Name: KNOW YOUR NEXT BRAND MOVE
Uploaded: 2026-08-27T16:30:10.791Z
Duration: 58 min 36 s
Description: KNOW YOUR NEXT BRAND MOVE

Transcript for "KNOW YOUR NEXT BRAND MOVE": I'm Amy Lucia. I am the chief marketing officer for Cvent, and I'm so excited that y'all decided to join us today for this session. You asked us to put together this case study, so we're doing that for you. So, again but you always make time to come visit us and listen to us and ask your questions, so we're really grateful that you invested the time. Let's just jump right in here. A couple quick things from a housekeeping perspective. We, are going to record this session so that you can look at it later so you don't have to take tons of notes today if you don't want to. And, also, at the end of the three part series, we're going to share a set of resources with you and templates that you can maybe use in your own work in the future. And, also, we really want to, encourage the chat. So go ahead and chat away in our chat feature here. And then we actually are gonna do a little q and a at the end. So if you have questions, go ahead and put those in as well. And we'll get to as many as we can today, and then we will work on more of those in part two and part three. So, again, our series has three parts. The first part today is kind of our setup, and the second part, which you're gonna hear next week is all about why we threw away our playbook for what we do before, during, and after event, why we reimagine that entire thing, and what that can mean for you. And then the last part is gonna be really about how do you leave your mark with your brand. And, we're gonna go through the the flip. Everybody wants to know how do we do the flip, how do we pull it off in forty five minutes, what kind of orchestration did that take, and we're gonna talk about all of that. But also I wanna make sure that we give you some of the templates and tools that we use because it's not just helpful for a brand flip. It can be to make any memorable, event. You know, whether you're launching a product or you just want people to have a great experience, that will help everybody. So really excited about that. We're gonna have some more special guests. But with that, let me jump in and introduce Kaela Vanden Berg first. Kaela, tell us a little bit about who you are. Hi, everybody. I'm, Kaela Vanden Berg, the VP of corporate marketing here at Cvent, and the corporate marketing team owns all things brand. Right? So creative, social, PR, meetings and events. Any way that you touch the brand, we are part of it. Great. Thanks, Kaela. And then we also have special guest, Forest Young. So I'd love to bring Forest on screen here and have him introduce himself. Hi there. Thank you so much for having me, Amy, and so much to everyone here. Great. Alright. We're we're just gonna jump in because we have so much to cover. And I just wanna say, this is not a presentation. We have some slides to help support, just so you can follow along quickly as we move fast. But this is more of a conversation, so it's not superscripted. I've got some notes here on on the left here so that I don't miss any key points. But really, we wanna have, more of a dialogue and just be really transparent because we learned a lot along the way, and we wanna make this accessible to all of you. Because while our story might be interesting, what really is most interesting is how you can apply these concepts to your own work, whether you're an event planner, a marketer, a hospitality professional, or anything in between. So, again, we're excited for you to be here. So there's two real things that we're gonna talk about today. And, I think Kaela, you wanna cover the first one really quick? Yeah. Hey, guys. So we're gonna cover two things. How do you know your brand needs to change? And then how do you make the case and actually execute it if you do need to change while doing your day job? Yeah. That's always the fun part. Let's keep Kaela up on screen with me, because we're gonna we're gonna. keep going back and forth here. And then, the second question is, okay. So if you're not doing a rebrand, how do you get the most out of the brand you already have? And there's so many really great tips that I've learned in my career that I wanna share with you. So we're just gonna jump right in here first. The American Marketing Association tells us that a brand, we have a very formal definition here, and you can all read that. But the reality is, the way I think about it, it's the overall impression and the feeling that people have about a person, a company, or your products. So it's so much more than, you know, what you look like and what you say. It's about your entire value proposition. It's about the customer service model. Every experience they have with you, they form some shape of some some type of an opinion, and that's really what we're looking at here. We're gonna jump into that first topic. What we've done is we've come up with for you, we wanna share our own playbook. These are what we would call Cvent's 10 steps to assess, evaluate, and reimagine your brand if you decide that's the thing to do. We're gonna go through each of these. It's gonna be really rapid fire, really fast, and hopefully fun. Okay. So the first one is, you have to know your why. Because before you can assess how your brand is doing, you have to be honest with yourself about, you know, that foundational question. Like, why does your company or your organization exist? Why are you here? And, again, it's not really about your product or your market position. It's really about that philosophical core of, you know, if you didn't exist, what would the market be missing? You know, why do your people get up in the morning every day? What's that thing that anchors you, that promise? And for Cvent, you know, that really hadn't changed for us. You know, we have been so passionate about this space for decades. I'm sure many of you have seen our founder and CEO, Reggie. He has such an incredible story of how he started this company and why, you know, from trying to plan events. And, he's been such an inspirational leader, and he and, Dave and Chuck are their cofounders who are still with us today serving, leading our engineering and sales and marketing. They've just been such great, champions of our customers and the industry and where we need to go and always challenging us to be better. But for us, you know, it was it that has never changed. We were really committed to transforming meetings and events. We were really committed to that powering of human connection with events. And yet there's ways there's times that we have innovated. There's ways that we've grown as the market needs have changed. And when you think about this new this collision of event tech and martech that's happening, so, you know, even though how we articulate our why we exist might change a little bit and modernize, the core of who we are is still the same. And that's been really, really special and I think one of our really big differentiators. And but this is the lens of how you have to look at everything. You know, your why is your benchmark. And once you know it clearly, you can hold every bit of data up against it to see how you're doing. Now before I go into the data piece, I just wanna share something because people always ask me, how do you justify a brand? Why does brand matter? Any company I work at, I spend a lot of time making sure that every employee understands this this importance of this because otherwise, it's really hard to get people behind, building a brand. Now our leadership team already understood all of this at Cvent, but even when I train our employees, I talk to them about this because, it can be really easy for people to just kinda discount it as, oh, it's just a logo, it's just a look and feel, it's just words. But But really, if you look at some of these metrics here on the slide and feel free to steal it, you know, these are really strong proof points that pretty much everything about your company and