’s go with, Will, final words of wisdom.

Will: For us and from my experience, brand is the thing that greases the wheels and turns the gears and can help them move smoother.

Drew: So how do we do that? I mean, so brand is important. So when we’re looking for some advice for CMOs to make the case that it will do what you’re saying.

Will: I would say, if done well, in my experience, making the case for it can make efficiencies in the rest of your spend. So it’s cheaper to run and market a business that has a great brand than a brand that is poor or non-existent.

Drew: Yeah, exactly. I’m so glad you said that. And it’s just, it’s like, when your awareness goes up, your SEO costs go down. So and you can usually see that it’s another one of those things, because your performance of your cost per click will improve because, you know, Google favors clicks over price. Okay, Joy. Final words of wisdom for making the case for branding.

Joy: When I think about it, for a launch of a rebrand, I think to that lens of having a compelling story or compelling platform for a successful rebrand, I think that’s one thing that really helped us having, you know, a new service to launch, and having a lot of surround sound or an omni-channel plan to go with that rebrand.

Drew: Yeah. Awesome. And I’ve got to sort of put some spin on top of this, myself. I mean, one of the things that I, you know, said a couple times: don’t jump into this. Do it because the business mandates it. In other words, you have a new product. You’ve changed something, you’ve acquired something, you’ve changed your target. Ideally, you’ve changed your product, because otherwise it’s just a fresh coat of paint on an old barn. You want to bring something new to the market when you rebrand. Two: bringing your employees along with you is essential, so that they can represent the new brand, and it’s hard, as you heard, it’s hard. There are so many areas where they’re representing the brand, but they have the old PowerPoint, okay? And then three: do try to get some metrics in place so that you can show your progress. And these can be surrogate metrics. Okay, with that. Thank you, Joy, Heather, Will—you’re all amazing sports. Thank you, Audience, for staying with us

To hear more conversations like this one, and submit your questions while we’re live. Join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio, we stream to my LinkedIn profile—that’s Drew Neisser—every other week.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!