Think big, start small: NetApp’s brand evolution

Gabriel: Holly, I’m really excited about today’s show. Keep me honest here, but would it be an exaggeration to say that when you sum up all of the traits and experiences that today’s guest has, that they’re a bit of a unicorn, at least a partial unicorn?

Holly: Yeah, I’d call Emily Miller a unicorn, or at least partial… unicorn in training. The fact that she’s been both client side and agency side. And in fact, I’ll do you one better, on the same client.

So she has literally been responsible for driving a client’s brand from the agency side of things and then became the client. That’s just such a rich pool to be able to kind of fish from. I’m excited to ask her a ton of nosy questions about what that was like.

She’s also one of those people who I think is unicorn-like in that she entered this hardcore technology-driven company full of engineers and she breathed brand life into it and was able, slowly over time, to convince people in the organization and show them how brand could deliver business value. Even in the most hardcore tech environments where engineers kind of are king. Yeah, so I think she’s pretty special.

Gabriel: It kind of comes from a similar world that you were in.

Holly: Well, I wouldn’t call myself a unicorn though. But yeah, Emily and I lived through a lot of the same things because when I was at Ciena it was truly a culture focused on the technology, right? It was, your technology either puts you in a leadership position or you fall behind. And they did not see at first why or how brand would play a role in that. How could brand potentially or possibly contribute to convincing a client who’s only looking at speeds and feeds?

Without going into the detail – because today isn’t about me, but about what Emily has accomplished – there are secrets that unlock… approaches that unlock that. I’ll give you a spoiler alert. It requires patience. It requires diplomacy. It requires a lot of emotional intelligence and an ability to speak in a language that’s different than what most stakeholders expect to hear from a brand person. You have to strip away all the language and learn a new one, or you won’t communicate and be seen as a leader in that kind of environment.

Emily has cracked that and I think she’s going to be able to shed light on a challenge that so many of us face. You know, we want to apply the best brand principles in any scenario. And in some companies, it takes some time to lay the groundwork and prepare them to go on that journey. And I’m so excited to get into how Emily did that.

Gabriel: Yeah. So for those that don’t know NetApp is a data storage, data infrastructure company – truly global – that has been a Fortune 500. It has more than $6 billion annually. It’s a massive company. If people have heard of Cisco, it’s kind of in that space, maybe just not as well known.

Emily… I don’t know anyone else who’s been in a brand role who has worked for as many CMOs as she has. So that’ll be a really interesting part of the conversation.

So maybe we should… you and I should stop talking and we should invite Emily in.

Holly: Let’s do it.

Gabriel: Well, welcome Emily Miller, it’s wonderful to have you on.

Emily: Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Holly: Glad you’re here, Emily. All right, are you ready for us to get nosy? Ask you a bunch of questions.

Emily: Ready to go.

Holly: Well, okay, first I want to back up because you actually… the last time that you and I worked together, and I we were kind of ships in the night, at Landor… and I’ve got to set it up this way because this was the coolest thing – you were managing a client within the agency and then got tapped by that client to go inside.

All of us were like, “Ooh, she’s going over to the other side. Will we ever see her again? What happens over there?” And, and so it was kind of like this freaky Friday, you know, sort of role switch, which was very cool.

You had already made a big impact on this brand on the agency side at Landor. So walk us through… take us into that transition.

Emily: Sure.

Holly: So, okay. You’ve now walked back in the doors – the people are familiar to you, the brand is familiar to you, but you now have a PNL. You’re responsible. You’re on the inside.

We would love to just start there and just unpack what that was like, the transition. And did you have to completely change your thinking?

Emily: Sure. No, that’s a great question, Holly.

So I had started working with NetApp in, what was it, like March of 07. Spent about two and a half years with them as my client. Then the opportunity came to go in-house. And I think what I had always loved about NetApp as a client and what attracted me to come over as an employee was just the leadership.

They were very transparent, very direct, very open with employees all the time. Like going to an All Hands for the first time… I hadn’t been to like a company All Hands like that since before the millennium. Like when I worked for Symantec, you know, where we would have like company meetings. And I was like, this is so bizarre.

What was great about the transition, as you say, was I knew the team. I knew the brand because I had built the brand program on the agency side. But coming in, at first, I still felt a bit like a consultant. And it kind of took that time to remember that I was going from consultant to – I actually need to own and drive aspects of this program, or I need to find the partners who can help me drive this program. Versus just kind of saying, “You could do this. It’s up to you.”

Holly: Mm.

Emily: Making that transition from consultant and guider of potential opportunities to you’ve got to own it and then drive it and then it’s up to you – It just took a little bit of time as you’re kind of getting your sea legs. But making that transition more to kind of being like you’re the owner, you’re not just an observer.