its performance is better, the inside and the outside. How you recruit and retain people, and how your company performs is so much better if you have a really strong, consistent brand. And strong, consistent brands happen when you know your why. Right? So this is a real practical takeaway that I leave with all of you, which is, you know, pressure test your why. Can every leader in your company, can every employee in your company articulate it the same way? And if the answer is no, maybe that's a place to start. So, before we move, I wanna just do a little polling question. Kaela, do you wanna take us through that one? Yeah. So the polling question, where is your organization right now on brand investment? So are you actively rebranding? Are you maintaining what you have and fighting for budget? Or are you honestly just not sure where to even start? Alright. Looks like we're getting. somebody from here. people actively rebranding, than I would have expected. How cool is that? that's really exciting. I love a good brand project, you know. Oh my gosh, me too. We've done dozens like in our career. I feel like they're just they're very fun, but they're they're all really unique and different. Okay. Awesome. So the next slide here, the next step is should we close the poll? Okay. We can keep. it going then. Okay. The next one is the next step is you have to know your data. So you're really clear on your why, but you need to know your data. And at Cvent, we had to ask ourselves, does the world see us now the way we see ourselves? Does our brand still reflect the company that we believe we've become? And then the company that we want to become in the future in terms of our innovation footprint, we talked at Cvent Connect about this notion of wanting to invest and planning to invest over the next three years over a billion dollars in tech to support that innovation, for the market. And, you know, is everything that we, are and want to be and are moving toward still reflected by our brand? So before we did anything, we had to go to the data, and we went two directions at once. Probably won't surprise you. We went live in person, focus groups with customers. We actually used our Cvent Connect event a year ago to do that. Right? So events are great for so many things. They're great listening posts as well. And we just asked and had real raw, honest conversations and got some really candid feedback. And then we did a more, statistical, survey. It was a dot brand diagnostic survey where we basically hired, a company called Wolff Olins to look at us globally and the different markets we serve, the different audiences we serve, and help us understand how we're doing. And, we their their diagnostic looks at us across different dimensions. There's brand awareness. You can be aware of a company, but you may not be familiar with what they offer. So that's very different. So measuring familiarity, measuring how your brand is delivering on the promise from a, like, performance perspective. There's also the commitment. So So it's really about, do they feel like they have a strong relationship to you? Are you delivering on that? Do they feel that you're actively working toward working for them and and their needs and responsive? The next one is purchase consideration. So they may know about you, but would they actually consider you when they're, you know, putting together, you know, their next bid for their next piece of software or solution or whatever it is that you might be, bringing to the market? And then advocacy. And, you know, are they willing to advocate for you? Because there's a real strong difference between, you know, someone who, works with you because they have to versus they want to. And, also, I think there's a really big difference between satisfaction and loyalty. So how loyal are your customers? I mean, all those dimensions can come together to give you a real sense of how you're doing both with your customers probably and your prospects, which is we wanted to look at both. We wanted to know the whole market and how the market saw us. And as a result of those two things coming together, there were quite a few things we had to look at, but I think the the practical considerations that really came through for us were that we wanted to simplify things. What we found is that people were very well aware of Cvent. No surprise. Right? We've been around a long time, many decades. A lot of people trust us. Some of the the top companies in the world trust us, with with their, their event planning needs and and their hospitality needs. But that that we kept hearing consistently, you have so much now that you offer that we don't know where to start sometimes, and we don't we can't keep up with everything you're offering, or we can't keep up with all the new solutions that you're launching or the new AI capabilities you're launching. It's a lot. How do we get our arms around that? And then we also felt like the feedback was coming in loud and clear that our identity and how we showed up didn't necessarily match how modern we really are with our offerings. And then we also wanted to make sure that we supported the biggest need of the market, which is we just kept, hearing our customers say, I'm being asked to justify the return on my events. I'm being just asked to justify, the outcomes and the impact of events. And we'd we'd made some pretty significant investments in helping do that, but it just became such a powerful, poignant need that the market had that we really wanted to make sure we honed in on that as well. So. Amy touched on it, but really leaning in on that performance, the performance of your of your events. Right? So when we took in all that data, this is more than just a logo. Right? You have to look at, you know, are you staying true to your why, and can we address these new data points on how the industry and ourselves, how we had evolved Yeah. Yeah. And and, you know, one point back on familiarity, I was just. thinking about, I always tell people that, why should they care about building a brand? Well, because, if you don't have strong familiarity, your cost of sale is going to be higher. Because by the time someone gets to a seller, they should actually know a lot about what you offer and what a market fit you might have for them. And if your seller is starting from the basics and having to explain who you are, what you do, what you offer, that's more expensive. And same if your marketing team is gonna have to work harder for that. So. the more brand awareness and familiarity, the better. Now, again, like, this is really important because I feel like we sometimes have a different perception of ourselves than others. So, like, what we want people to think about us may not be exactly what they think about us. So I would say don't skip this step. Practical takeaway though. Okay. Let's say you don't have the funds to, or the time to do a a formal survey, and they don't have to be super expensive, by the way. But you can always look at your customer satisfaction data if you collect it. You can do customer interviews. You can do win loss analysis. You can do social listening. You can do surveys at your events. There's lots of ways that you can plug in those listening posts. Definitely make sure you do that if you're thinking about this. Let's go to question number two in our poll, which is, like, have you done a formal brand research study in the last two years? I'm curious to see. Alright. