The Art of Changing Your Brand Name
There is probably nothing more fundamental to marketing than your brand name. It usually takes years to build awareness and equity, especially the kind of equity that helps recruit employees, retain customers, and attract prospects. So, when a company decides to change its name, that’s a really big deal or at least it should be given both the challenges of finding a new name and then rebuilding the lost equity. In this episode, Dave Deasy, CMO of TrustArc, formerly TRUSTe, walks us through their entire renaming process.
Over the course of this interview, you’ll learn how to tell when a name change is in order and a concrete process for the development of the new name. Involving an outside naming firm was only part of the answer. Another important component was the role of the CEO and his insistence that the executive committee build consensus together. Along the way, Deasy shows his artfulness, encouraging his branding agency to “get crazy” when thinking about the logo design, a suggestion that resulted in the addition of a fin to the logo and a whole new storyline for the introduction. This is just one of the many insightful stories you’ll find in this episode.
Full Transcript: Drew Neisser in conversation with Dave Deasy
Drew Neisser: We’re all students of marketing. I think so. I mean, I think we should be students of marketing, so it’s appropriate that today we’re recording an episode in the San Mateo Library. And we’re recording this because my guest is Dave Deasy, who is the CMO at TrustArc. After we record this, we’re going to go to a CMO Club dinner. Shout out to Peter Kranik, the gentleman who helped introduce us. I want to go back to the notion of being a student and I know that part of this show for me is that I get an opportunity to interview so many amazing chief marketing officers. When you look at Dave’s career, it’s really interesting. He spent time at AOL. You’ve spent eight years, that’s such a long term.
If I did the average tenure and I eliminated one individual who has been on the show who was 20 years in the job, the average would be two. So eight years, it’s a pretty significant accomplishment. Anyway, Dave, welcome to Renegade Thinkers Unite.
Dave Deasy: Well, thank you, Drew. I’m happy to be here and looking forward to our conversation.
Drew Neisser: Let’s start with the big deal. The big deal that I see besides the fact that you’ve been able to just be in your role for as long as you have is the name change. Take us back to why. The company was TRUSTe. Where were you and what was the moment where you said, “We’ve got to change your name?
Dave Deasy: Just to give it a quick history, the company TRUSTe was founded in 1997. What most people know TRUSTe for is it’s the company that helped certify business privacy practices. If a company was certified, they were able to put the little green seal on their website, and most people have seen that green-certified privacy seal on websites over the years. As a result, the company TRUSTe built a very strong brand name for the company as well as very strong brand recognition for that green seal. When I joined the company in 2011, at that pointed it had already been up and running for about 13 years, but had been focused almost 100% on services. I was brought in as part of the team that was brought in after the company went out and raised venture capital funding with the goal of transforming it from a services company into a tech SaaS company.
Drew Neisser: So we have this strong legacy brand. This business is churning along. There’s recognition because people have seen it on the website. But you’ve decided that you want the company to be more than this one individual product line, right? That’s my guess, you wanted to expand.
Dave Deasy: Exactly.
Drew Neisser: I mean, the whole purpose of raising money typically is to be able to do new things and so forth. As you were looking at the TRUSTe brand, was the notion that it simply couldn’t hold anything else, that it wouldn’t be able to sustain, if you will, sub-brands or sub-services?
Dave Deasy: That’s exactly the issue that we were running into. What we were finding was, as we began to build out our technology products and we continued to build our platform out, we were having great success selling the product to customers, but the reality was it became, with a lot of companies, difficult to convince them that we were a technology company. When they would hear the TRUSTe name, they would immediately think to themselves and say, “That’s right, you’re the certification company.”
And so we pushed on that hard for a couple of years and eventually came to the conclusion that, as hard as we were trying, it was simply some uphill friction or headwinds, if you will that was becoming more and more difficult to overcome. That’s when we began to actively take a hard investigation into, at a minimum, we needed to rebrand the company, but potentially we needed to go as far as actually renaming the company. That’s when we began that initiative.