Holly: Mm.

Emily: I think sometimes it’s hard to make that transition if you’ve never been on the client side before. So, luckily, I’d been on the client side before being on the agency side. And then being able to then be the advocate for your client when you’re working with new agencies. And so how do you learn to kind of really be the advocate for the client now that you are the client instead of kind of reverting back to like the agency… like observing the problem.

Which is wonderful when you’re on the agency side if you work with a nightmare client. You’re like, “I’m so glad I don’t work there.” This was one where I was happy to work; it was nice to join.

Holly: What was something that you observed within, let’s say the first… I don’t know, let’s say a hundred days? Something that you saw that you thought, “Oh, I never would have seen this on the agency side.”

Emily: Let’s see. I think there are just so many aspects of the business where people want your input. And I think that was actually something that was really gratifying because I knew a bunch of people in marketing – it was getting outside of marketing and working with people that were not maybe the traditional folks that I would have worked with when I was on the agency side.

So being asked to come in and help with… I mean, I’m remembering being asked to help with some naming for some programs – again, that were outside of marketing. But people just saying, “You are a resource. You have good suggestions. We want you to help out.” Even if, you know, again, it’s not my skin in the game of their ultimate decision necessarily. But being able to help people think through things was really great to be asked to do.

Holly: I want to double-click on that because not everybody who joins such a tech-forward and engineering-driven company finds that marketing and brand is invited in so openly and so warmly where they’re saying, “Hey, good ideas. We need your help.”

Was that sort of naturally happening or did you have to build that a little bit? And what was maybe one area of the business where that didn’t happen naturally and you had to kind of make inroads?

Emily: I believe that, again, it’s all how you tee yourself up. And I think because I had been the consultant, I was a little less threatening. I could come in and say, “Hey, here’s a way to look at it.” So being able to be kind of more of a professor, like how my former chief of staff used to say,

Holly: Professor Emily.

Emily: Yeah. She would say when you’re coming in and doing this naming presentation, you’re talking to a bunch of executives that don’t do this every day. They may understand it conceptually, but – again, being more engineering-focused – they’re not thinking about it in the way you are. So you have to kind of teach it to them like it’s a course or like a Ted talk, where they’re going to be kind of like, “Oh, okay, that’s interesting.” So taking that tact versus like, I’m the authority and I’m going to tell you what to do. Like that’s not going to fly.

I think one area where… like we have a big customer event – it’s a customer event now, but back in the day it was really more of a training event for the engineers and for folks on the technical side — it wasn’t a marketing event, but they were having to do marketing. So they had sponsors. They had to put logos on notebooks. They had to have a sponsor of the big appreciation event and the music. They didn’t know how to do branding and so they were just putting logos on everything. And so I kind of came in and did a little bit of an audit and just said, “Hey, there’s different ways we could think about this. And let’s think about this holistically. And you don’t actually have to give this away. And it actually looks like it’s their event instead of your event. Like, how do we think about this?”

So just being more slightly academic, I would say, in the approach and showing ways in which it could work without mandating or instructing.

I remember my first day of work, the head of the public sector business met me and he’s like, “Oh, you’re the new brand police.” And I was like, “No! That is not…” I hate that part of this job.

Holly: Here we go.

Emily: Yeah. So I had a metric for my team one of the first years I was there: how many times are we referred to as the brand police versus the brand team? And if the brand police match mentions are going down, then we’re doing the right thing. And thankfully, I don’t think anybody thinks of me as a police captain, so that’s good.

Gabriel: And how did you do?

Emily: We did pretty well. We gained a lot of fans by saying, “This is how it could work if you would like to go this way.” Not being, you know, militant. Because I do think people resist the militants, especially like very entrepreneurial-minded folks don’t like being told what to do.

But I will say everybody was always very curious to do the right thing. And so if you could show them the right thing and not scold them, then they were like, “Oh, okay, I get it.” And then they would come back to you the next time, before they completed the project, and they would say, “Do you have any input that you could give me before I go too far down the path?”

So that’s kind of how you then build that credibility, build that trust that you are not the scary person who’s going to shut their project down. But actually get their input ahead of time so then it’s successful for everybody.

Gabriel: Did you have to do some coaching with your internal team on how to respond on changing some of the mentality?

Emily: Yes, I definitely did work a lot with the team. I do credit my upbringing from a mother who was Southern and always said, “You know you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.” Again, you can’t come in and just start smacking people down. But if you come in and say, “Hey, you know, I’d like to work with you on this and your team. The reason why is because this XYZ.”