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. A good mix. Yeah. Totally good. Thanks. Okay. Well, for us, you know, we like I said, we did that. And then the next step here is, okay. So now you have the data. You know about your why, and you know how you're delivering on what you hope to achieve and what the market says. So the next step here then for us is what we call step three, which is make the call. So then you have to decide. You know, the decision was clear for Cvent. We had the hard parts done. We have strong solutions and always wanting to innovate and do better. Right? We have strong customer loyalty. We have strong AI innovation happening. We were really strong out of the gate very quickly there and and and and accounting. Right? But the data was telling us that we had more work to do in a couple of those areas I just mentioned. Forest, I'd love to bring you on and ask you a question. We've been asked quite a bit, how you know if you just have to do a better job marketing the brand you have, or if you have to do an official rebrand. And what do you say to that to the clients? Well, I think this is also, this is also one of the most difficult questions because I I love rebranding. I will always want to be drawn by brand transformation. But. I do think there's a moment where you have to apply just extreme discipline. Because I think in today's in today's market conditions, sometimes rebrands can be seen as misdirection or, you know, kind of not acknowledging things that are kind of fundamental business flaws or not reconciling unmet needs. So I think the one thing is to say, you know, for all of our constituents and the audiences that you serve, is there anything kind of outstanding that feel like is is being kind of underserved? And if you feel like in general, you feel good about, you know, your value proposition that's being understood, I think my, my very scientific litmus test is I always, I always ask clients to close their eyes and to say the name of their company. And then I ask them, what do you see and what do you feel? And if what you see and feel is different than what is a general perception, then that's where the calibration needs to happen because, ultimately, you want to work towards the thing that inspires you. I love it. Yeah. That's a good one. Now, when you start a rebrand, there's also a spectrum. Right? Because you're not always changing your name. You know? You might be changing your positioning or things like that. So can you share a little bit more about this spectrum and what considerations go, are taken, you know, taken into fact when you, you know, think about the that that rebrand you're doing? Yeah. I think there's, like, the classic continuum of, you know, evolution. You know, it's a revolution. But I think even with evolution, there are some rebrands that you you hardly notice. Like, they may be most significant in other parts of the company, whether it's architecture, how people are navigating the business, whether it is, alignment across, parts of the business that maybe need to be need to be aligned. But maybe people feel it, but they don't necessarily see it. I think, generally, when people think of, you know, evolution to revolution, they think of, a sort of a glow up. Like, everything is just a bit tighter. It's sort of tightening the screws on how the brand looks, sounds, speaks, and behave to become more coherent. But then revolution is we want to really change the perceptions of the market. We really want to demonstrate that we have stepped through a new door, and that requires all, all steam ahead in terms of all those new vehicles being aligned and possibly reconfigured, possibly being resurfaced, and ultimately, possibly a new a new embodiment or a new logo, that leads the charge. Yeah. It's so interesting. One of our first workshops with Wolff Olins, they put all these papers on the wall, and they drew a spectrum of evolution to revolution. And that was one of the questions they asked us. And we had to go our leadership team had to go pin things onto the papers about what we thought was where we needed to go. And, do you remember what we did, Boris? What we said? Yeah. I think I had to pick my jaw off the floor because it was a 100% revolution. I think it was the I think it might have been the only time I've done that that was a 100% revolution. And I remember looking around going, everybody wants a revolution? Is this true? Is this true? And then they're like, yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. And so that. was incredibly invigorating incredibly invigorating. that's seen it. We're gonna go big or go home and, you know, we want wanna do the best for our customers for the market, and we're always wanting to to press in and try new things. So we were ready. We're like, let's go. But it was it was pretty fun moment. Okay. The next step then thank you, Forest. The next step is you have to make the case. So, we answered our why, we looked with the dataset, we made the call. And then how do you make the case for change? People constantly are asking us, how do you make the case for a rebrand? In our case, we didn't have to. Our leadership team at Cvent is phenomenal. They already knew where we wanted to go. They already knew, you know, that it was time to to to shake things up a bit and to evolve. And they've been so committed throughout our entire existence. I've seen that multiple decades of, like, push push push the limits of what's possible, reimagine, reinvent, and I think that's why our customers trust us. Right? So that was the easy part for us, but that isn't always the case, and that hasn't been the case for me in other companies I've worked at. So for those who have to make the case, it starts with educating people on the importance of brand. You can steal our slide if you want here. So what is the importance of brand? I showed you that slide previously. Knowing your why and then showing people the data. Like, what does the data say? And this probably includes your competitive landscape. So speak the language that your executive team needs to know and understand. And then casting a vision for what's possible because sometimes I feel like people who aren't close enough to it don't really understand the value of brand. They just need some examples of what great looks like and what's actually possible if you could reimagine or realign a little bit. Forest, I'm gonna pull you back in here a second because those are mine, but, you know, what do you think works best in terms of making the case for a rebrand? Well, I think, you know, a lot of, so many of these decisions are emotional, that are kind of, wearing the clothes of of pragmatism and rationality. I think a lot of the case for change, oftentimes is what is the future, that you're you wanna move towards? I think so often you're mired in the day to day or kind of reconciling, like, how you're kind of, like, shoring up, certain things in the business. And I think it's sometimes helpful to kinda take a step back and say, where do you wanna be in a year or two years or three years? And who are we actually going to be? Who's are gonna be in our audience in one to two to three years? I might actually be a different audience. We may be operating a different context. What is the role of AI in our value proposition? All of these things. And I think it's a healthy dose of we're not fit for future. Like there's aspects of our company, of our story and what people believe when they come every day to work that actually is not aligning with the bridge that we need to make towards where we want to go. And I think that is also, an emotional plea to, have a case for change also is about driving towards something that is, how the company can live on and how the company can thrive in a future state and take a step away from, from the day to day or even the success of the past. Mhmm. I really like that because especially today, you know, the market's crowded. Things are moving really fast in the AI landscape. So being able to, shore up your company's, you know, footprint and your your your place in the market, by being able to cast that vision, that's that's really powerful. So okay. Now we're gonna move on to step five. We're going really fast here because we. didn't get a three hour webinar. Okay. So next, you need to get aligned internally. So okay. Now you know you need to rebrand or evolve your brand. We're gonna get aligned internally. So, Kaela, what are the two things that we have found are really, really critical to get alignment? So you really need to have those clear and well understood objectives that