Drew Neisser: All right. So we’re at this pivotal moment. You can’t grow the way you want to grow with the brand. Maybe there was a way to change the way TRUSTe looked and felt so that people wouldn’t just associate it with this one product. The alternative was, of course, to come up with another name. We already know the end of the story. That’s what you did. What were some of the critical steps that you went through to validate that, one, it was really critical that you did change the name and, two, that TrustArc was the right name to change it to other than the fact that it was available?
Dave Deasy: There were a couple of things involved there. Once we decided that we needed to undergo a major transformation, we decided that there was enough historical heritage in the company name that we needed to get some outside help, so we hired an outside brand agency and brought them on board to help us go through this process. Part of the early process was we had them do some external validation with interviews with customers, interviews with partners, and also interviews with salespeople and other employees to start to float the idea of whether or not a name change made sense. Overall, the information that came back was pretty strong. TRUSTe meant one thing and one thing only, which was certification services. And the data came back pretty strong that said you’re only going to be better off if you can come up with a new name for the company.
But there was a lot of strong goodwill with the TRUSTe name. So part of the feedback was that you should continue to use that name for the certification products, but it made sense to come up with a new company name. Once we had that information, that’s when, as we worked with the brand agency, that we had them start to explore new name possibilities for us. Some of the criteria that we gave them, obviously, we wanted something that was going to help convey a tech company, a growing company, a new and innovative company. And at the same time, if there was some way for them to leverage some of the historical things like the word “trust,” which was a key ingredient in the original company’s brand, that was something that we were excited and interested in.
They came back to us with a pretty wide range of options, but along the way, one of the ones that they produced was TrustArc. It was one of those moments where we had our entire exec team sitting in a conference room, and after they had gone through a number of names, they had saved this one to last. They presented the TrustArc name and immediately everyone looked around the room and said, “Hey, that’s not bad.” It leverages the name with the word “trust,” it also introduces this idea of an arc, which is a way of signifying kind of growth and transformation. So we immediately fell in love with it, and then the immediate question became, is this domain name available?
They actually had not checked ahead of time at the meeting, so we all sat there and said, “Let’s check and see if the name is available.” And again, it was one of these interesting experiences where we found that somebody else owned it, but it happened to be a website that was in the business of selling domain names. The price was $5,000. Our CEO pulled out the credit card. We immediately bought the domain name and literally within a matter of seconds we owned the name.
Drew Neisser: What a great story. First of all, for a branding agency to not know. That was a moment that they should have checked. For the folks that are listening, there is a wonderful website as well that the U.S. government patent office runs where you can also do trademark searches really quickly. Before we ever go in and show tagline or something like that, we always put it in there just in case. We were about days away recently to present a big idea and, of course, it had already been registered. What an amazing thing. And by the way, if you thought $5,000 was high, you haven’t been going through this. We’re seeing folks that are looking at names that are six figures, which is so painful. There you are. That’s a moment. And the minute he put the credit card on the table, you kind of knew you were all in on that, I imagine.
Dave Deasy: Exactly. And one quick follow up comment on your references to the costs of getting a domain name. It’s part of the cost sometimes, but the other challenge is simply that it’s amazing until you go into one of these searches that virtually every name that you can think of is already registered. Literally, what you’re often left with if you don’t want to pay a high fee to acquire an existing domain name, it’s about coming up with either an incorrect spelling or you come up with an extremely long compound name that ends up becoming very difficult for people to pronounce or spell. It is one of the trickier parts of branding that people don’t quite realize until they get into it.
Drew Neisser: I think it’s really important also that just to punctuate. One of the things that we talk a lot about with our clients—and by the way, Renegade is not in the naming business, but our clients do go through this process—never have a name that you can own the URL. It’s just too complicated. You will really create all sorts of issues, and by that, I mean the dot com. There are folks that will buy some other things. Let’s face it. Bitly, it’s worked for them, but there are very few brands I think that I feel bad about owning the dot com. I know lots of brands that own alternatives that struggle for recognition. It creates e-mail problems and so forth.
