Necessity is the mother of invention - a brand story

What do you do when everything turns upside down? How do you handle a pandemic that forces people to stay at home or disallow collaboration with other people in ways that we are all comfortable with?  Then on the heels of that we are also faced with the rising inequalities of how people are treated, sparking an outcry across the globe that we haven’t seen since the 60’s -70’s – protesting and rioting all at the same time.

As a marketing leader and CMO, I have been faced with many marketing and business challenges over the years. Competitive battles, hostile takeovers and major shifts in technologies and trends. I’ve had to launch, an industry game changing campaign, to disrupt the way enterprise software was consumed and sold to unseat a major competitor. I’ve inspired and created a hackathon for 400,000 employees to seed Artificial Intelligence technology in every product division across a global enterprise tech company.  And, I’ve also been responsible for launching a new cloud business that grew to be a 10 billion dollar business in 3 years.  All of them seemed like daunting tasks…well, maybe until now.

In my new company, we had just started a huge effort to relaunch our brand and execute a multi-phased project to redefine our brand and reposition our company in the market. We have been growing and expanding as an enterprise player. The project started in December with client interviews and progressed through the new year right on schedule. Phase I complete, phase II complete, phase III almost complete and ready to launch, that’s when COVID hits. At first, we didn’t think it would significantly impact our business, our clients and industry. We were still heads down working to complete our new brand platform and developing/building our new web experience, when we knew something was different for our business.

Over a weekend, we launched a COVID-19 application for risk monitoring, and we had to immediately transition a full 2020 marketing plan to a 100% digital plan as everyone was going into a social distancing mandatory “stay at home order.” In a span of a week or two everything changed. The 43% of leads that came in from events would go to zero. The live demos now had to be remote. Physical meet ups and face to face networking was out. Two years of digital transformation was now about to happen in a month…just in time for our new brand launch. So how do you launch a new brand when no one is in the office, clients are working from home and not traveling, businesses are struggling to maintain their budgets, and everything is upside down?

You have the employees launch the brand!  All 485 of them. Use the power of our people to tell the story of the brand. Use social media and LinkedIn to launch the brand with the support of the employee base and celebrate every employee’s “Power of one.” Every one of our employees have the power to make a difference and tell the story of the brand by communicating their power.

In an upside-down world you operate from the inside out and in the spirit of the heart. The heart of any business are the employees who deliver customer success.  That is how the mother of invention inspired the launch of a new brand. Eka, The Power of one.
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