you can hold each other accountable to. And then who is your team? Who's your working team? And then within that working team, who are your decision makers? That's really important. Yeah. And we're gonna put up our objectives here, share a little behind the scenes for Cvent. As we looked at everything we were trying to accomplish. You know, the first thing we wanted to we had become an AI, innovative company, but we wanted to make sure that we could really signal that and show the world all the innovation that we are putting forward, all the investments we were put putting forward. And I also talked already about the fact that we wanted to authentically show up as that leader that's meeting our, market where it is in terms of wanting to actually deliver on outcomes and show the impact of event investments, and MarTech investments. But, you know, from an authentic place of what we truly can do to help support that. And of course, resonating with our audiences and making sure that, every single audience that we serve understands how deeply committed we are and how deeply invested we are in either, in understanding them, and wanting to, really deliver what's the best for them. Like, if our customers don't feel that connection, that commitment, it it will be transactional. And for us, it's relational. It's really, really important. It's one of the special things that I learned about Cvent pretty shortly after joining was when I saw how our customers would interact with us at conferences, etcetera. It's a very relational approach, and, we're very, very we regard that very safely. And I also mentioned simplifying the complexity. So how can I get my arms around everything you offer really quickly and and understand, how do you make it easy for me to kinda grow with you? Meaning as my needs grow, I can grow, and make that accessible and easy. And then also, for the creative folks. Right? We needed that brand system that actually was easy to deploy, so that it was it was usable, but also one that was distinctive. We didn't want to look like everybody else. We wanna look and feel like Cvent, and we want that to be authentic to us as well. So those were the principles that came up. And what we had to do throughout the entire project is we had to keep pulling them up because decisions would be made and people would have opinions and feelings, which is all normal and part of the process. Right? But we had to make sure we had ground. Well, are we accomplishing this brief? And then there was the deciding, you know, who needs to contribute and how. Like, who gets to make decisions? Kaela, you wanna. share that? So I will say I've been in a lot of brand projects, and this was we had the broadest scope of different stakeholders across the company, and I think it really helped. We had representation from product, from sales, the founders. Obviously, we had marketing in the room, and so we had all these different perspectives. And that helped it not become just a marketing siloed exercise, which we all know will, like, crush your buy in from your customers and your. and your employees. And then also, we touched base with our customers before, during, and after the rebrand. We kept them in the loop. And so this just really helped us stay on track and know that we were moving in the right path and not just, mine and Amy's opinions about the. brand. Exactly. Helps avoid the backtracking. Right? Forest, Yes. I'm gonna bring you back for a second. Have you ever seen companies not get to, alignment and have to backtrack because they didn't get that early alignment? Oh, absolutely. Who was it? think just kidding. it's tell me. a well, hold on. Let me pull out my almanac. You know, I think in general, a lot of times, teams sort of misunderstand. They they basically say that, like, you know, leadership is leadership is so busy. We don't wanna sort of, like, bother them with the intricacies of this project. Well, they have to keep the they have to keep the business afloat. And I think oftentimes, that's sort of the beginning of the end. It's like it's it was a well intentioned, like, we wanna be mindful of your time. Usually, what ends up happening is, you know, ultimately, you know, leaders are the most passionate people in the company. Right? And it's specifically talk about, you know, kind of cofounders. This is such an incredibly emotional decision. And so oftentimes, it ends up happening. Best of intention, being mindful of time. We understand how time poor you are. Let's let let's get this to a place where it's, it's at a decision point, and then that is almost a 100% too late, because what it does is it invalidates, their role and their participation in a very meaningful journey. Yes. It may be time consuming. Yes. It may be one extra meeting, but I think, you know, more than not, leaders, will usually always say, I'll make time for this. And I think it's just to remind yourself that, the leaders are people. They're very passionate people, and they're very busy. But the the truest words that anyone has ever said to me is if you want something done, give it to a busy person. So, so I often find that, you know, leaders leaders will make time, and I think that ultimately comes back, in droves because you will have backtrack moments if you go the other route and a leader is seeing it, when everybody else in the company has seen it before they have. It also feels a bit alienating, and so it's even harder. to feel like you have confidence about the decision. Yeah. That's that's so true. I really appreciated how engaged our leaders and everybody on our steering committee was. It really made a huge difference. And, you know, we're kind of best idea wins here, so everybody gets their good ideas out. And then we pick the idea that we think is best for the company and for our customers, and we move forward. Speaking of moving forward, I'm gonna move us to step number six to keep up on time here. By the way, has anyone noticed that we're only already on step six of 10 and we haven't even hired the agency yet or started the actual creative work yet? That's actually because there's a lot of upfront that you have to do to do this well. So fast forwarding a bit, we needed an agency partner, and Kaela and I had both worked with and without agencies to do brand projects. We know this was a question that came up from you. So the real question is, how do you know when you need help? So this one is is an a pretty easy one, actually. Just take an honest an honest assessment of your internal capabilities, what you can and cannot do well. And then also you have the burden of keeping the lights on in this company. You still have to run the business. So do you have the capacity to take this on? If either one of those is light, that's when you need to say you need help. Yeah. And if you do need help, how do you keep the cost down? So that's a good one. It's it's not all or nothing. Right? Agencies are very flexible. They're willing to work with you on certain portions of a brand project. So when you work with them, identify where and when you want to pull them in, and that'll help keep costs down. Very true. I'm gonna bring Forest back because that, brings us to, picking Wolff Olins as our partner. So, Forest, tell us a little bit about Wolff Olins. So what Wolff Olins says, we just celebrated our sixtieth birthday. So our first clients were actually The Beatles. So you can imagine that, doing Apple records. So we hail from London, but now we have, you know, offices London, New York, Los Angeles. And it's a wonderful, collection of people that is equal equal parts, strategic in terms of thinking about some of the really difficult decisions that have to be made in terms of, the mission, vision, values of a company. Where is it going? How is it architected? Also, verbal identity. So we have a bunch of amazing writers, which I personally love, which operate kind of between, Amazing. Right? between copywriting and strategy, Uh-huh. which is the a strategic a strategic writing core, which I think is, when