So really, seriously, when you have a new name, if you are lucky enough to find one and it clears trademarks, makes sure you can get the URL, and if you have to buy it, don’t negotiate to buy it from the organization if you can just buy it straight out because you see the price and they’re selling it. If you have to actually go and negotiate, get a third party to help you out, because otherwise if they see you’re a big company, they’re gonna want big money. Any last thoughts on just getting the name part of this before we take a break?
Dave Deasy: Yeah, I think just the other part of it is that even though at that point it seemed like everything was a done deal with respect to the name change, the reality was there were still some other people that needed to be sold along the way. People like our board, for example. We were in good shape in the process. There were still some additional people that needed to be sold on the matter, but the reality was that really was just the beginning part of the process because we still had to work through the new identity and then eventually roll that out across all of our collateral in sales tools and different things like that. While it seemed like mission accomplished, the reality was that the journey had just begun at that point.
Drew Neisser: Perfect place to take a break. We’ll be right back.
BREAK
Drew Neisser: We’re back and you have a new name, but as you said, this is just the beginning because there’s so much work to be done. Without going through every detail, what were some of the surprising hurdles in this process before you launched it that you think were the key critical moments for you on this?
Dave Deasy: Once the name change part was agreed to, which to be honest, it was surprisingly easy within our executive team how everyone did bond on an individual name. The next part was looking at the broader identity. Things like the logo, what was the logo going to look like and what kind of bug or symbol would we potentially want to incorporate it into the logo? And a tag tagline and colors and things like that. That I have often found can be one of the more challenging things because everybody in their spare time is a designer.
The color part of it we were actually able to get agreement on pretty quickly because again, part of the guideline we went into this was the historic company colors were green. We said we really wanted to leverage the green. We were open to a variation of it, but we wanted to leverage the green. There were some other simple things like we switched from black as the second color to blue as the second color. But where we had a lot of internal debate and probably took longer than the actual name change part was what was the logo going to look like and what was, again, that kind of bug or symbol going to look like that would go along with the logo?
Drew Neisser: This is a really interesting part of this. Do you look backward at the old brand and say, “Oh, there are some legacy things there that we’d like to keep,” as you said, the green color? Or do you just rip the bandaid? Because you’re really trying to say to the marketplace, “We’re a different company.” Can you do that incrementally? The green changes it a little bit, so that’s the signal, but you kept some things from a design standpoint. How hard was it to move really away into a fresh territory because everybody’s comfortable with what they know?
The funny thing about logos is, I’m just imagining people the first time they saw that backward “e” in Intel. They probably thought that was the stupidest thing they ever saw. Now we’ve seen it a billion times. It takes a long time for a logo to burn in if you will, and then when you change it—like if suddenly you saw the IBM logo change or the Nike logo change, it would be disruptive for you. You might say, as people often do, “I hate it.” How did you deal with that incremental, big step? What was your approach?
Dave Deasy: I think part of what we concluded along the way was, while we wanted a big transformation, we did not want to throw away the past. As I alluded to a little bit earlier, when we did the interviews with customers, there really was an overall positive sentiment toward the TRUSTe name and the TRUSTe brand. It wasn’t as much trying to run away from that as it was leveraging the good parts, but changing enough in order to help create the new identity.
The big part of the process that came next was going through the process of trying to figure out what kind of symbol we were going to put right next to the Trustarc name. This is where the brand agency came back with a wide range of options. We had everything from arrows to the letters TA formated different ways. We had circles and dots and different things and we had a million different opinions on what people liked and didn’t like. One of the options that came along was a single arc, which tied into the TrustArc name. Early on, there was some positive sentiment within the group for that, but it wasn’t quite simply resonating with everyone. Then they did a simple change where they introduced a second arc, and then all of a sudden it became two arcs looks better than one for some reason. People were getting a little bit warmer.