If you explain to people why, hard things are easier to accept. Be it a layoff, be it you bastardized the logo – those are easier to get through and get through to a better solution if you can explain why. A lot of people have never been told why. They’ve never been exposed to this kind of thinking because it wasn’t a discipline that had been staffed up significantly.

So getting your team to understand that it’s about building relationships, it’s about building and earning the trust. Then you can start to coach and educate, kind of influence without them knowing, and then you build the culture.

Gabriel: It’s amazing because I’m from the South and I never heard that expression growing up. Maybe it was a different part of the South.

Holly: Okay. So Emily, would it be fair to say that your first chapter at NetApp would be… if we had to title the chapter, it would be educator – you know, the education era. And did you continue to have to lean into the role as an educator, or sort of Professor Emily, as you continued on in your tenure? Or how would you sort of label the next chapter where it was more about …igniter or sort of how would you label your evolution over your time there?

Emily: It’s been 15 years now that I’ve worked there and I look back to like those first days and I do remember that feeling of kind of like tentativeness of, “Okay, I’m coming in from the outside, coming in with this title and this role.” This was the first time they’d had a full-time brand director role.

I feel like once I became more comfortable and could feel the positive response to, “Hey, I’m here to help you. I’m not here to just smack you down.” Then that gave me, I would say, the confidence and the platform to have a stronger voice. To be able to push more strategic leadership brand considerations, I would say, versus let’s get the basics of brand management right.

We had a great chief strategy officer, Holly and I did at Landor, who would say, “You know, when the student is ready, the lesson appears.”

Holly: Love that.

Emily: You can’t start calculus when you haven’t conquered algebra, so you’ve got to do those baby steps. So once we kind of had the basics of brand management in place, we had the team in place, people knew they could come to our team. They may not get the answer they wanted, but they would get help to get to the right solution. And then they might actually go, “Oh, I didn’t even know that was possible,” or “Now I understand why it’s this and not why I came to you originally.” Once that kind of trust had been earned, then it did move into more of like, you know, a flag bearer to say these are things we need to do.

You know, we’ve had a lot of executive turnover. I think I shared with you that I’ve had, you know, probably about seven, eight, nine CMOs, all coming in with their different areas of focus and mandates. But it’s a continuing education process, I would say, with our executives. Because as we grow as a company, as we become more mature, as we’ve done acquisitions, as the macro environment changes and the competitors change, we have shifted. Fifteen years ago, we were the upstart against EMC. Then Pure was coming on our heels. Now Vast is on everybody’s heels. That dynamic is always shifting. Therefore, our brand challenges and considerations are always shifting.

Holly: That makes a ton of sense. I’m curious when you first got there, were you paired with a CMO who gave you the runway and the time to play that educator role or were you…?

Help us understand, because you saw what needed to be done in terms of building relationships, building trust, setting context, educating, and that was going to end up gaining you much more productive relationships over time.

Did your CMO give you the chance to do that? Or was their expectation that you were going to come in and just kind of hit the ground running? How did you reconcile that?

Emily: So I think the first month I was there, the CMO moved into a new role and we were CMO-less for about four months.

Holly: Oh, wow, what was that like then?

Emily: You know, okay, well, there’s going to be a new sheriff in town. And so when that new CMO came on board, she had a very clear sense of like, we need to develop a new narrative, a new positioning, new identity. And that’s when I feel like I got into a really great feeling of like – in rowing you call it the swing – you’re just like in a really good rhythm and everybody’s really kind of working together. Because I was working with an agency that was more of an advertising agency and less of a branding agency. And so I felt like I basically had to kind of structure the program based on what I had learned at Landor. But I was able to do that because I had gotten my sea legs at NetApp.

I’d been there almost a year and I was like, “Okay, this is what we’re doing people.” So then was able to really drive that. And I think it was that ability to drive and then have that kind of confidence to do more than just kind of what I’d learned from Landor and take it further.

Gabriel: Emily, I think one of the things that truly is unique about your experience at NetApp is having worked with eight or nine different CMOs in the time that you’ve been there.

What are some of the learnings that, as you reflect back, having worked with so many different CMOs around, “Oh, okay. You can kind of separate them into these different segments.” How do you learn how to adapt to understand their nuances when they come in so that you’re adapting to them, not vice versa?

Emily: Right. It’s definitely like a lesson or a crash course in learning how to manage up. Learning what are their most important priorities and how can you get your priorities that you know are kind of the longer term – because again, the CMOs come and go. And so as we stay as a team – and obviously new people are coming in and people are moving off – being committed to wanting to drive and build the brand over time, and see that grow, and see the company succeed over time.

It’s, you know, “How can I take the things that I know we need to do and attach them to what’s important to them so that things on my agenda that maybe they’re not thinking of become important because I attach them to their agenda?”