you have it, you know, and when you don't have it, you feel it. A great design group, ultimately, but designers who also are used to working with strategists and working with writers. So very interdisciplinary, collection of folks. And then engagement, which I think is really a discipline focused on what is the strategy of navigating the client engagement and really thinking about all of the different, ways to navigate it, who to bring in at the right time, how to how to do the kind of the sell in, how does it feel like this thing will land and be implementable. So I think it's a collection of those those three three disciplines, mainly the strategy design and engagement with a kind of, a writing core that exists between three. And you do it well. You know, Cvent is a very data driven analytical company. So even in our evaluation of who we chose as our agency partner, there was a lot of, art and science there. So we really had to know our criteria. So for us, we had a set of criteria, some of which was we wanted to work with a partner who understood the technology space and had experience there. We also wanted to work with a partner who'd worked in every industry we serve. So Wolff Olins had worked with hospitality providers, had worked with, event planners inside of financial services companies, had worked with nonprofit organizations, had worked with marketers. So basically every vertical market, and every audience we serve, there's a book of business that Forrest and his team, Will Bolins, have worked on, which made us really excited because they had the credibility to work and help us serve our audience well. Now switching gears, I wanna share our framework. This is my homegrown little paper. So you can use it if you want, if it's helpful. But these are all the things that I think need to be considered when you're working on a brand project, because a lot of times people forget some of the stuff further to the bottom, and they're really, really important. So when you're trying to make the checklist, okay, start to finish, what do I actually have to work on? This is my slide. I've used it multiple times. Like I said, please steal it. The brand agency is usually up in the top. Right? That's the really hard strategic work. And then when you get to that, what I would call in this slide the phase two, this is where you're starting to implement it through the audiences you serve and vertical markets and how you nuance your messaging and things. And those things are, it's nice to have an agency partner if you can with that, but you don't have to. You know, if you can take that brand book that they give you and that strategic guidance or those brand building blocks and you can funnel it through, that's really powerful, and then you can take it to the next level. But you'll see here there's a lot of focus on employee engagement plan. How do you get your employees, educated? How do you make sure that your biggest brand ambassador are ready? How do you make sure you operationalize the brand through everything? Like, for us, we had to look at the logo on your login screen as an employee, not just inside of our products. We had to look at, invoices and all the different things. So so really the operationalization of the brand is a step that needs to be done with excellence, and we'll talk more about that in a second. Now I'm gonna switch to the inventory and timelines. I'm gonna take a breath and let Kaela cover this one. Yeah. So alright. Now you know the whole scope of the project. You know you wanna rebrand, and now it's time to take an inventory of everything that will be impacted. And you would be surprised. It's probably a lot more than you think. It's thousands and thousands of items across the company. It was mean, for us. not I'm not exaggerating. It is crazy. This is just an example of I actually have this massive Excel doc that I use, but, these are just some of the categories of what you need to touch when you do a rebrand, and it touches every piece of the business. So once you determine what is your inventory, you get it all documented, then you have to go through and figure out, what do I need to get done by when. If you have the luxury of taking as much time as you need, you are very lucky, and I envy you. But if you don't, which we did not in our. case, we knew that our moment had to be Cvent Connect in Nashville. So it. was a we're up against it. Yeah. That meant we had nine months. Mhmm. Forest, how long does a normal brand project take start to finish? I think most most brand projects, you know, are somewhere between, I would say three and four months. They're they're they're they're fast, but they normally don't have near the scope of Cvent. They are not, you know, not wrestling with really critical strategy. They're not trying to really define a brand voice. They're really not trying to communicate a really big step change. I mean, the the new posture that Cvent had really required a lot of due diligence, a lot of stakeholder engagement. So I feel like, you know, for the for this project, I mean, I feel like nine months was compressed. I feel like it almost, you know, could have easily been a comfortable a comfortable year. But I think that was because, you know, you and the team had such incredible stakeholder line leadership alignment that I think it felt like, it was fast and furious, but it was enjoyable. And I think, again, we all know, like, the world famous flip, that the flip program. Yeah. We under we underestimated how people were gonna respond to that. It was really humbling, and we're so grateful for your positive feedback, everybody. Thanks, Forest. Okay. So this is, I think Kayla should we talk about AI? Yeah. We should definitely talk about AI here. So we actually worked with Wolff Olins to develop a really cool AI skills. So, Forest, you wanna tell them a little bit about that and how we deployed AI to help us rebrand? Absolutely. Well, I think it was really just a testament to the Cvent team actually for sort of raising some, some kind of, like, operational questions to us. We really had started with some really frank conversations of, we really love the way that your writer writes. His name is Wolf. And it's like, how do we how do we scale well? And so the problem was, like, how do we scale well? And I think ultimately, realizing that, one of the most difficult things to sort of help provide coherence with is the brand voice. It's almost. the first thing that starts to dip you. You maybe understand the logo and clear space, but how do you speak on voice that's really nuanced? Uh-huh. So we decided to create, like, a machine readable, voice tool, which is a markdown file that we worked, hand in hand with the Cvent team to be able to deploy so that any Cvent, employee could essentially upload those to the LOM of their choice and essentially be, like, a 97% approximation of our will. So we call it the will unofficially. Mhmm. But, Mhmm. ultimately, we're so happy because, ultimately, it reduced a lot of friction relative to a potential pain point and allowed a lot of other things operationally to to be accelerated. So that was our our our sort of our implementation, tool, that was our kind of final handoff. Mhmm. Yeah. And it was it was an amazing tool and I just want to stress how so many of the things you do in a rebrand are about updating and getting on tone. They don't need redone from the ground up. So this tool came in clutch on all of those things. All right. To move us along, before you touch a logo, a color, a headline, a campaign, any of those, the fun part, right, You gotta get the foundation elements right first. We talked about how much planning has to go into that. But now what are those foundational elements? What what actually are they when it comes to a brand? So when we worked with Wolff Olins, obviously, they helped us a lot getting agreement on some of these core elements of the foundation. So you hear a lot of brand projects will talk about a vision. For us, we used purpose, why we exist, which was to show the