So You Want to Lead a Brand Refresh

 

Drew Neisser: Hey, it’s Drew. And I’m guessing that as a podcast listener, you will also enjoy audiobooks. Well in that case, did you know the audio version of Renegade Marketing: 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands, was recently ranked the number one new B2B audio book by Book Authority. Kind of cool, right? Anyway, you can find my book on Audible or your favorite audio book platform.

And speaking of audio before we get into today’s show, I do want to do a shout out to the professionals that Share Your Genius. We started working with them several months ago to make this show even better, and have been blown away by their strategic and executional prowess. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast or want to turbocharge your current show, be sure to talk to Rachel Downey at shareyourgenius.com and tell her Drew sent you.

Okay, let’s get on with today’s episode.

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 Neisser: Hello, Renegade Marketers! Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite the top rated podcast for B2B CMOs and other marketing-obsessed individuals.

You’re about to listen to a recording of CMO Huddle Studio, our live show featuring the CMOS of CMO Huddles, a community that sharing caring and daring each other to greatness every day of the week.

This time we’ve got a conversation with Huddlers Rashmi Vittal of Productive, Julie Feller of US Legal Support, and Bill Strawderman of GS1, as they discuss rebranding, so let’s dive in. I’m your host Drew Neisser live from my home studio in New York City. Utter the word “brand” in front of non-marketing executives and it’s not uncommon to see eyes roll with the unspoken thought, “There goes the marketing person pushing fluff again.” It is no wonder many CMOs avoid the term all together and disguise budget items related to brand building at something that sounds more like revenue generation. Nonetheless, intrepid CMOs find a way to navigate around the word itself and gain consensus that there is an urgent and important need to rethink the how the what and the why of their company. Thus begins a process —it’s really a journey—some might even call it an adventure, in rebranding. To help you understand the challenges and opportunities related to the rebranding process, we have three amazing CMOs ready to share their journeys. With that. Let’s bring on Rashmi Vittal, CMO of Productive and star of episode 201 Renegade Marketers Unite and episode number one of this show. Hello Rashmi. How are you and where are you?

Rashmi Vittal: Hey, Drew, thank you. I’m so happy to be here. I’m in sunny actually Half Moon Bay, California.

Drew Neisser: Amazing. I love that. Now, we did our homework and we noticed that you volunteer as a basketball coach for the MLK center and Foster City Little League. Did you play yourself? And do you still coach?

Rashmi Vittal: Yeah, so I did play so I played tennis, basketball and softball. Growing up actually played D1 softball in college and I love coaching. So yes, I did Coach the eight to 10 year olds at the Martin Luther King Center up here in San Mateo. And then I also coach Little League, softball and baseball whenever I get the chance. It’s really hard because it takes a lot of time during the weekday. But when I can I try and make it happen.

Drew Neisser: Amazing. Now D1 softball. I mean, some of those pitchers can really get some volume, on I’ve watched it on ESPN2, it’s amazing.

Rashmi Vittal: Yeah, it is, you know, I’ll tell you that seeing a pitcher that’s only 40 some odd feet away from you hurl the ball and they can get up to 65 miles per hour. But the coolest thing is not just the speed. Once I got to the college level, I actually saw my first curveball, and there’s nothing weirder than a laterally moving curveball coming your way. It froze me the first time I saw it, but it was pretty cool.

Drew Neisser: I think the whole branding thing and curveball is a perfect analogy. But before we get there, did you ever get hit by a pitch?

Rashmi Vittal: Oh sure I did.

Drew Neisser: I think it’d leave a mark you’d remember.

Rashmi Vittal: So I’m not age myself, but this was a little bit ago.

Drew Neisser: Alright, fine.

All right. Well, let’s get into it, you know, launched a new website and refreshed the brand around September. Let’s just go back and say how did you know it was time to sort of update the brand so to speak?

Rashmi Vittal: Yeah, actually, it was one of the first things I really wanted to do when I joined, Productive. And the reason being is it was a startup, it’s been around only for three years, its young yet growing fast. And so I knew that this was a really good opportunity to elevate, what I call, the brand DNA of the company. And in talking with the CEO, from the very first time we talked, it was something that he was also passionate about, and he believed in so I knew I had a champion there early on. And then it was about getting champions around the rest of the executive team in the company, especially the cofounders, and just kind of push through on it. But it was something where we always have one of our big values here at Productive is, “Plan to win big.” And this was a great way to demonstrate how to continue to elevate the company.

Drew Neisser: I talked to a lot of CMOs, and I’ve worked with a lot of CMOs over the years, and I’ve seen them use up a lot of goodwill and political capital in the first six months focusing on brand, instead of say, demand gen and getting that and building the credibility. In this case, the CEO was on board from the beginning. So that wasn’t much of an issue. But I’m still imagining that, while they’re saying focus on brand, they’re still really saying help us with demand too, right?

Rashmi Vittal: Oh, well, there was never a focus on brand it was absolutely get our demand gen engine up, build pipeline, build pipeline, build pipeline. But the thing that I think, and we’re talking about it more, which is important. It’s really hard to go build pipeline, if you don’t have a good brand, story, brand, narrative, etc. Because that’s how people become aware of you. And it’s really driving awareness, you have to drive that awareness and then create the interest in order to then capture that interest. And everybody’s so focused on capturing demand, you don’t think about all the things you have to do before that demand is even created.