One day I gave the group the task. I said, “Look, I see a lot of companies where they’ve incorporated animals and different things like that. Why don’t you just get crazy and see if there’s something like that that you can do?” What they ended up coming back with was, if you can imagine again, and if you look at our logo, there are these two arcs to the left of the name where they came back and they put a little fin. At the time, we didn’t know it was a fin. I just thought it was a little bump on one of the arcs and I said, “What is that?” And they said, “That’s the fin of a dolphin.” And I said, “Well, why are there dolphins in our logo?” And they said, “Well, you asked us to get creative and try to come up with something a little bit different.” And I said, “Okay. But why dolphins?”
They came back with it with a story about how well, first off, obviously the dolphin fit with the arc, but then they came back with a lot of symbolism around the idea that dolphins are very intelligent. They’re actually very fierce animals. At the same time, they’re also very friendly. And in general, people like dolphins. Pretty quickly, they sold us on this notion that the arcs with a little bump on it became this idea of the dolphins. While there’s nothing to do between dolphins and privacy, all of a sudden it started to tie the identity together in a nice way.
Drew Neisser: I love that story. First, one, kudos to you for asking a question like that. If you’re listening, CMOs, when is the last time you told your agency, “Hey, go crazy. Add animals. See what happens just for fun.” You open the door to creativity, which is really important. Two, I love the fact, and this is why doing a podcast is so fun, I just never expected we’d be talking about dolphins, you know, with identity programs. I did notice the fin, but I just thought, “Oh, that’s cool. There’s a fin.” I’m curious. Now you have a dolphin in your logo and you just keep moving from there. How did you then introduce this and roll it out both internally and externally?
Dave Deasy: Before I come in on that real quick, just one more comment on the dolphin. Once people get got warmed up to the idea—when I say people, we had a pretty close-knit group of just our executive team that was really in the know that anything was going on with respect to a name change and different things like that. There was still a lot of back and forth debate internally around, well, what are people externally going to say about a dolphin? Is that going to reflect positively or reflect negatively? I’ll jump fast forward a little bit and then we’ll come back, but one of the things that we eventually found was, once we actually rolled out the new logo with the dolphin and everything, I’d say for about the first 24 to 48 hours, we had people ask, “Hey, what is that little hump on the arc for?” We explained to people that it symbolized dolphins and that was it. I’d say after about two days, we never had anyone ask about it again.
But if I go back to the question around the process of rolling it out—once we had an agreement on the name change, on the symbol and everything, then we had to go through a pretty big exercise to start redesigning all of our collateral and the website and different things like that. Without getting into all of the details there, that was a pretty time-consuming exercise that took probably about 40 weeks to be able to work through all of those different materials. In terms of the actual rollout, there was a pretty elaborate plan that we had put in place around everything around how do we start communicating and internally, number one, and then number two, how do we communicate it externally?
Drew Neisser: That’s awesome. I just wanted to pause for a second on the internal thing, because this is the thing that I hear about these programs. Oftentimes, because there’s a trade show coming up or there’s a press release that needs to get out, the internal rollout is given short shrift. How long did you allow for internal?
Dave Deasy: I’d say the actual internal rollout was probably just a couple of weeks depending on whether you consider that long, long or short. Part of it obviously is putting in perspective that the size of the company. Our company is about 350 people. Obviously, we could do an internal rollout a lot faster than a company of 35,000 people, for example. A lot of effort went into building out everything from presentations on why we were doing the name change. We incorporated some of the information in there around the customer interviews that we did and different information. We built FAQs and that and held a number of all-hands meetings, had all of the execs involved in that process, and in communicating the information. Over the course of a couple of weeks, we were able to get that information communicated and also start to train people on the new messaging.
The one other quick comment on the internal rollout is, you can’t allow too much time because we had not started to publicly announce it externally yet. You’ve got to do the internal messaging rollout fairly quickly so that you can then follow on with the external rollout. Otherwise, you risk the naming getting out there uncontrolled.