world what events can do. And then how do you actually deliver on that? That's your mission statement. And for Cvent, it was, you know, we build technology powering the highest performing events on the planet. And then think about your differentiators. This one, I would say the differentiators might've actually been the most difficult to just boil it down. You know, you can't have 10 differentiators. You have to have three to four, 400. right? What are the things that, yeah, what are the things that you do really well that you can claim, right? And for us, that's the trusted AI powered platform, our data advantage, our ecosystem that's unrivaled, and obviously thirty years of expertise in events. Right? We couldn't leave that out. And then understanding who you deliver it to, your key audiences. So those are really like the foundational bricks of a brand. And then when you think about a slogan, a slogan, I will say, is optional, but for us, it was not optional. We knew we needed it because we wanted to make sure that when we launched our brand, our promise around performance and what we were committing to our customers was coming through in that moment. So we wanted them to we were challenging them to expect more from their events, and we also wanted them to expect more from us. Right? It was a partnership in that promise. So. these are the foundation elements, and I will say that this helps. If you get alignment here, everything else, every other decision, if it does not serve these foundation elements, Don't do don't ship. it. Right? Yeah. You don't do it. don't do it. So. it it takes the opinion and a lot of the the personal debate out of it because you align on the foundation elements first. So whether you're doing a rebrand or not, just a practical takeaway for you, I would say build this one pager. Do you have alignment in your company on these these foundational elements? And this is something that, marketing leaders should really, run point on and just make sure they create that alignment across the company. Alright. We're gonna race here. And by the way, I'm gonna show you in episode three, I'm gonna show you a practical tool that we built to get employees all on board with this really quickly and have them memorize it and understand it. Real practical tool. Alright. Let's let's let's jump in a little further ahead, Kaela, onto the before and after. Yeah. Alright. So you can see here some of those decisions, how they actually influence the decisions that we made in the new brand. Forest, do you wanna run them through some of the thinking behind. our brand decisions? No. Absolutely. I think one of the things, you know, a lot of brands a lot of brands are blue. A lot of brands are blue because blue is a color of trust and security. And, ultimately, it's it's hard to, to to do wrong with blue, but it also starts to to blend in. So if you want to be cut through, if you want to stand out, it becomes a difficult color, to to operate, to be able to achieve those objectives. And so Kaela talked about, you know, ultimately, what's your foundation? Well, your foundation is literally the the the spec. Right? It basically says this is where we need to head. And so we answered a lot of those things strategically through design. And so green green is the color of go. Green is the color of of a phenomenal performance. Show the world events can do. Okay. Well, green is good. So green became a color that was highly motivating, but in a very more an electric and vibrant form of green, that that communicated that Cvent was moving into an AI forward space. Right? So how do you think about the visual cues of moving into an AI forward space? Well, it looks less, less classically kind of b to b, and it looks more like a tech brand. And tech brands have different proportions of color and white space. And we really wanted to activate the screen, to be a device that signaled how active, your Cvent is and basically powering exponential growth, you know, connections. But a color that could a little little Cvent green goes a long way, so you'll see all the green over in the thread. And so it's not floods of green. And that was also another thing, which is, you know, we don't need to do color fields or floods. We can do really meaningful uses of color that communicate Cvent was here. Yeah. Alright. Awesome. And a, lot of people we lot of people? told us, yeah, a lot of people told us performance. Right? Like, I think green means go. performance. So okay. I'm gonna skip to validate. So the next step is a lot of people miss this, but it's all about getting external feedback. So we just wanna make sure we get external feedback. We got feedback from, our customers, and our employees, and we wanted to make sure that we got that objective feedback. And what we did is instead of saying, what do you think? How do you react to this? We said, here's our brief. We asked questions. Does this deliver on the brief? Because. everybody has an opinion, but we need to know if it delivered on the brief. And then, of course, we noted this objective. So moving on to step 10, our launch plan. Okay. So you've done the hard work. Now you need to introduce your brand to the world. You need to decide how you're gonna do that. It's really important that you decide what moment is right for you. Some people, do it differently. Some people do it as Forest mentioned earlier quietly in the background. For us, you know, we wanted to go, you know, bigger, bolder at Connect. So, we will get into how we did Connect. I know you wanna hear it. It's an episode three. It needs its own whole episode, and we have a ton of behind the scenes footage we're preparing for you. We're really excited to share that. But I want to actually transition to this other question we had before we go into q and a because you asked us, how do you know, like, if you if you don't if you're not rebranding, how do you get the most out of the brand you already have? Or if you've just rebranded, how do you get the most out of it? So, I wanna make sure that we can talk a little bit about that. Forest, you, work with brands all the time who are, like, itching to change things. And what do you say to the ones who maybe shouldn't change their brand, but just should market it more, promote it more? Yeah. I think it's it always goes back to, you know, who are you trying to serve? And I think a lot of times, you know, you can lose sight of who your who your core audience is and what's keeping them up at night. A lot of times, you know, we kind of are our own worst enemies in terms of, like, drinking. around people eight, and then she's saying, like, actually, like, we haven't listened to our to our actual, you know, customers and audiences in. quite some time. And if we. actually did, we might understand there's actually some some pretty easy things that we can do right in front of us that would be have an outsized impact of how they would feel about the brand, how they could advocate for it way beyond, a logo or rebrand, which actually might even be a misfire, if some of those basic needs are not addressed. Alright. Awesome. Quick polling question. Which of these feels hardest in your org right now? Okay. Okay. Well, then we're gonna spend the most time then on, oh, it's it's moving. Here we go. Okay. Very interesting. So a little bit of everything. We do wanna get to some q and a. We'll at least have a few minutes for q and a. So we're gonna race through this really quickly. We've got four keys for you to think about to optimize the brand you currently have or to get the most out of it. So, Kaela, why don't you Yes. So when we talk about optimizing what you already have, I'm talking about what you're doing and what you're spending on it. You know, don't spend another dollar until you do that and figure out what's working and? what's not. Do not fall into the trap of doing it because you've always done it because that'll free up a lot of money for you. Yeah. And then the second, key is leverage, but I call the amplifiers. There's so many cost