Drew Neisser: Yeah, it’s like this magic thing. But I think the difference is, so the way I’m thinking about this, in this balance, when it’s your first six months on the job is, there’s got to be some quick wins, where maybe you’re just buying leads or whatever it is just to get some things in the pipeline, again, to give yourself air cover, you didn’t need the air cover. And obviously brand and demand are deeply connected. It’s just I’ve seen this not work where they didn’t do the little things that could have fixed or helped pipeline at least accelerate a little bit. And by the time they got to the brand, they had no credibility.

So let’s talk about the refresh what the process was, did you do it in house, and talk a little bit about that?

Rashmi Vittal: We did. So one of the things is whenever you think about it, you’d love to bring in an agency and put down the big contract and go do that. We looked at it. And I said, “Look, what is in the best interest of the business?” And had discussions about it, I think we could do this in house. And fortunately, through my network, I was actually connected to an independent consultant who was really well known in doing brand and brand work and had done brand work at some great Silicon Valley companies here. And so she and I connected, we talked, we immediately hit it off. And we started working together on this and she came with the whole, what is the brand approach and methodology we need to apply in order to do our due diligence in determining everything from our brand persona, we reevaluate our vision and mission statement, taking a look at our new brand narrative and our brand story. And then from there, understanding that, what is our archetype, and then going into all the other things that do a fast follow with your brand identity and how your brand looks.

Drew Neisser: Now, did this individual actually help you think through those things? Or say, “These are the sorts of things you need to do?”

Rashmi Vittal: Yeah, both these are the things you need to do let’s think through it and was with me lockstep we were working together, it was almost like she was my temporary Head of Brand working with me and internally across the company, to learn to educate and to gain buyin.

Drew Neisser: And so one of the quick questions on this one is, how helpful was having an outside person who could sort of help be the expert in this area?

Rashmi Vittal: It was wildly helpful. I liked having that voice. I would say at the end of the day, though, what we came to in terms of what we decided on was really me working very closely with my CEO and actually, we have our CIO as well because we target IT departments. And the CIO is just an important champion executive sponsor for us. So having a CIO in house who had worked, was actually one of Productive’s first customers before he joined us directly. He understood the mindset of a CIO. And so the four of us collaborated very closely initially, to just kind of get that baseline of what we wanted to do. And then we engaged more of E team and then across the company.

Drew Neisser: Yeah, and I’m just going to put a big punctuation point on it. Having the CEO deeply involved in deeply invested is really, it is one the fastest way to get this done and two, the most important way to make sure it sticks. Okay, and having the customer in house helps as well. I’m curious, what archetype did you end up with?

 

Rashmi Vittal 

So great question. We realize because of what we do, we provide deep and rich data and insights to help teams align, especially around IT finance and procurement to unlock the most value out of their SaaS portfolio at scale. So you think everything from “Hey, I have all the SaaS applications, I don’t even know maybe half of them that are in my company. How can we even rationalize my SaaS applications? My Portfolio? How do I think about licensing? How do I then think about during renewal time? And ultimately with the goal of hey, how can I actually save on my SaaS applications? How can I actually optimize those costs, and make sure that I’m doing the right things for my business as my business grows to enable better employee engagement and productivity.” So with that, we really honed in on that expertise, the fact that we’re giving you trusted rich data insights, because when we did our brand survey, we did it to our customers, to our prospects, to our partners, even to our investors. And the results that we got back overwhelmingly is that when they think about Productive, they think about, we trust you, we really believe in the data that you provide and we really appreciate how you work with us as a customer vendor partnership, and really appreciate the care that you provide. So we had this one notion that we were, if you think about the whole brand archetype and the wheel and everything, we landed very squarely on two areas. One was around being sage, it was that expertise, and the other one was about being a caregiver. And so we’re like, okay, we can’t call ourselves sage caregiver. And so what we wound up with is we call ourselves sage givers. And so because that is exactly what we do, we want to provide the insight and the data to our customers, to our partners, so that they can do their best work so that they know how to unlock the most value out of their SaaS portfolios.

 

Drew Neisser 

Amazing. Okay, and I love it. I love the bringing it together because a lot of brands and tech end up being wise sage, so adding that caregiver and a lot of people are intimidated by caregiver because it sounds like oh, you’re a nurse or something like that. Anyway, I know you’re wearing the tshirt, the big reveal, talk about this.

 

Rashmi Vittal 

So to continue, as you said, like we launched this out and got a lot of internal employees in the beginning and back in the summer and we launched our website in September. And now what we’re doing to continue the drumroll we have every employee in the company is going to be getting “I am a sage giver” tshirt. As you can see it has our hand caringly giving insight to another and every employee is going to get this and have it and just kind of represent and embody that sage giver mentality, which they are, interestingly enough when you land on these brand archetypes, what you realize if you feel like you’ve nailed it, right, it’s when it really just kind of feels comfortable with folks. Especially when I think about a sage giver, the person who embodies it the most is our CEO he truly wants to deliver insights and he does in a very thoughtful and caring manner very human first manner and so yeah, so everybody’s gonna get one of these I’m kind of pre revealing it but everybody’s gonna wear it in our office.