Also recognizing that every one of them brings different strengths. I’ve learned something from everyone. I think, you know, when we were talking before, I shared, there’s like a saying from each one that I’ve learned, like, you know, the one who brought in integrated marketing, she had this mindset of like, “Think big, start small, move fast.” And I have stolen that and used that many times.

Another one used football analogies, American football analogies for everything. So it was, you know, “Do not come to me at the two-minute warning with the project and I’m not having any exposure to it already because then I can’t help you.” So we have this whole methodology around there’s spring training where you’re putting everything together and you’re making the plan, and then there’s kickoff, and then you’ve got half time. And so she’s like, “Show me at kickoff so I can just say, yep, maybe tweak that, tweak that. Then we come at half time. And then when we get to the two-minute warning, if there’s any final touches we need to do, you know, that’s when you like put the cherry on top of the sundae. Because if you come to me at the two-minute warning and there’s nothing… there’s just no runway. So we ultimately have to punt. And so then we’ve kind of lost the opportunity.”

Holly: So Gabe, do you see the value of American football here? Are you getting… Are you a believer now? I mean, this is some deep stuff.

Gabriel: Hey, Holly, I’m already a big American football convert. And I know my US sports to the extent that I can also recognize that Emily was mixing analogies there because spring training is baseball, not NFL. So I’m just going to drop that one there for a sec.

Holly: Oh, no.

Emily: Pre-season, sorry, the draft. Yeah, that’s funny.

Holly: We’re gonna edit that comment out, my friend.

Emily: That is hilarious.

Gabriel: No we’re not, no we’re not.

Emily: So I’ve been to spring training the last two years. That’s why I think it’s on my mind.

Holly: That’s so cool. Emily, that was fully approved, approved by me.

What I’m dying to know about… okay, so the football analogy is so cool. I love a good sports analogy… go back to the, “Think big, start small, move fast.” Can you give us a real-life example? How did you manifest that? Like, how did that show up in real work?

Emily: Yeah. I think it’s so easy to think about these big things that have to get done. We call them big rocks. Like, yes, there are these major big rocks, but sometimes, you know, as with anything in life, when it’s too big and you’re “boiling the ocean”, it’s just, it’s impossible.

So how do you look at something super strategic, super important, big imperative that you do it, but break it down. So a lot of times I’ll talk to my team and I’ll say, let’s pilot it because anything called a pilot, you can get done. Just figure out how to size it. Let’s pilot it and then see what works and then we can tweak it. And if it works well, then we can say, if you liked this, you can give us more money and we can do more of this.

Things just get so bogged down with timelines. The move fast part is critical because it is so hard to get things done quickly in a big company. I think that’s really one of the hardest things. You’re just in meetings all the time and that’s why we love good agencies – because they’re not in these meetings all the time.

By sizing it and making it a little digestible pilot, then you can move fast. You don’t have to go through like so many like – pick a country, pick a geo, pick a segment. Just pick something, size it, get it done. Then you can like build upon it. But gosh, getting something off the ground is hard.

Gabriel: What are the times that you purposely go, “No, no, we have to treat this as a big rock.”?

That’s the thing in branding, right? There are both sides to it. Sometimes if you’re talking about like the big brand positioning, or narrative, or it’s architecture, or it’s a more significant change to the visual expression – which happens less and less today because now it’s more and more constant evolution. But, how do you judge then the times when it’s a, “No, no, this time on this one, we need to do it as a big rock.”?

Is that more when you realize that there’s an opportunity to top down — there’s that executive engagement? Or is it something else?

Emily: Definitely. Yeah.

I would say a good example is the most recent work we’ve done on our narrative because we had a lot of acquisitions over the last four to five years. We had a lot of messaging around cloud that was needed, but it was also a little bit of a sense of over-pivot. I remember talking to an analyst and he’s like, “You’re not alone.”

Cloud was amazing during the pandemic. It was able to help a lot of customers do things that they maybe didn’t know they were ready to do, but they had to do it immediately. So figuring out how to expand our narrative so that it could encompass the cloud acquisitions that we’ve made versus having it be this either/or that everybody was kind of pulling on these two poles. That was kind of like deep — that was a big rock, that was full time, and that was involving the executive committee.

They care about the identity, but that one is something that we can just kind of inform them more about. They don’t need to pick unless you have an executive who really just wants to get involved beyond your marketing leadership. It just needs to be something that they don’t dislike. And that’s one that we could say, “This is our big rock, and we’re going to move on this.” And then we’re going to inform on what needs to be done. But again that depends on personalities and interests.