effective things you can do to build your brand that doesn't cost you another dollar. Mhmm. You know, it's everything from earned media, PR, putting thought leadership messages out in the market and platforming them in creative ways, leveraging social media, leveraging awards and recognition, you know, to get that credibility out there, using your customers as advocates. Well, I would say asking them if they're willing to share their stories online. Yeah. Employee ambassadorship, we talked about. Strategic partners. I've done this a lot, especially when I was a CMO of a non profit, helping partnerships where I can actually get access to their audience and have part of their reach, you know, be the multiplier effect for me. So that's helpful. And of course, events. Events, you're already spending money on them. They're already there. They're a captive audience, whether it's a one hour webinar or whether it's a three day in person event, that's your opportunity to share your message as well. And we're gonna talk all about that in the next session. So the next key is be consistent. So consistency creates loyalty and, you know, we just wanna have a consistent message in terms of, you know, how we communicate, but also the customer experience, that your value proposition, how they interact with your products, your customer service teams, everything needs to be looked at. And it is marketing's job to look at that consistency factor across the company and raise the raise the flag if you're not being consistent. And then lastly, I'll say is measure and listen. So, you know, you have to know what's working and what's not working. So you can measure reach and engagement. You can measure sentiment. You can measure pipeline and leads. You can measure brand exposure. There's a ton of things that you can measure, point in time, like do a brand diagnostic. So just make sure you know what's working and not working so that you can, optimize the things that are currently working and not, and then make the case as well. So that's a really quick one. We could probably do a whole webinar on that section, but we. wanted to give you that. And we'll give you some tools, like I said, after number three, we'll give you some tools in these areas as well that you could take with you. So with that, I wanna jump to a couple minutes of q and a. We'll bring Forest up and go ahead and and and ask us questions here. Alright. Kaela, do you wanna take that one? How do you measure the success for rebrand? Oh, yeah. So there's a lot of different ways you can do that. You look at, I think you need to look at the moment in time that you rebranded. Did it drive a significant perception shift? And then the ongoing brand health. Right? So look at things like, Amy just touched on it. Right? The measure and listen. You should be doing this whether you're in a rebrand or not to test your reach and engagement. What's the sentiment of your brand? Is the the brand engagement bringing in pipeline? Right? I always say branding is the long game and demand gen is the short game. So is brand still contributing to pipeline? You obviously, NPS, brand exposure. There are a lot of ways to measure brand that give you that hard data to support. a brand. And and we had a list of metrics. You have to make your list of what is success. Our board asked us how you know you're successful. I will tell you one of mine is, like, that it's not an epic fail because, you know, I. see that. question true. from Jean in the q and a. It's like, were you nervous? Yes. We were we were nervous to do a flip live in front of people, but we also were we did our best to make sure we had customer and employee feedback, but you never know, like, how is the market gonna react? And then y'all know there's just haters online that that might have nothing. to do. They might not even serve your market. They don't even understand what you're trying to accomplish, and they'll have opinions about what you did. So there's always that hold your breath moment, and that's. where Forest's team were really helpful with us, in saying, you know, have confidence in what you've done. Have confidence in what your customers told you. It's gonna be okay. And it was more than okay. We're very excited. Yeah. Other questions? How did you stay sane? How many times did we cry, and how did you take did you take some PTO? I may or may not have cried once. That's a story for another time. Yeah. Did we take PTO? We tried to. Right? But. But think that eventually such a some p two after. but then. there was such a good response after everyone is gonna keep up the momentum and and all that. But, how do we stay sane? I don't know. What do you think, Kaela? I will say I probably called and texted Amy more times than my husband during the rebrand. So. I think. we were each other's therapists through all of it. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. So I think, you know, team collaboration, that'll be my official answer there. That's. We had stay safe. a good team. I mean, literally, you'll hear in part three, over a thousand people in some capacity worked on the brand in some way, whether. it was before or after. It was and don't freak out. If you don't have a thousand people in your company, it's I'm not saying you can't do a flip. What I'm saying is, there was a lot of teamwork. And when we're all rally that's the thing. Right? What is what is really works from a team perspective? You have a vision, you all know where you're going, rally everyone behind it, and everybody marches forward. And Cvent is such a passionate company, so everybody was like, game on, let's do it. And, that. definitely made it easier. Yeah. Absolutely. We weren't pulling people along. They were honestly so excited that we had to be like, oh, oh, no. We can't do everything all at once. So it's it's actually fantastic, the buy in and the excitement we had internally. Yeah. It was great. It was remarkable. And I did take PTO. We all we all took a little. How do we organize internally to get buy in? Yeah. So in our case, you know, I think our leadership team, we were all pretty aligned that we needed to do something. We're really excited about it. But I think that it is really important to go through kind of some of those questions we talked about, like, which is like, I mean, what Forest said, which is, you know, what are we trying to accomplish and how are we doing on that? And then it becomes a little bit more objective to say, do we need to make a change or not? And, I definitely feel like that having a committee, is really good and really helpful. We had a a committee that was kinda steering the project. And as Kaela mentioned, they represented customer facing folks. They represented product. They represented marketing, and that helped keep us on track as well. Forest, do you have anything to add here in terms of advice on this question? I think a lot of times, moments of agreement or descent are largely around, things that feel like they're about, like, taste or subjectivity. Mhmm. But they're actually about actually defining. success criteria. There's a lot of times people actually have the same success criteria. They just use different terms to describe Mhmm. success in whatever, that's a good point. their particular focus is. So if you can align everyone that the success criteria is actually the same, you're marching towards the same destination, I think it tends to calm people that people don't feel like there's anything for them to lose if the journey goes successfully, but they see see it all as a as upside. Yeah. It's a good point. My I showed you guys our our goals, the brief for the project, and there were just one or two times that I pulled them back up in front of our our working committee. And I said, hey. Just as a reminder, as we're about to make this decision, let's hold this up, and let's make sure that we weigh this decision against these criteria versus, Alright. like, how we feel, especially when it comes to color. You know, like, everyone has a visceral, yeah. reaction