 

Drew Neisser 

Love it. Two notes on that, and we’ll come back to you. But one is, for those of you who’ve never done the archetype thing, there’s a great quiz on sort of discovering your brand archetype that I put in my book, and we can share it in the show notes. But always ask the CEO to do it. Because oftentimes, that’s where you end up. It’s the CEO. Okay, very cool. We’ll be back Rashmi, but let’s bring on Bill Strawderman, CMO of GS1 US and the star of episode 18 of this show. Hello, Bill. Nice to see you again.

 

Bill Strawderman 

Great to see you again Drew. Thanks for having me on your show. Appreciate it.

 

Drew Neisser 

So first of all, where are you?

 

Bill Strawderman 

So I’m in central New Jersey in Ewing so not too far from you a train ride away.

 

Drew Neisser 

There we go. It’s been too long for between face to face. And so we did some digging, and noticed that way back when you had a blog and even did some poems about marketing now, we noticed that you haven’t posted in a while but do you still write marketing poetry?

 

Bill Strawderman 

It’s funny so my handle for Twitter when I first joined was “The marketing bard.” And I’ve always been a writer and poetry was sort of like a family thing for me for a long time. So I’m like wait, let me just see if I can sort of blend marketing and poetry together. And actually, you challenged me by your question to write a haiku for you, specifically, and maybe it’ll be on the cover or in the liner notes of your next book, but it goes like this, because in 17 syllables, you have to test being perfectly pithy. Right? So here we go, Drew, this is a haiku for Drew, “Unbeatable brands, shrink change in inspiring ways, with perfect pressions.”

 

Drew Neisser 

Man, nailed it. Look at that, wow, I love poetry. And one of the things my dad always did on big birthdays, he always wrote poems, and I’ve continued that tradition, my son just turned 30. And we have a lot of fun coming up with that. All right, back to brand.

 

Drew Neisser 

So I know you’ve been on a journey, probably safe to say, let’s talk a little bit about the journey and the process just even where do you start with a company like GS1, which I know to be a nonprofit organization, but maybe you could sort of explain a little bit of history and then what the journey is today?

 

Bill Strawderman 

Sure, let me give you a little bit of a backdrop. So GS1 is a federation of about 116 member organizations that are independently run around the world. But we come to a common core. And that common core has two probably very meaningful ways of saying who we are as a global brand. One is what I’ll call the visual identity, and the tagline, which is the Global Language of Business. But importantly, we’ve created through and with industries health system of shared value, and common data standards. And those data standards are a foundation for really helping companies conduct commerce, run their supply chains, and even provide transparency to consumers around products. So what we looked at, from a US perspective, which is one of the larger member organizations around the world. But last time we had evaluated the brand from a positioning perspective, which is a little below the visual identity layer, right? It’s what do we mean to others, the last time that was done was probably four years before I joined in 2016. So we had a significant opportunity to take a fresh look, if you will, and kind of what was our meaning generally. I think we have a good sense of purpose. And I think we have a very strong culture, especially within the US company. But I was sort of thinking a little bit about kind of the episode you had with Lindsey Peterson, where we really have this problem of cognitive calories. Data Standards are actually pretty complex. And a lot of, I think how we have historically led is through the lens of how standards work. And we really needed to elevate a little bit more of why they matter. And why should you actually care about them for the kinds of roles or jobs to be done that you have.

 

Drew Neisser 

In the book, I condense lots of things, positioning and rebranding and all of those. And I love the way you just described positioning as that sort of layer below, it’s the strategic foundation for it. And I just think a lot of folks don’t really understand that. And it’s a hard distinction to appreciate. And then of course, Lindsey thing gets it to this, what space do you own in the brain? And so when you were looking at this and started to do and imagining there was some research that you did, to sort of help you assess, because I think you are an industry standard with barcodes and so forth. How did you sort of, from a research standpoint, uncover, where do we go? Because the global language of business seems like a really solid place to be.

 

Bill Strawderman 

Yeah, I think it is. And so building upon that heritage, we identified first of all, we had four core stakeholder groups that we wanted to really understand our positioning with. And so when we had clarity on the who, we actually had set of research instruments, from kind of in depth interviews to some quantitative research, to sort of test this question of a little bit of that real estate we’re occupying and people’s heads. And we actually went through what I’ll say is a fairly extensive discussion around the SWOT for each of those different audiences and tried to condense that into what I’d say were the major things that would really help us push this idea of needing to grow brand awareness as Rashmi said, as a way to kind of be on the radar when someone’s in the consideration process. I think the other part was really dealing with the complexity, right? How can we actually build understanding differently? And that really came back to this question of Do people really understand the value of standards as opposed to the mechanics of them? So we did the research phase that was probably a good three to four months worth of effort. And then we had a period of distillation, which everyone always does after they get all these massive decks of insights from the different studies. We went through a series of kind of what I’ll say positioning ideations to and I would sort of describe us as having made good progress, but we haven’t exactly landed the plane yet. So we’re in what I’ll say is a period of testing, right? So what is the ideal position? Can we distill it to a single kind of position as a brand that actually reaches a lot of different types of stakeholders from very small businesses to senior leaders who are trying to run supply chain functions. So we’re in that process of sort of distillation and testing of the main positioning.