Gabriel: So like much of tech, you’ve been in this pivot point of moving from more of a kind of traditional maker of boxes and software to this transition to the cloud.

Can you give us kind of any insight learnings around when you go and work on this type of narrative work in an organization that’s global with so many different business units, so many stakeholders? Not only getting that through, but once the work is done, making sure that then it can actually get used and cascaded down through the parts of organization. So it doesn’t just kind of live in this PowerPoint.

Emily: Totally. And I think sometimes it gets to the PowerPoint and then your sales team and your engineering team goes, “I don’t like it.” And then nobody uses it. So then it kind of stays a marketing initiative.

I think some of the differences this time for the narrative that we worked on was lots of deep involvement with our product leadership — our core business and our cloud leadership and their product marketing leaders. So really having them be a core part of that versus creating some things and giving them options. They needed to be so inherently involved.

We also have a CMO right now who has a very strong product marketing background in addition to a corporate marketing background. I think that’s something where different CMOs maybe have brought different strengths, but those are two strengths that we need to make a brand narrative aligned with business strategy. I think that has made that successful. As well as then taking that and really connecting it into the portfolio.

We also got the portfolio narrative work done first, and then this connected down into something really strong versus connecting into just like hundreds of products that have no through-line that brings them together.

That was where the partnership with product marketing was hugely, hugely important. And then we co-presented the content. In the past, it would be me saying, “Here’s this new corporate narrative, here’s a deck you should use for customers.”, and they were like, “I don’t want to use it.”, “I think it’s stupid.”, “I would never say that.” But if we’ve created it with product marketing, I actually had my VP of product marketing on a call say, “I used this with a customer this morning and it sparked all these conversations.” – getting that kind of stamp of approval.

My joke on these brand road shows is like, I don’t think I’ve ever created a deck with a corporate marketing message that sales has ever been happy to use.” It’s just it involves so much involvement to get that buy-in. And because we put the time in to do it – granted, I also think we were at a unique time where sales was looking for the narrative too. They really felt strongly about like, we’ve got to add all this stuff to make it say something because what we have right now isn’t working.

Gabriel: That’s so interesting Emily because I think over the last five years we’ve been talking a lot about how the agency-client relationship has changed a lot. It needs to be a lot more co-creative in the sausage-making itself and having the client present the work internally. Not always having the agency, but really having that sense of ownership.

It’s really interesting hearing you talk about that because what I hear is, “Oh, that co-creative exercise needs to happen a lot internally now.” Especially as brand starts to permeate through the organization. Most of us work where it’s B2B or there are all these other departments and functions that really own the brand and own the brand story. That co-creation becomes more and more important.

I don’t know how many brand leaders think about how much time they spend outside of their team.

Emily: Mm-hmm. It’s interesting because I just had this… I don’t know, like this thing come into my head that before the pandemic, the agency meetings were always in person. We had an agency in London; we would fly to London for creative meetings. So it was just, there was a way of doing things that a lot of the ownership of selling in the story just sat with the agency because it literally sat with the agency.

Then, with the change in our working relationship with agencies during the pandemic and now coming out of it, we’ve kept that flexibility and that need for kind of a bit more sharing of information. Because it couldn’t just be in these moments of like drama in person. It’s like, “No, we just need to kind of meet three or four times this week on Zoom and work on this and iterate.”

Holly: So getting rid of the big reveal, right?

Emily: Yeah. I can’t be big reveal to any more than my product marketing person. So it’s brought us closer to the creative process and that strategic development.

Holly: That’s healthy. That’s that sort of conflating, and that kind of blurring of lines is the way to go.

Emily: Mm-hmm. It’s better outcomes.

Holly: I’d love to grab on something that you said a minute ago that kind of sparked something. You mentioned, if I heard this correctly, that you started with a portfolio narrative. I did the exact same thing at Ciena. And I recall, had I gone for the jugular, had I gone up to the big corporate brand first, I think there would have been organ and tissue rejection.

Emily: Yeah.

Holly: Like, I think it would have been, “What is this program? Why? How are you grounding this?” and “Who is this chick? Like, where did you come from?” So the magic bullet was to start with something more tangible and bring brand into product, bring it into portfolio, build a story there. And then I could start to chip away at going higher and higher and higher upstream.

Emily: Yeah.

Holly: Was that sort of your secret sauce? Was that by design or did you kind of luck into it? How did you decide to start with portfolio narrative? What did that look like?

Emily: I would say that’s a great outcome of the function of having a leader of product marketing at the time (who is now the CMO) who also understood the importance of narrative because of her experience in corporate marketing. So she knew that her task coming in was get a portfolio narrative. And then upon that, we needed to ultimately build it. We were trying to do the corporate narrative at the same time, it didn’t work.