Drew Neisser: Right. Perfect. All right. Just last question on this part of it. Swag for the employees?
Dave Deasy: The swag, as you can probably imagine, included a number of things with dolphin themes—everything from little stuffed dolphin animals to T-shirts with dolphins on them and pens and various other things. I will have to say by far and away, the most popular items were the little stuffed dolphins, which initially were something that we only planned for employees. We actually thought that wouldn’t be the type of thing that would make sense for some of the trade shows and events because we sell to lawyers, people with legal backgrounds, and people with compliance backgrounds. The thought was that little stuffed animals wouldn’t necessarily be something in demand by them. But the reality is that we experimented with one event and it actually turned out to be a very hot item.
Drew Neisser: I love this story. I mean, we’re gonna have to come back and talk more about dolphins. Stay with us.
BREAK
Drew Neisser: We’re back. Can I just pause for a moment and revel in this notion? So many B2B brands think about their trade shows as a place to push rational information to their target about their product and how wonderful it is. You just shared that by having stuffed dolphins, which no doubt the folks, one, it created curiosity, but two, they probably wanted to take it home to their children, proves that even your lawyers and compliance professionals are like real people who like stuff.
Dave Deasy: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. I couldn’t agree more. Without going too far off, one of the things we have found over the years is that some of the crazier swag and giveaways are quite often some of the more popular ones and interesting ones. We’ve given away, literally, things like yo-yos. It’s amazing how many people come up and will say, “Wow, a yo-yo, I haven’t touched one of these in years.” Next thing you know, you’ve got people showing off their tricks that they were doing as a kid and bringing back some of those memories.
Drew Neisser: I can do that. I think “Rock the Cradle” was one of my favorite yo-yo tricks. First time I mentioned some of my past yo-yoing; a youth misspent. Anyway, we’re back to dolphins. Now you do this at trade shows. Were there any other big moment portions of the relaunch when you brought it out to the rest of the world past employees?
Dave Deasy: Yeah. There were a couple of other things I’ll just hit on it as part of the rollout. One of the things was we actually did a big launch party. We’re based in San Francisco. We did that in San Francisco at a nice event downtown. That actually was a great opportunity for us to, number one, bring all the employees together. Number two, we actually invited all the past employees together, So it was a good way to network and bring a lot of the former employees back together for a big celebration. Then we also invited all of our customers and partners from the local Bay Area.
That was probably the big signature event. In the end, it ended up being the anchor date. What I have found with this project and most projects is you ultimately need a launch date or things can move on forever. Ultimately, for us, we picked a launch date when we had to put the deposit down and reserve a place that could hold 500 people. Then that became the crowning moment where everything had to be done and in place by.
Drew Neisser: I thought for a moment maybe you were going to do the launch party at Marineland, but I get it. It would have been a little tough. You do this, the new brand is out there. What were the metrics that you were looking for and using to know that you were on the right path, that this program was taking?
Dave Deasy: I think the main metrics we were looking at were what was both the external and the internal reaction. I’ll start with the internal side. Even though, to a large degree, once you got beyond the executive team and you had general buy-in across the employees, I would say that the longer somebody had been with the company, the more they were nervous about the name change. I often measure the success of marketing programs by how many salespeople complain about it and how quickly they complain. This is probably one of the few programs that I’ve ever launched where literally I didn’t get a single sales rep complaint. For the most part, I actually got compliments and praise, which, as those of us in the marketing world know, it’s not often that you get the sales team actually going out of their way to say positive things. From an internal standpoint to a large degree, we really used the feedback from the sales scene.
From an external standpoint, again, to a large degree, we used feedback from customers. In the very early days of going out and doing the communication—and the communication was done through multiple avenues beyond the launch party. We sent emails out to all of our customers, emails out to all of our prospects. There was obviously a press release and a blog post and a number of different communication channels. All of our top customers got phone calls from a sales rep or somebody else in order to introduce the feedback. The number one most universal piece of feedback we got from people was, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Why did you wait so long?”