to a color, you know, but what's best for the company? What's best for the brief? Next question? Thanks, Kristen or Kirsten. Oh, why was, green chosen? Yeah. Forest mentioned this, but, you know, I think there's so many different things that the color green signals. And we if we were committed to being a brand about performance and helping customers get real performance outcomes and impact from their events, then what better color than green to signal performance growth, and also AI. So, it was a pretty easy decision for us when we knew what we were trying to solve for there. Just for fun, we we mocked the old the new brand up in the old colors, and it just didn't work. Yeah. Didn't sing the way it needed to because we also, like, want people to you know, there's a there's a subliminal thing you think about when you look at things and you see colors and different things, and we wanted to make sure that we were adding to the conversation versus detracting or distracting people with the colors we chose. Thank you for that good question. It's a great question. If it's not successful, what do you do to course correct? Forest, do you wanna take this one? Sure. I think the biggest thing is just, you know, just reframing, something that doesn't work well as learning opportunity. Oftentimes the most exciting opportunities come right after something that is not successful, because you go at something ideally with tremendous amount of ambition, and courage. And if it doesn't go well, then it also is saying, maybe it's just there was just maybe something that was just a bit off about it. Maybe there was a conversation we didn't had. Maybe there's something we weren't quite seeing clearly. And so I think, sometimes the course correction doesn't have to be major. It's just making sure that you take stock of what should we learn from this. And sometimes that those kind of trips are the, the absolute best things to happen to a project. But I think it's important to retain composure and to see those as as learning opportunities and in places to kind of, like, gather back energy, but ultimately to to keep that as momentum moving forward, not as a not as a roadblock. I'll also say this, like, you know, we had I had one brand I worked on years ago where there was, like, a little bit of chatter online. It was negative, and it felt very disruptive because we've done such great work, and we were really committed and took all this data. And then there was a small pocket of noise, and it was in a in an online forum. And people internally were panicking a little, and we're like, no. We're gonna stand behind this. And it quieted down in, like, seventy two hours, and nobody remembers that, you know, and our brand held. So I think also too, if it's not successful, just make sure it has to be successful by your terms, and it's obviously important with your customers and what the market thinks, but it can be really easy to, overblow some constructive feedback because everybody has opinions. Yeah. So just make sure you really are defining it as not successful. And then if so, I'll apply what Forest said. But but I would just encourage you not to panic as well, Mhmm. if if it's a little, you know, little dicey because change is hard for people sometimes. So, Okay. what else? just to just to build off that, Amy, I feel like this is that that is the new question that I feel after, you know, Cracker Barrel and some of these big kind of brand moments that the the fear of the it not landing well becomes so exaggerated has become so exaggerated of a debut that unfortunately, it starts to almost make it feel like it's a it's a logo pageant that this is our this we're having. a logo pageant. Do you like my logo? And. I think it's important to then tell the story of this is so much bigger than the logo. This is a whole kind of employee shift that's happening, arm in arm. So just one of the one of the thoughts about, you know, to to add to to what you said, which I totally agree with about, how to think about marching towards that, that inevitable moment of will we be successful or not being successful, or also how do you pivot? Mhmm. How long did it take? Nine months from decision to rebrand to finish the brand, but we were racing. We were sweating it. Because that top part. of chart I gave you, there was a lot of real strategic work that we wanted to do really intentionally. I've worked on other rebrands that, like, for us that could take three to four months. It just really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. So take that checklist I gave you and see how much of that you need to do, and then you'll be able to figure out your timelines. We may have room for, like, one or two more questions. And then, by the way, Cassandra, thank you for that kind compliment there. It's really nice of you. Any more questions? Okay. Oh, the mix of capital and lowercase letters and c then. Oh, lots of fun discussion internally about that. I'm. passing Forest. Yeah. It's it's so interesting. Steven, the letters, of course, course, we spend a lot of time with those, those five letters. Mhmm. It's interesting, if you do anything, kind of decorative to the C, then you really just Cvent. And so then vent comes forward, if you do something to the to the t, it becomes almost, you know, like, less legible. What we liked about it is that, you know, Cvent from a perspective of how the letters feel so balanced, Felt it like it wanted to be a lowercase, mark. But when it's lowercase, the lowercase t just jumps up. Right? So you almost have this, like, Mhmm. this tree at the end of the at the end of the street. And so we thought, well, what if we use unicase? What if the t is this really confident cap that's at the height of the of the rest of the letters. And so it creates this really nice shelf, this visual shelf where your eye moves across. And it felt, it felt a bit bold, it felt a bit sort of old new and had the right amount of tension for us where I think, initially, when I looked at it, I was like, oh, it has a little bit of tension. And I like that. It doesn't feel just super just purely easy on the eyes, but it also felt like these letters and this this logo, this wordmark, feels very serious. Like, I would trust a a powerful event to this company. And so, ultimately, Yeah. that's why that's why we landed there. Yeah. T and t for technology. I know when you guys showed us that, you're like, we're putting the weight on the t for technology or a tech company. And what I loved about this, logo is that it brings the boldness of a technology provider serving marketers and event professionals with the distinctiveness and character of the hospitality side of the space. So it really brought it all nicely together. I think we are out of time. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm I'm gonna make sure that we take all the questions that we are we didn't answer today, and I'm gonna make sure we do our best to try to answer them in sessions two and three. And, I'm gonna have Kaela pull up, just one more slide to tell you what's coming next. So next part is the before, during, and after plays, how to get the most, before, during, and after your event, for your brand. And what we did, like, we literally tore up our playbook for how we did things, and it's gonna change forever. By the way, this is, like, really cool behind the scenes footage. This is a goal right here. We have a lot a lot more to show you. And, then the September 10 session is, how we actually did the flip and then how you can leverage the principles and the checklist that we provide, to do your own memorable events, whatever it is, rebrand or not. So I just wanna thank all of you for joining us today. It's really humbling that you spent the time to come chat with us. I hope you learned something. Again, we'll we'll give you all the templates after session three. We hope to see you in the next two and hope you have a great rest of your day or evening wherever in the world that you are today. Thanks so much. Thank you, everyone. Bye.