Holly: Oof. Rough.

Emily: Yeah, it was just too much. Again, clean up what do you need to do first. Kind of that think big, start small, move fast. Yes, the whole narrative needs to be fixed, but we can’t fix the whole narrative until we get our building blocks in order. Then we can move on to that. Because, as you said, people would have been like, “What are you doing? This is impossible.”

Holly: Totally. You’ve got to start with the what before you get to the why, which sounds counterintuitive in some way because, you know, Simon Sinek and everybody’s saying start with why. Start with why is not for every company though. And if the company’s product story, if the portfolio isn’t hanging together, it is very challenging to then grow the brand from there because it’s disparate, right? There isn’t a purpose to what you’re doing.

Emily: Mm-hmm.

Holly: Okay, now I’m curious about how money comes into it, because anything that’s touching portfolio – that’s worth it, that can impact sales.

When you started to go up the chain then, and you were working on more of the brand upstream, did you have the budgets you wanted? And how did you go fight for the resources that you needed?

Emily: So thankfully, we’d had run rates for brand investment, mainly around like campaign, paid media… and because we didn’t have an organized message, it was like, “Let’s not put that in market.” So let’s use the money we have to get like this clean up on aisle five and really get a strong narrative that we can then put out into the market.

Sometimes you do just need to kind of like chop some things off and just reallocate those funds to the right thing and get it together. So that then you can go out with the right message.

Holly: Prioritize.

Gabriel: I want to go back to this portfolio narrative piece because I think for too long, all of us who are practitioners, regardless of whether your agency or client side have thought about brand architecture too much in terms of thinking about organizing principles, master brand, sub brands – almost like how we organize our logos.

The idea of portfolio narrative really forces us to elevate ourselves from a true business strategy standpoint in thinking about what’s that story of how all of our products and businesses hang together.

Can you talk about… maybe for people that haven’t thought portfolio narrative work… How should people be thinking about portfolio narrative? What is it? What is its value? Is it a part of brand architecture? Is it part of something else? And what is a good portfolio narrative?

Emily: I think that’s a great point.

It’s funny, the NetApp engagement, way back in the day, was originally brand architecture. And then, after the initial conversations, it was like, “Before you can do brand architecture, you need to have a story. Like, what is your narrative?” Where we’ve seen really great progress is that… you know, in the time that we took the break from kind of developing the narrative and took the campaign out of market, kind of hunkered down, developed a new story, working on the new message to the market. We didn’t see changes in our awareness because, no surprise, we weren’t doing anything there… but what we did really see is a big shift in consideration. And so I see that as a proof point of having something to say to customers that are willing to consider us, willing to include us in the RFP… Like you are talking about more than just the latest widget.

I think that is where, especially B2B tech companies that are engineering led, you focus on the new launch coming out, the new box, the new widget, the new whatever. And you’re constantly having to like change and update. Versus like what is the overall value or benefit that you’re bringing to the customer. So trying to just kind of look at it from like… yes there is an efficiency standpoint, but it’s also just the market’s not going to be able to absorb all that.

So what’s the narrative that you can tell that can stay true over time that then just gets reinforced with these great product launches that come three or four times a year? Versus every three or four months, you’re telling a new story. And so I think because we were able to center on a couple of key messages at a higher level, versus the message of the quarter, we’ve seen dramatic improvement on consideration because people feel like we have something of value for them.

Gabriel: How distinct is what you just talked about from a corporate narrative to a portfolio narrative?

Emily: That was all the portfolio narrative because we had not launched the corporate narrative yet. So I credit the portfolio narrative for kind of cleaning up. And again, we’d had a lot of acquisitions. People were like, “Why did you buy this company?”, “What does this do versus that do?”, “Why do these two things sound the same?”

Gabriel: Is there anything about the process of developing a portfolio narrative that’s different to the corporate narrative? For example, one of the things that we’ve seen is a notion of, well, when you go portfolio narrative, you kind of need to map customer needs or customer journey to our different product portfolio so that they can see how our different products can map to aspects of their journey. Or it’s about trying to show how they hang together and then ladder up into a cohesive story.

Is there anything else that you would change or add to that?

Emily: I mean, I would say that because the work on the portfolio was done, there was greater clarity on what are the key needs that we need to solve. So that when we came down from the corporate narrative, that was how we figured out how they connected. And so that allowed us to do a little bit of rationalization. Almost like portfolio narrative 2.0.

Holly: Mm-hmm.

Emily: That got a rev with the corporate narrative coming down because then we were able to say these actually are the ones that are maybe most important, or most strategic, or these new themes and trends – like AI, obviously.