 

Drew Neisser 

So SWOT is an interesting thing, because strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and trying to find the right vectors for those, right. I mean, you have business, you have business issues, you have marketing issues. And we’ve used SWOT a lot, because it’s a nice way to sort of frame the challenges. But the person who writes it, is kind of determining it. And I’m just wondering how when you do a SWOT, and let’s say research company does it, how do you make sure that the SWOT doesn’t contain the biases of that one individual perspective or that company’s perspective? And provides a I guess, a fair framework to proceed forward? That’s the biggest complaint of SWOTs.

 

Bill Strawderman 

I can actually understand that, we actually probably went through some iterations of the SWOT, right, so you get presented with a set of ideas. And then I think it’s our job as leaders to sort of say, what does that really mean, let’s dig in underneath it. Did that come up one time or was that sort of a pervasive theme? And so for those things that seemed like they were more kind of stray bullets, we said, okay, that doesn’t really belong in the final analysis. And then the other thing, when you get a SWOT, you get a lot of distillation, but you’re still, in some cases, almost too big. So we tried to kind of put it into what I’d say, what were the two most important or salient issues in each of the quadrants, and let’s see what we can do to kind of use those to inform how we want to reposition.

 

Drew Neisser 

And I think that’s one of the keys here is you’re constantly narrowing it down to what’s really important, and what are the springboards for the ideas, and that will crystallize this sort of magic positioning that you’re working on now. So talk a little bit about your evolving executive team and the board process?

 

Bill Strawderman 

Yeah, so it’s interesting, I’ll think back to last year in November, we were having a strategy discussion at our board meeting. And a lot of the strategy questions are questions of growth, right. So they’re either growth or around existential threat. So that type of thing. So we had a very rich discussion about where the business is heading. And almost magically, the topic of kind of where our brand fit into our ambition kind of surfaced, and it turned into a really great opportunity for us to say, look, we’ve probably been working in the brand for a long time. Now it’s time to work on the brand and sort of having that realization and that support, stemming off a question of business strategy was just sort of natural. I’d say it couldn’t have originated in a better context, because we already had sort of the people who are helping govern the organization, as well as the senior leadership team, they are present to have a discussion about, this is really important, we actually need to sort of fixate on this for a period of time and get this right.

 

Drew Neisser 

For folks who are looking at getting their exec team and the board involved, like not everybody in the exec team has ever gone through a branding process or the board. And this is where sometimes you can run into landmines, because what is their understanding? And how did you get everyone on a sort of a common starting place so that you can solve the problem together, if you will or they were open to it?

 

Bill Strawderman 

I would say I think the common starting place really gets back to this question of what is our growth ambition? So what would it take to increase the adoption rate of the standards for different contexts? And then there is sort of some history of how well do people who are running supply chain functions and so that if that’s part of our governance process, how well do they think their trading partner communities understand the value GS1 is providing to their organizations? We have people who I think are not just casual observers, but they’re actually kind of pretty familiar with how we operate and why we exist. It’s an industry run and industry governed membership organization. So board members, in our context, in particular, are pretty versed in what standards are and why they matter. And so they actually get to observe, I think, from their own community, and from their own experience, are we really kind of being pointed enough? Are we being pithy enough? Are we sort of getting and building understanding at the right rate with the right kind of messaging? So I think it’s probably unlike what you might see in a board that’s comprised of very different kind of levels of familiarity with what the company is doing and how they operate.

 

Drew Neisser 

The key takeaway on this is not fluff. What you said it’s a means to an end. It’s like we want to get somewhere we want to change the way the business performs. And so business objective first, brand second. Okay, great. We’ll be back with and now let’s welcome Julie Feller, Head of Marketing at US Legal Support and star of episode 39 of the show. Hello, Julie. Welcome back.

 

Julie Feller: 

Hey, Drew, thank you for having me again.

 

Drew Neisser 

Nice to see you. And so first of all, where are you?

 

Julie Feller: 

Yeah, I’m in sunny San Diego, California.

 

Drew Neisser 

So now I did notice and I hadn’t noticed this before, you were at UC Davis and you majored in business and corporate comms. But I know Davis for its viniculture school, who wouldn’t want to go to Wine School? I just think that’s the coolest thing ever. And then you spent a semester in Paris, did you always plan to go into marketing? Or is this something that sort of came in?

 

Julie Feller: 

Yeah, especially in high school, I knew I wanted to go into marketing. But at the time, I honestly didn’t really fully understand what that even meant. I think everyone thinks when they’re younger, you’re selling some sort of cool and interesting product. And you’re just dealing with a lot of fun videos and stuff. I thought at first, I wanted to be in sports marketing. So I interned with our athletic department, the Sacramento River Cats and some other organizations, and then ultimately decided that the sports marketing world was not for me, and found my way into the B2B software and services where I’ve been ever since.

 

Drew Neisser 

Note to the younger, aspiring marketers in the audience. Internships are a great way to figure out what you don’t want to do. I’ll never forget, I interned at a TV station and realize that I certainly did not want to be writing news for local news, for sure. Okay, so talk a little bit about, and I have to say, Sacramento River Cats. What a great name.

 

Julie Feller: 

I know, a little random, but it was definitely fun. So T shirts,

 

Drew Neisser 

Is there such a thing as a river cat?

 

Julie Feller: 

There is.