Drew Neisser: Which a pretty good indication that everything is good. Now one of the big challenges is, of course, when you change your name, you change your domain and you can lose your site traffic. You have to start from scratch. But I imagine because you kept the TRUSTe product as a product, I’m kinda thinking in my mind that you kept that website alive for a while before migrating. You have this sort of new parent company if you will, and you keep the product alive as it is. Was there some kind of migration plan like that?
Dave Deasy: There were a ton of different migration things that we had to work through. Not only did you have to work through some of the migration around things like the URL, but also all of your social media pages as well. You had to work on a migration strategy for LinkedIn and for Facebook and Twitter. I think at one point the master list of total different project to-dos was well over 100 items that we needed to work on in order to complete the transition. You had all of your different online activities and URLs and accounts that you had a transition. But again, literally, we had probably 100+ different sales tools that all had to get converted over into the new identity. We’ve got hundreds of pages on your website, so it was pretty extensive.
You don’t even realize how many places you use a company name until you go through a process like this. Changing the voice greetings on the 800 number recording and different things like that. Having all of the employees update their email signatures and update their voicemail greetings, having employees go in and update their individual LinkedIn profile so that they no longer refer to the old company name. The list really does go on and on and on.
Drew Neisser: Wow. I’d like a copy of that list. That would be really, really helpful. As we’re wrapping up and you’re thinking back on this program, let’s say you were about to embark on it again. What were the two or three key pieces of advice that you would offer your fellow CMOs in this process?
Dave Deasy: I think it falls into a couple of things. First and foremost, obviously you’ve got to have strong buy-in by the most senior person in the company. In our case, it was the CEO. You need to have strong buy-in and support from the CEO that this is something that the company is supportive of and wants to do. That’s number one. Number two is, you’ve got to have a strong set of objectives that you’re trying to accomplish. There were many times throughout the process of the project where you would start to go astray and you needed those strong objectives to be able to come back to and help keep things in line.
Dave Deasy: I would say number three is, strongly consider bringing in some outside expertise to help with the process. Things like the brand and the corporate identity, there’s often just a tremendous amount of emotional equity that people have invested in what’s currently there. It’s a very difficult process to get people to change some of those thoughts working from within, so bringing somebody in from the outside both helps bring some of that outside expertise, but they also help bring that objective thinking that helps make it easier to be able to introduce change in the organization.
Drew Neisser: Yeah, it’s a great list. I would add to that because one of the things that you did when working with this outside partner is you said, “Go crazy a little bit, just find something. Just that pure question inspired them to do something that ended up creating a little quirky bit to the story. Are there any don’ts, where you would say, “Whatever you do, don’t do this?”
Dave Deasy: Well, I think again, again, it gets back to the thing I commented on a couple of minutes ago around having a good objective. I think the opposite of that is like, don’t change your company name without having a good solid reason. What you don’t want to do is embark on a name change simply because somebody says, “Well, I don’t like our current name,” or “I wish we had a different name.” There needs to be a good solid foundation for why you’re trying to do something like that. The second one is, and I think you alluded to this a little bit earlier—you can’t rush it. This is something that we actually did in what I think was pretty fast timing. Probably end-to-end, the entire project took roughly between four and six months. It’s something that is going to take some time, and you need to be careful not to just have some arbitrary deadline and try to rush it and risk making a bad decision.
Drew Neisser: But you need a deadline, which you pointed out. Wow. I think this is just a great story and it’s a tight one. Have a good reason, obviously, for doing this. You had your executive committee bought in all the way along the line and ta-da moment happened together. I think that the CEO does need to be involved in this process. They have to embrace it. And when you finally pick one, they have to be able to stand in front of the organization and really champion it. They can’t hide. I think that’s so important. So, you get this done and you look back on it—what did it ultimately enable you to do?