So bringing it in the middle. I think that’s to your point, Holly, of starting with corporate narrative without having organization down below – you’re dropping from way up high just into product and you’re missing that middle piece of value and why should a customer care about hearing more from you. You’re not going to get it if you go from these lofty things and then just like go, “Buy this, buy this box.”

Holly: Yeah, you can’t go from purpose to widget or from widget to purpose.

Emily: Mm-hmm.

Holly: I’d be curious to know if you agree with this, Emily, and did you see a change in when you talked about pulling together through M&A and this portfolio starts to feel disorganized or it appears disparate to customers?

When they’re considering you they want to know not just what the product does, but what investing in a relationship with you is going to give them, right? Like, are you going to be there for me and have the right technology 18 months down the road, 36 months down the road?

Did you find that that portfolio narrative that wrapped up sort of the company’s intention around product made it clearer to companies what you stood for? And what did that do for you in the RFP process? How did that show up? Like take us through… your guys and gals are responding to an RFP, they’re describing product, how do you elevate that story in that circumstance?

Emily: Well, I think a good example would be say in an executive briefing. You’re preparing for that customer to come in and you understand what their biggest challenges are. Having the narrative provides your sales exec, your client exec, and your SEs that ability to frame up conversations and have more long-term strategic conversations with specialists that you bring on to those briefings. And it’s in an organized, methodical, repeatable way versus these people out in the field having to pull it together themselves every time. That is not sustainable, it’s not scalable.

Again, by providing enough for people, they can then take it, and then they can customize it to that account. Maybe they have special interests they can add in. And I think because we work so closely with sales and with product marketing and product leaders too, to get that deck fully integrated with the corporate narrative, they then see how like I can talk about this at a high level and then it connects down into like our strategic areas that we’re investing in for the future, and, “By the way, we just had a launch at our customer event last month.” And it hangs together in a way that it didn’t before.

We did a road show this summer to Europe and I had a sales leader who’s been with the company like 12 years, and he was like, “This is the first time I really feel like we’ve told this story.” And I was like, “Thank God.”

Holly: It’s so gratifying. I think the secret sauce in there that I want to make sure we don’t lose is your relationship with sales. There often can be a rub there, right? That marketing creates something, you know that it’s right, but sales is saying, “I can’t. This isn’t going to roll off my… this isn’t natural. My customers aren’t going to buy into this. Please.”

Emily: Right. Can’t use that.

Holly: And so you have what could have been a blended 1+1=3 relationship become one of conflict. So was that by design that you brought sales along with you in that journey?

Emily: Yes. But I actually use product marketing to hook them.

Holly: Tell us more about that?

Emily: The other thing about first coming into the company and be the brand police, like we actually intentionally just didn’t use the word brand for probably the first two years that I worked there. We used reputation, we used enablement instead of brand guidelines. Again, just trying to take like the fear out of the brand police role. And so if somebody else is able to bring something to someone who has… so when we did the narrative briefing, we did the recording, I had one of our CTOs who’s just like a legend in the field do it with me instead of just me. Because if it’s just me, it’s just the corporate marketing lady. If it’s me plus him, it’s endorsed. I mean, it’s basically like brand partnerships.

Holly: Yeah, it’s an endorsed brand.

Emily: I know this guy’s brand is highly relevant, highly attractive to everybody in the field. When he talks, they all listen. So I brought him onto my training and had him give half of it with me.

Holly: So smart.

Gabriel: Some of these learnings are very connected to that kind of Yoda-ish wisdom that you said at the start of the call – when the student is ready, the lesson appears. Can you give us a couple of other examples? Underneath that phrase is this notion… I think what we’ve really felt in getting to know you is this notion that you have this blend of patience and persistence.

Emily: Yeah, and it’s so funny because in my personal life I am not known for being very patient.

Holly: That is not what I’ve heard.

Gabriel: We’re all contradictions.

Emily: I know we are. It’s all relative, right? It’s all context.

I am a history major originally and I love stories and talking. And so for me, it’s all about how do you tell a story to somebody that they can relate to when you’re telling them? So I use analogies to try to get people to understand. So why would we do a sponsorship with a brand? Did you see Can’t Buy Me Love with Patrick Dempsey from like 1988 or 89? You pay the popular girl to be your girlfriend for a month, you become popular. It’s really that simple.

The cost, the price is going to change, you know, property to property, but it’s making it relatable. Sometimes you need to teach in an academic way when you’re bringing in strategic conversation, but sometimes you need to do something that seems really like basic.

Why do you not want to print the logo on every single napkin at a party? Well, because you don’t need to. You don’t need to brand every single thing to be on brand.

Gabriel: So what’s the analogy for the napkin story?