 

Drew Neisser 

Okay, well, then I’ll have to look up that mascot later on. So where are you right now in your brand journey?

 

Julie Feller: 

So US Legal Support. We’ve been providing litigation support services, court reporting, record retrieval, and much more to legal professionals for about 25 years now. And as such, we have a really great and loyal client base. Over the years, there hasn’t really been any substantial changes made to our brand, the messaging or look and feel anything of that nature. We recently rolled out some brand refresh changes where we looked at our positioning, we really wanted to modernize our visual, but at the same time staying in tune with our industry and what our clients really need. So while we have done a lot, there’s plenty more that we still want to accomplish as we move into next year.

 

Drew Neisser 

Well, and so one of the things that as I’m thinking about US Legal Support, at least your category is in your name. I mean, that’s a good news, bad news. That’s what you do. So you don’t have to answer the question what, at least when it comes to positioning, and so forth. And so I understand how you knew it was time, because it’s been a long time. But talk a little bit about the process that you went through, in order to sort of get from this is what we’ve been doing to where we need to go.

 

Julie Feller: 

Absolutely. So I think with any brand, you want to make sure that your branding is consistent and matches the direction of your company, helps you expand your reach, lean into your history, your existing brand loyalty, all of those kinds of key things you need to look at. So what we did was that when we took a step back, it was really important that our brand still resonated with our audience, not just what they need, but what they value. So we really wanted to build on our reputation, on our name, on our brand loyalty, which is why we opted for a refresh and not a full rebrand. And we know that with just a couple of split seconds to make an impression, we really wanted to be sure that we were putting our best foot forward with both our messaging and the visual identity, and making sure that our promise our values, everything, how we stack up in the marketplace really aligns with who we are currently, where we’re going, and that we can continue to deliver that exceptional service that people have come to know us for and love us for.

 

Drew Neisser 

I love the distinction what they need versus what they value. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What was the insight there that you determined?

 

Julie Feller: 

Yeah, I think it comes back to conducting voice of the customer surveys and interviews and really understanding at the core, what service are people looking to us for? But why are they looking for that. Obviously, there’s the basic answer of well, we have this litigation happening, we need support in this area, but what do they really need from that partner so that we can make sure that we are their go to partner and we’re delivering more than just the basics and that they keep coming back to us for more.

 

Drew Neisser 

And help for the listeners, the difference between a brand refresh and I guess a rebrand. What’s that fine line? What’s the difference?

 

Julie Feller: 

I think it definitely varies from organization to organization, at least for us in the current state. We didn’t look to change our name, our logo, the essence of who we are, we really just wanted to make sure that we took a look at everything we were currently doing and ideate on how we’re doing it and make sure that we are staying in tune with really how things have changed over the last few years. Remote work and different services that we’re rolling out to make sure that people still understand who we are and at the core what we deliver, but that we are here with them to innovate with them and make sure that we’re meeting the challenges that they’re facing today.

 

Drew Neisser 

So you do the research and talk a little bit about, okay, we’ve got what the refresh is going to be, talk about sort of executional. What kind of components went with this?

 

Julie Feller: 

Yeah, absolutely. So we opted, we did work with a partner agency for a little bit of the work, really looking to kind of enhance some of what our internal capabilities was, and fill the gaps where we didn’t have those capabilities. So conducting the voice of the client research. So interviews, talking to as many people internally and externally as possible to understand what their needs are, what their challenges are, how things have changed for them. What do they think of when they think of US Legal Support, as much as we can just gathering all that information, so that we can then take a giant step back, look at all those findings, and do internal workshops, looking at our purpose and our mission and our values, and then taking a look at our brand voice and our messaging. And once we kind of went through a bunch of rounds of revisions on everything and ideas there, we’re able to then kind of take those new ideas and develop a visual identity that matches everything that we were seeing and the opportunities that we find.

 

Drew Neisser 

So before the visual identity, was there some kind of written strategy that sort of reflected or positioning that reflected the changes that you were making?

 

Julie Feller: 

We put together our brand promise and our mission and our values, we developed a brand story and kind of the tone and the persona that we wanted to go to the marketplace with. And then from there, it was going to the graphics team and our amazing graphic designer and saying, “Okay, can you take this and make this shine and really give it some life.” And obviously, there was many rounds of iterations there as well. But we’re happy with where we’ve got to.

 

Drew Neisser 

Sometimes in this process, I’ll hear a CMO talk about the “aha moment” where things sort of crystallized and we said, “Okay, now now we’ve got it.” Was there that for you? Or was this more of a sort of, we’ll call it rolling thunder, just good stuff just happened along the way.

 

Julie Feller: 

I think it was definitely a little bit of both. There’s definitely moments where you’re sitting there saying, I’m not in love with this, or this isn’t really resonating and feedback you’re getting isn’t so great. But I do remember, there was one time I was on a call with someone from our content team. And we were looking at our brand story. And we were just kind of tweaking words here and there. And all of a sudden, we both got really excited on that call. And we kept reading it out loud to each other and saying, “Oh, we have something here that this is sounding really good. And checking all the boxes that we wanted to check.” So there was definitely a couple of those moments.

 

Drew Neisser 

I love it. I mean, that is one of the fun parts of this. If you’ve been deep enough, and you’ve set the strategic framework enough, when you get to the expression of that brand, it’s pretty cool. It’s a great feeling. Right?

