Huddlers in the News

When Amy Messano joined Altair as CMO in early 2019, the global tech company was in the middle of an acquisition spree that radically reshaped it. With 30 or so new companies merged into one, Messano had to make sure it became a cohesive branded house and not a chaotic house of brands. To do that, Messano and her team spent close to a year conducting research among their 3,300 employees and hundreds of customers, ultimately developing a new vision for the brand. Then the pandemic struck.

Not wanting to appear tone deaf, Messano considered holding off on the launch. But a bit more research with employees and customers revealed that their new rallying cry, #OnlyForward, was actually a welcome message of positivity in a time of uncertainty. Messano discusses how the rebranding came into being, how the team gained employee and customer buy-in and how they knew their efforts were indeed well-timed.

Read the full Q&A on Ad Age: Why the Pandemic Didn’t Stop a Global Tech Company’s Rebrand

Listen to the Episode: Decoding Your Company’s True Brand Purpose

Just months ago, B2B marketers had lofty growth plans focused on driving a large quantity of leads into their sales funnels. Today, with so many businesses struggling and lead-generating events off the table, those plans have been torn up. Many marketers are now making customer retention their top priority, which is a victory even if it means making contract concessions.

Couchbase, an open-source database software company, has found success with this approach. Because "customer-centricity" is part of the company’s core values, Chief Marketing Officer Peter Finter said it is easier to demonstrate increased empathy for customers—which translated into “we’re in this together” messaging, making training courses free and flexibility on terms. “We want to take pressure off our customers,” says Finter.

Read the full Q&A on Ad Age: How Customer Retention Is Replacing Acquisition during the Coronavirus

Listen to the Episode: B2B Values to Solve Any Marketing Challenge

Listen Here | From Renegade Thinkers Unite, Episode 192: Decoding Your Company's True Brand Purpose

Brands must be handled with care. They are emotional, enduring, and convey everything a business stands for, so it behooves CMOs to ensure that their company’s brand purpose and the messaging around it are not tone-deaf, but accessible—so accessible that they become a rallying cry for employees and customers alike and speak to any challenge that may come your way.

Now, how can you achieve this? At Renegade, we suggest finding a common story and articulating it in six words or less, which is exactly what Altair did when the software engineering firm launched its “Only Forward” campaign. As CMO Amy Messano explains, they knew that their decision to rebrand during COVID was the right one; firstly, because they had previously put in nearly a year of hard work to find their brand story, and secondly, because their purpose gave employees hope in an otherwise unpredictable moment—the true acid test for a successful brand refresh.

In this week’s episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Amy shares the story behind Altair’s mid-COVID rebrand, including how she used her “engineering pocket translator” to discover their purpose-driven story statement, how they activated their employees with the new message, and how they’ve measured its success thus far.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegade.com/podcasts/

Acquisitions are relentless in tech. Even in the middle of the pandemic, brands including Cisco, Microsoft, Facebook, VMware, Atlassian, Zoom, Intel, NVIDIA, Verizon, Docusign, BMC Software and Accenture acquired one or more companies. With each acquisition comes a series of branding questions. What to do with acquired names? How does the overall brand story change, if at all? For example, after SAP paid $8 billion for Qualtrics in 2019, it shifted much of its messaging to improving customer experiences, a promise enabled by Qualtrics technology.

For Isabelle Papoulias, CMO of Mediafly—a sales-enablement and content management software company—the answer to these questions changed after back-to-back acquisitions over a six-month period. The first acquisition was business as usual. But two weeks before announcing the second acquisition, Papoulias received a “stop the presses” call from her CEO. He wanted a new campaign. She took this as an opportunity to rethink everything, leading to a complete overhaul of the brand, go-to-market messaging and tactics.

Read the full Q&A on Ad Age: How Back-To-Back Acquisitions Led to a Tech Brand Overhaul

Listen to the Episode: Keep Calm and Acquisition On

Listen Here | From Renegade Thinkers Unite, Episode 191: B2B Values to Solve Any Marketing Challenge

When do company values matter? Just ask today’s guest Peter Finter, the SVP and CMO at Couchbase: “It’s when you have to make a hard decision, that’s when values matter.” Speaking with conviction, Peter knows what it takes to prepare a business to take on any challenge. This conviction was made clear in Couchbase’s nearly seamless response to the COVID pandemic and how it took care of employees, customers, and prospects.

In this week’s interview, Peter shares the six unique values of the open-source cloud database company that they’ve brought to life in the recent months across the spectrum of their ecosystem, starting with “Be a good human always.” With a commitment to personalizing marketing through things like employee talent showcases on Zoom and a free community edition of their software, Couchbase’s priorities are evidence that the human, purpose-driven B2B brand will always outlast the two-dimensional, poster board one. 

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegade.com/podcasts/

Given a chief marketing officer's to-do list—brand building, demand generation, employee communications, crisis management—it's counterintuitive to add additional responsibilities. But that’s what Mika Yamamoto insisted on when she took the dual roles of CMO and chief experience officer at F5 Networks—an application services company with more than 5,300 employees in 43 countries and many Fortune 500 clients—one year ago.

Realizing that marketing is more effective with a fulfilling customer experience, Yamamoto—whose background includes GM and strategy positions—leapt at the chance to bring both roles together. For Yamamoto, the organizational challenge boils down to whether an activity removes friction or adds delight. And one of the strategies to managing her double duties has been radically simplifying measurement.

Read the full Q&A on Ad Age: How Marketing Can Be More Effective with a Fulfilling Customer Experience

Listen to the Episode: Why CMOs Should Be CXOs Too

Listen Here | From Renegade Thinkers Unite, Episode 185: What a CEO Wants in Their CMO

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: no CMO can succeed without the backing of their CEO. Countless CMO guests on the show have talked about how crucial it is to have that top-down support, and on this special episode, we’re joined not only by the CMO of Wasabi, Michael Welts, but also by his CEO, David Friend. With a strong working relationship that most would envy, they talk about how they’ve built their brand and grown their customer base from 1200 to 15,000 in just two years.

The key thing David was looking for was a “simplifier” CMO, and with Michael, he found just that. Through bold marketing, Michael and his team developed a strong value proposition, “1/5 the price of Amazon and 6x faster” and based their sales strategy around the three Wasabi “peas:” price, performance, and protection. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear how to build a B2B demand gen machine, measure metrics outside of revenue, and have the CEO-CMO relationship that dreams are made of.

For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegade.com/podcasts/