Holly: Yeah, what movie?

Emily: When you go to a wedding, if everything says Tony and Tina’s wedding from the matches to the…it’s just… less is more people, you know?

But again, if you don’t know, you think you’re doing the right thing by putting the logo. You don’t need the logo on every panel on a booth, but you do need to be able to walk around the booth and make sure that the logo is visible from every angle. But that doesn’t mean you put the logo on every single panel. Not everything is a one-off thing. It’s like, how do you look at everything in concert? You know, it’s that whole experience that you need to think about. I think that’s just how brands become more sophisticated.

We just didn’t have much of that knowledge in-house. And so that’s why I kind of felt like a teacher those first two years or so, because it was just meeting with all the different teams and saying, “Hey, have you thought about it this way?” And then they’d go, “We never thought about that.” I’m like, “No problem.” I’m not going to scold you or make you feel stupid. It’s just, you know, I don’t think about engineering… so I wouldn’t presume to know what to tell them either.

Gabriel: Speaking of engineers. We all know that we can convince people with emotion and that we’re all humans and there’s a place for using emotion and storytelling, it doesn’t matter what brand you’re working on. But that’s often the challenge in tech companies and engineering, especially when the customers are engineers.

How do you navigate that? How do you convince a company of engineers to imbue more emotion in storytelling? Or talk about some of the times when maybe you tried to do it and it didn’t work, and what did you learn from it?

Emily: I think at the end of the day, B2B tech care about brand, they just maybe don’t know everything that needs to go into it. And so everything is really in service of demand and driving business. And that is what marketing in B2B… you can’t forget that, if you forget that then you’re not going to be successful.

So with the engineers, it’s about math. What is it that this is going to do? How is that either quantifiable or measurable? How does it become more efficient by doing something? I think if you’re able to kind of explain the math behind the decision, then you can get the attention. And then you can throw in the funny analogy. You know, everything in branding is relatable to high school. Because they get it, they went to high school.

And I say, “You, did you ask that person out without even introducing yourself and showing them your name? No. So that’s why you don’t expect somebody to get a demand offer and like buy it right away.” Like they need to be warmed up.

Holly: Yeah, this ain’t 16 candles, people.

Emily: No.

Holly: It’s more Can’t Buy Me Love. Who knew that the 80s would give us… John Hughes and all these guys would give us just like this wisdom for the ages.

Emily: Yes, everything you need to know about branding you could have learned in high school. Yeah.

Holly: No kidding.

Gabriel: Emily, we’re gonna wrap things up in a moment. So we’re just gonna finish with a couple of quick hits.

Can you talk about, having been there for so long, the importance of having a network and connections that you can continually learn from? Because the one truism is that corporate brand teams are small. So how do you share and learn from others in the role to ensure that you’re staying current?

Emily: Yeah, so I’d say kind of two things jump to mind.

One is, who are my internal touchstones that I can go to. You know, they may not have the subject matter expertise that I have, but they are a consumer of what I’m doing, especially, you know, being inside the company. That is hugely helpful to just kind of stay grounded and like what’s working, what’s not working. You know, how might I be able to do this differently? People will reach out to me from all over the company with like, “Hey, I have an idea about this.” and that’s great. I love getting their input and ideas and asking for feedback.

The other is just maintaining my network of former colleagues. You know, I have many friends in marketing. There’s a lot of dog walking and conversation, you know, about like, “I’m trying to deal with this.” Making sure that you have your professional… you know, it might bleed into your personal network, but like, you’ve got to build those networks of intelligence that you can tap into for different reasons. It might be based on the actual subject matter, organizational questions, then also like how are things working internally?

You need to be a connector and be connected.

Gabriel: Wonderful. The time has absolutely flown by, I think we could have kept going for another hour.

Holly: Easily.

Gabriel: Holly, anything else that we’ve missed before we wrap up?

Holly: Oh, man. I mean, so, so many things. I want to tap back into about 20 things that you’ve said, so we may just well see you back here in this podcast again. But that was brilliant, thank you! Really practical, applicable learnings today. So beautiful.

Emily: Great. Well, happy to join your podcast. Thanks so much for having me on.

Holly: We loved it.

Gabriel: Thank you. I’m going to go and watch some high school movies this weekend and try and pull those brand learnings.

Holly: I’m going to assign you The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Gabe.

Gabriel: I don’t know that one.

Holly: Yeah, that has to do with the networking and the community that Emily was just describing at the tail end there.

Gabriel: This just offers so much value.

Emily: Yes, I don’t know about the magic pants, but yeah, friendship.

Gabriel: Emily, thank you so much.

Holly: Yeah. Thanks, Emily. It was great fun.