 

Julie Feller: 

Absolutely.

 

Drew Neisser 

Amazing. Okay, so where are you now at this point, in terms of the process? Is it all rolled out? And did you go to employees with it?

 

Julie Feller: 

You know, we’ve done some work internally, there’s still more to do, I don’t want to give away too many of our trade secrets that are coming. But there’s much more that we want to do and that we can do to help improve our client experience. And so I’m excited for the new year and for everyone to see some of that.

 

Drew Neisser 

Got it. But there are some elements that if I went to the website, I’d see?

 

Julie Feller: 

Absolutely, you’d see our About Us page or the updated brand story and our values and our visual strategy as well.

 

Drew Neisser 

Great. Okay, so but there’s lots more to be done, and we’re going to talk about that.

 

Drew Neisser 

But for now, it’s time for me to talk about CMO Huddles. We launched it in 2020 CMO Huddles is an exclusive community of over 100 highly effective B2B CMOs, who share, care, and dare each other to greatness. When CMO described Huddles is a cross between an executive workshop and a therapy session, and given how hard things are getting out there who doesn’t need a little reassurance that they’re not alone. Everything about CMO Huddles is designed to be a force multiplier helping you to make faster, better, and more informed decisions. Since no CMO can outwork this crazy job, CMO Huddles is here to help you outsmart it. So let’s bring back Bill, Rashmi Julie, all get in here. Let’s bring them out. There we go. I love that. All right. So quick question. Are you on the therapy side or the executive workshop side? When it comes to CMO Huddles.

 

Julie Feller: 

Can I say both depending on the day of the week?

 

Drew Neisser 

So yeah, no, that’s that’s fine. I’m just curious. Is there a specific example of how CMO Huddles has actually helped you over the last several months either feel free to jump in.

 

Rashmi Vittal 

Recently we made the decision to move part of our business development team under marketing, so not the whole team but part of it and just having the dialogue on CMO Huddles about those CMOs who’ve had, we now call them market development rep underneath them, and kind of what that looks like and how they work with the outbound folks is just been really helpful. So it was great. It actually was very timely too, the sneaky thing about CMO Huddles that always seems to have a very timely topic for a need or a question that I have.

 

Drew Neisser 

Love that. And it’s fascinating to hear you say that because over the last six months, I would say, there have been a lot of different conversations about BDRs. And about 90% of the CMOs agree that they should have them reporting to them. And one of the holdouts, ironically, just had the broad end and was feeling pretty good about it. Okay, Bill, you were gonna say something?

 

Bill Strawderman 

Yeah, I was gonna say, I think that a lot of the topical stuff around branding in particular has been very insightful for me. And I think you probably know, my attendance has been like a little spotty lately, but because you care so much about the community, I always feel like even if I missed the session, I’ve always got sort of the double click down. And I kind of get to the gist of what the community is talking about and how they’re solving problems that are very important to me, personally.

 

Drew Neisser 

Very cool. I appreciate that. Julie, anything?

 

Julie Feller: 

Yeah, I think just hearing from other people, even though we’re all in different industries, similar challenges that we’re all looking to solve for, when we’re looking at new technology solutions, hearing what other people’s experience has been the positive and the negative, there’s nothing like that, that firsthand knowledge coming from someone else who’s facing what you’re facing.

 

Drew Neisser 

I love it. Okay, well, if you’re a B2B CMO, who can share, care, and dare with the best of them, check out CMOhuddles.com. So now let’s get to this topic.

 

Drew Neisser 

We’ve got a bunch of CMOs, who will be listening to this watching this or listening to it later. And if you could redo your program, maybe you feel perfect about where you started. Where should they start? This is you giving advice to CMOs. We’ll do reverse order, when it comes to refreshing a brand, where would you recommend that they start. Julie?

 

Julie Feller: 

I think starting with the why and not the why of why the company exists. But why are you looking at a rebrand or a refresh, making sure that consensus and that goal is in mind how you’re going to measure the success. That consensus is really key in identifying the stakeholders and the decision makers is also key in that process. You just want to make sure that you’re all agreeing on what you’re doing and why so that as you go down the path, you can kind of look back to that as the north star and make sure that you stay on track.

 

Drew Neisser 

Yeah, and I think it’s funny, because in the conversation with Bill and Rashmi, what Bill came back to, we’re doing this because we want our business to grow in a certain way. And Rashmi said, we’re doing this because we need to do better with demand gen, and we need a clear story. So that why it’s a really good distinction. I appreciate the why of you’re doing it for the business, not the why of why does the business exist, they may come together Rashmi or Bill, anything to add on where to start?

 

Rashmi Vittal 

I totally agree with Julie on the why I also believe that part of it is, it depends on where you are, if you’ve been there for a while, or you’re just entering into a company as a CMO or head of marketing, is to just really listen and learn and understand kind of how do people talk about your company? How are your sales folks talking about your company or your CS folks talking, how our internal employees talking about company, or your customers talking about the company? And are we saying the same thing, are we being consistent, and how our brand and how our company and our message is being pushed out in the market, if you feel like there’s a lot of inconsistencies, and people are kind of making up their own story, then you got to really, you know, I really do believe it’s a CMOs job to come and wrangle that, bring that back in, and then level set. And so if you can show and prove that today, there’s a lot of technology you could use to prove and show that people are saying different things at different times. You can use that as a data driven approach to then say, don’t you think it’s important or when I have experienced high growth success, it’s when, not the only thing but one major thing, is when everybody’s singing from the same songbook. And they have a very integrated message if you need that as a way to kind of drive the project. That’s one way to do it.