Dave Deasy: Sure. I think the name change helped us do a couple of things. It helped us start to tell the story more confidently around the fact that we were a technology company. You could almost see it immediately where our sales team felt more confident going out and telling prospects that, “Hey, we’re not just a services company, we’re now a full-fledged technology company. That confidence literally helped start to translate into more sales. As the team out there selling got more confident, you could just see the overall confidence level in the company start to grow. We saw over time a significant uptick in our sales trajectory, and ultimately, it helped us lead to a large funding round a couple of months ago where we closed a big $70 million funding round.
Drew Neisser: And there you have it. A named can make a big difference. It really can. You’ve given me lots of things to think about as a couple of our clients are thinking about name changes, so this couldn’t have been more timely. All right. I think we’ve learned a lot. I think the library setting was really important here. Brand matters. And the brand that you have may or may not be the brand that you need. The fact that you have a brand that is known, you can’t underestimate that importance, but you can get stuck. It felt like this was an organization that a great product name but not a great platform name. They needed something that they could step up to and build underneath. Interestingly now, you’re kind of a house of brands. You’re you’ve got a TrustArc and TRUSTe stays around.
Dave Deasy: Exactly. We definitely continued the TRUSTe brand for the certification offerings and TrustArc reflects both the corporate parent name as well as the brand for all of our technology. The two of those have worked quite well. The market has accepted those as two complementary offerings.
Drew Neisser: I think it’s really convenient that they both have the word “trust” in it, so it’s really easy to do it. Did you change the TRUSTe logo at all at any point to try to align it with the TrustArc? Were there any thoughts on that area?
Dave Deasy: We did not. We debated it and just ultimately decided that it was recognizable and there was no sense changing it. The one change that we did do is, if you see now any of the TRUSTe-certified privacy seals on websites, we added a powered by TrustArc tagline to the bottom. That was a way for us to be able to leverage the reach of all those TRUSTe seals on all of those websites to help get more of that TrustArc brand out there and also help reinforce the fact that even though the certifications are services, we’re actually using the TrustArc technology platform to power the delivery of those services. That worked out nicely.
Drew Neisser: One last question. The rebrand was successful. You’re in the market. You’re known now as a technology company broader than the original product that you started with. You just get $70 million in venture capital funding. And I’m really curious, as a CMO, that’s a moment where there’s kind of a land grab and the sales guys say, “Hey, we should hire 100 more sales folks.” And the R&D people say, “We need like 5,000 more engineers.” And then there’s the CMO saying, “You know, guys, we still need to spend a little more on marketing.” How did you go about that landgrab?
Dave Deasy: That’s a great question. The key to think about in our market right now is, I think as most people know, privacy is becoming more and more complex for companies because of all these new regulations, which means there are more requirements that they need to deal with. The reality is that I, as a marketer, while I know that we need to invest more in marketing and more in sales, I also recognize that we need to continue to invest in the product. In the case of our company, the top priority that I’m fully supportive of is continuing to hire more engineers to make sure that we can build out that product because there’s nothing better than having great products to be able to market. A big focus will be on the further building of the product. But then again, of course, there’s gonna be a big focus on further expanding the marketing and sales efforts as we continue to expand our operations beyond the US as well as into additional sales channels. We’re going to be equally investing in marketing and sales.
Drew Neisser: Perfect. All right. Well, I think that’ll do it for this episode. Dave, thank you so much for being on the show.
Dave Deasy: Drew, thank you very much as well.
Drew Neisser: And to you, listeners, maybe you want to go to the library today and just investigate something interesting that you haven’t thought about. I certainly am inspired just walking in the door and watching all these kids looking at the books going, yeah, libraries are really cool places. Anyway, I think the only thing I’m going to add, if you got something out of this show, do me a favor. Go over to iTunes right now and rate the show six stars. I know you can only give five, but I love that Drifted, their CEO, asked for six stars. And until next time, keep those Renegade Thinking Caps on and strong.