 

Drew Neisser 

Yeah, it’s so funny in a Huddle. I think it was last week, one of the CMOs lamented that every single salesperson was using different language. Describing the company in a different way using different language and what a problem that is. Well, besides the fact that you got 10 messages going, you have no way of refining or improving or knowing but also just the problem of, there’s so many different contact points that if they go to the website and see one story and the salesperson saying another you have that disconnect, you lose. Bill, any other thoughts on where to start?

 

Bill Strawderman 

I think they covered it very well. I would say that the connection between brand and business has to be clear. And if it’s not, then you know you’re already several steps behind the potential for getting someone interested in investing.

 

Drew Neisser 

Brand equals business. Listen, I just I’m gonna, I’m gonna say this, I talked about this in my book, if you are looking at brand as a refresh, where you’re going to fix the logo and change the colors of the brand, you are just painting an old barn. And so part of this, and we haven’t really talked about this, but part of this is you’re bringing a new promise to the marketplace.

 

Drew Neisser 

So the question, What is the news? What are you actually changing if anything about the company, right? Because otherwise, you are just a new coat of paint on an old barn. So all right, that’s me, what is the number one thing a CMO should definitely do? Okay, we’ve already established the first step. But what else should they do when looking at a brand refresh? I will start with Rashmi.

 

Rashmi Vittal 

Well, maybe I feel like maybe I’ve said this, but I think working closely with your CEO, it’s so important to have that bind to have that strategic thought partner to really push that forward. But once you get to that point, it’s then really like laying out a brand strategy plan, like taking them through the steps of what you’re going to do over what period of time. So they’re always kind of aware and bought in. And because they’re not only going to be a partner with you, but they’re going to be a champion for you. So just really having that strategy planned and coming back and saying, Hey, this is how we’re doing, this is how we’re doing. And this is where we’re at. And so it isn’t a surprise, like I think the thing that some maybe sometimes people will go to, they’ll go off into a corner or go work on something with their team, their marketing team, and they’ll come back and it’s like surprise, and you feel like you’ve gotten the ball down to like the 10 yard line. But really, in your CEOs mind, it’s like, no, no, you’re back at the 50 yard line. Let’s bring it all back and rework this. So I just think just really engaging with your CEO is important because they are the leader of the company. And they’re the ones who are talking to the board on a regular basis. And you need to have them close to that.

 

Drew Neisser 

Yeah, it was worth going back over that because it reminded me so we talked about leadership in the Huddles in November. And it always comes back to the executive, sort of embracing the values and the vision of the brand and walking the walk and talking the talk. And if you do a rebrand, and the CEO isn’t 100% in, it doesn’t stick. It just doesn’t. So riffing on that, Bill, Julie, any thoughts on you know, in terms of these are really the some of the lessons that you’ve learned in this process? We’ve talked about making sure it’s aligned with the business, getting the CEO involved in the buy in, other things that you think are just so critical to this process that we should double down on right now?

 

Bill Strawderman 

Yeah, I’ll just extend I think we’re Rashmi was, which is that you need to build the coalition, right? The CEO is great as the catalyst people who are in sales, finance, other critical decision makers who have to help galvanize the organization around the change. Because at the end of the day, you are going through some element of change management and you want lots of people in the boat with you, you don’t want to be the only one with an oar so I would just say build the coalition after you’ve convinced the CEO, this is the right thing to do. And then, you got to be a little flexible, I think sometimes in terms of the how and what meaning it will drive in different parts of the organization.

 

Drew Neisser 

Yeah, interesting. Julie?

 

Julie Feller: 

Yeah, I agree with everyone there as well, I think at the kind of the tactical level, talking to as many people as possible internal employees at various various levels of the company, in different departments, external clients of different personas, partners, the more information you can gather and the data that you have available, the better you’ll be able to kind of hone your ideas, develop your strategies and your thoughts and start to see patterns and themes arise.

 

Drew Neisser 

So all of you mentioned a partner in one way or another working on this. And I’m curious, in thinking about that, what’s the key role that they play in this or the things that, again, that you did with this partner that really helped make it work? Rashmi.

 

Rashmi Vittal 

I think it’s a common understanding in terms of what the outcome, what’s the end game you’re trying to achieve and let’s work back from that. And let’s be very clear. And so I also think, like anything else, whether you know, it’s an agency or an independent consultant, you have to see if they fit culturally with you and your company as well. Right. And you’ll know that pretty quickly as you’re having conversations, are they pushing their own agenda? Are they truly in it to help you in your company, and so I interviewed agencies, small, large, and consultants, and when I again, got connected with this independent consultant, it was like, it was as if we had known each other for a very long time. And so it just felt very natural to work together.

 

Drew Neisser 

Amazing, Bill, in terms of partnerships and outside agencies and making sure they sort of work optimally. Any thoughts?

 

Bill Strawderman 

Yeah, I think for us, this was a pretty intensive project, what I’ll call a brick in the bag that was maybe not planned for in terms of resourcing. So when I was looking at my own kind of team and the kinds of things that we had this year, and I looked at the agency partner team, who we’ve had, for a number of years, the agency leader, and I pretty much had to spend a lot of our personal time and shepherding kind of all of the phases of this together. So I would sort of describe the relationship there as more of a foxhole buddy, like we’re in this together, we’re going to kind of power our way through a lot of different types of learning. And we’re going to have to each kind of bring in different members of our team and cross functional teams to the table to get this thing powered through. So the danger there, of course, is that you become just too self fulfilling, and you’re not looking outside enough. So we had to challenge ourselves to kind of lean in with curiosity at the right points, and then branch out for capability when we needed to.

 

Drew Neisser 

Interesting, I love the foxhole buddy metaphor. And I think the reminder, this is time consuming, if you want to get it right, you as a CMO are gonna have to, and again, this is one of the reasons why if you’re a new CMO, I don’t always recommend you tackle this. Because if there are quick fixes that you can do in demand generation that might fill pipeline, you buy some time to get to know the business, because the challenge and all of this is if you do it, when you first arrive is you’re still learning the business. It’s a good way to learn the business, but it’s such a tricky thing. I’m curious about this, and then we’ll sort of get final words. But cutting through is hard. Cutting through is really hard. And you can get comfortable. And I remember in one of the interviews that I think it was with Karla Pinero sublet, and the agency presented one idea and said, “This is going to make you really uncomfortable.” And instead they ended up embracing it. And the challenge I think in this is how do you balance the thing? It feels right, but it’s boring. Versus it feels right and it’s kind of got some edge to it. And I’m just curious. And Rashmi, you’re shaking your head on that.

 

Rashmi Vittal 

Yeah, I think Julie mentioned this before, but I think it’s when you have that aha moment in when this thing is going down the right path, you will get that aha moment. When we were doing this, we had plenty of times where we were like, we’re just stuck, or we felt like we weren’t really making good progress or sounding same. But there was this very clear moment when it was me, the CEO, CIO and our consultant, we were in a room brainstorming, just talking through this hard part and which is really around, we kept on coming back to this motto, like we’re thinking about “Teams that work together, win together” but it just wasn’t the right thing. And then as we were talking, we came around to this aha moment of “When teams align, great things happen.” And it was just so simple, that we said, “Wow, this is something we can rally against, and rally for.” And because not only is it important for what we do in terms of bringing the various teams from IT, finance, and procurement together, but it’s also a rallying cry internally to our company, because when all of our teams align from sales and marketing and CS and product, and GNA, and etc, great things will happen. And so I swear it like caught on like wildfire. And maybe I’ve created a monster with my CEO, but he uses it every all hands. He’s got that motto right up there. And it is like become the ethos of our company.

 

Drew Neisser 

I’m so glad you shared that story. Because I would argue that internal audience is like 90% of the ballgame. I talk about that in the book, too is if they don’t buy in, nobody’s gonna buy in. But if they buy in, so much of the work gets done.

 

Drew Neisser 

So all right, one last question. And then we have to wrap things up. So we haven’t talked about metrics here at all. And if you had to sort of look ahead to what metrics will you measure to know that this refresh has worked. Julie, what’s the sort of measure of success for you? And then looking ahead knowing that refresh worked?

 

Julie Feller: 

Yeah, I think there’s kind of the internal success measures and the external. So internally, there’s things like employee engagement surveys, and your recruitment and your retention efforts.  How are those looking? And how do they improve and change with a brand refresh? So that helps you know if internally if it’s resonating with them, and if they’re living by it. Externally, NPS scores, other types of client feedback, obviously, pipeline sales revenue, all of that can be looked at to help determine if something is working.

 

Drew Neisser 

Bill, what will you look at when you get to the end of this rainbow?

 

Bill Strawderman 

Yeah, so I think we’re clear on the destination. And it really has to do with the adoption rate metric for us. The challenge I think, is one of what are the right leading indicators and when you talk about attribution, how do you do the attribution of kind of what you did to kind of work on the brand along with the other things everyone else is trying to do to create conscious growth in the business. So I don’t think it’s about kind of hogging the limelight. But it’s sort of like going back to the discipline of what steps really mattered and were a creative. I think that’s going to be a challenge in terms of how we actually do attribution.

 

Drew Neisser 

Interesting. Okay, Rashmi a metric that matters in this conversation.

 

Rashmi Vittal 

It’s interesting to see we look very deeply at our buyers journey. And we’re seeing so much of our general brand and our brand driving that kind of super top of the funnel first touch, but then it also helps accelerate as we get to that S0S1 creation. So we’re seeing that connective tissue come through, and we’d like to continue to raise that, then from the accelerated between stages, and then also higher conversion from one stage to the next.

 

Drew Neisser 

Yeah. And what’s so hard in all of this is that you have to stay with it, right? Because it’s not just top of the funnel, the awareness worked, right that you got into the consideration set, but you got to keep going all the way through. And that just takes time. So all right, well, thank you, Bill, Rashmi. Julie, you’re great sports. And thank you, audience for staying with us.

 

 

 

If you’re a B2B CMO, and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your own 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 our B2B podcast partners Share Your Genius. 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!