The Supermetrics Full-Funnel Brand Test: How we used data to develop and launch a new brand identity
In this episode Edward, Demand Gen Director at Supermetrics, is joined by Gabrielle Stafford, CMO, and Kate Gleeson, Head of Brand, to discuss the Supermetrics full-funnel brand test and talk through the whole process of how we launched our updated brand identity, from strategic goals and setting up the test to the results and internal stakeholder management.
You'll learn
- How did Supermetrics leverage customer’s expectations to shape their brand transformation?
- How did data help Supermetrics make informed decisions throughout their journey?
- What steps did Supermetrics take to communicate their brand transformation effectively within the organization?
- How did Supermetrics ensure brand consistency across all touchpoints?
- How did Supermetrics roll out the new brand identity?
Edward Ford:
Hi, I'm Edward from Supermetrics, and this is the Marketing Intelligence Show, the podcast that empowers marketing leaders to work better with their data and make sure every marketing dollar counts. Now let's get into today's episode.
All right, so we're back with another episode of the Marketing Intelligence Show, and this one is going to be a lot of fun.
I've been waiting a long time to do this one. So today we're joined by two of my colleagues, Gabrielle Stafford, CMO at Supermetrics, and Kate Gleason, head of Global Brands, along with myself, Edward Ford, head of Global Demand Gen, and we're talking about the Supermetrics Full Funnel brand tests, which I think is becoming a little bit legendary, at least at the B2B Marketing Circle.
So I've been speaking with a lot of people about this, so we can kind of call it the legendary Supermetrics full funnel brand test. And Gabi, I want to start things off with you, as you'd been in the CMO role here for a few months when we started planning this brand test, which was your brainchild. So to give some context, can you tell us why did you think it was time for us to review the brand here at Supermetrics?
Gabrielle Stafford:
So a couple of things. I think one, whenever A CMO joins, but that's the first thing that they go is I want to review the brand. But mostly Supermetrics had been growing so fast we'd had a huge success with PLG growth. We had a big customer base, but we were now getting increasingly successful on our sales led motion, which were higher ACV deals, larger organizations. And it really was a question for me of whether how we were showing up in the world was resonating with our audience.
And I didn't want to be the classic CMO who just changed everything to Blue because they loved Blue because that's not how I have ever worked. But also we are a data business. We believe that data makes marketing better. So it was, okay, let's put our money where our mouth is. And really it was a test to see if the then iteration of the brand was resonating with our audience.
And when you're planning a test, you never know what's going to happen. And this is the amazing thing about the brand. Your brand is not what you say it is, it's what your customers say it is. So the easiest way for us to see where our brand was currently sitting with our customers and prospects was to test that with them. And I had had a lot of B2B experience, sorry, B2C experience as well as B2B experience where something like this might have been a little more usual. It was kind of the idea to take that B2C experience, take the fact that Supermetrics has this big broad customer base and a big prospect base and see what comes back from our base in terms of what our base thought our brand should be.
Edward Ford:
Yeah, absolutely. And I remember back to that time because our brand was, we'd gone down that whole pastel colors and cartoon characters, which was very much the thing in B2B and particularly in SaaS at that point. And I think as you said, we were at this crossroads in terms of staying true to the more emerging playful startupy routes, very approachable, the PLG self-serve motion.
But then as we were working with increasingly more complex solutions and going up market speaking to larger companies, as you said, we're in the data space. So trust, security, and reliability are such important factors in that.
So the other thing was should we kind of move in this direction? And I think this is where we kind of had that discussion, it's time to review the brand. And as you said, most CMOs, they'll come in, the first things they do are first renew the brand, second redesign their website. It's the kind of classic, classic stereotype.
And as you said, normally when redeveloping the brand or renewing websites, particularly in B2B, whenever this has happened, and also based on my previous experiences, it's often just based on the beliefs people have on the direction that they think they should go and the direction they should think they should take things. But we took a very different approach, as you said, based on data and feedback from the market. So can you tell us how you devise the actual full funnel brand test?
Gabrielle Stafford:
So I think it's worth pointing out, and Edward, you particularly were here at this time, Kate, it may have been a little bit before your time, but there was a lot of really heated debates about how we should do this and which way we should go at leadership level in the marketing leadership team, the marketing team. So a lot of people had a lot of very firmly held opinions. And again, we are a marketing data company, so we decided we would test, and what we did was we wanted to put our current iteration of the brand or then iteration of the brand in the middle.
And when you're devising an AB test like this, you're really looking for a direction. So we weren't testing the actual resultant brand, we were testing the direction we thought we should go. So we kind of took where it was as the middle point, and as Edward said, it was pastel and it had 3D colors and it was warm and fuzzy and it was really, really nice and beautifully executed.
So we had that as a really good starting point and we went right, what are the two extremes of that?
And one was, I can't see my hand here, but it's over here. It's way over here, really structured, not passed out, not 3D really kind of more structured, more sophisticated little, maybe more established, more of an established business. And we decided, right, well, we'll go really far this way. And then from our pastel 3D shapes, we'll go even more abstract and even more colorful the other way.
So we took our middle and then we decided to test full extremes. And then I think the first iteration we talked about was just search testing because that's what we have at volume. But then when we really sat down to think about it, it was right, if we are really going to do this test and it's really going to be meaningful for us, we really need to go full funnel.
And that's where we ended up doing YouTube. We ended up doing Facebook, YouTube at the top of the funnel, Facebook mid funnel search at the bottom of the funnel. And we had two landing pages. So actually quite a lot of creative now and creative efforts from the marketing team. Edward, I know you spearheaded our sophisticated version, and Pinya did an awesome job, who I still wish was on the team, did an awesome job on the abstract version. So we had two really strong iterations to test and that's really how we decided to go about it. And part of the genesis was I was new, there wasn't any agreement internally, but even if there had been agreement internally, it's not what we think it is literally what the customer's reflecting back to us. And what we wanted to find out was what our customers and prospects thought the right look and feel was for a business like ours. And so that's where we went. We went to two big extremes
Edward Ford:
And it was a crazy few weeks because we basically ended up creating these completely two new and very different brand and visual identities of Supermetrics in a few weeks. We split the team into two, as you said, I was working more on this sophisticated and refined, established direction. And then the other half of the marketing team, they were on the other side and had these two tribes. And it was hard.
I remembered the process because we were pushing so hard in a direction that we had been given. I think what happens is that then I realized that often when you're creating things, you create things that you like or I like this wording or I like these colors and so forth. But we were trying to create something that maybe didn't come too natural to us using words we didn't really use using colors and palettes that were very, very different.
And it was a good exercise because you're creating something you didn't necessarily like, but you were just trying to push something out so that you could get feedback in terms of the direction as you said. And I remember when we were kind of building the assets and developing the test, and when it started running, you started seeing that people think which one's going to win? And you of biggie, I hope this one wins and this. And it was a very, very interesting and crazy time and I think very different to any approach that I've seen a company take in terms of the brand direction or deciding in which direction to take a brand. And so as you said, yeah, we had 19 tests across the funnel.
We had a brand lift, we had an ad recall, we had a few at the top which was going to be measuring video view rates. We have the ones in the middle, so we have three in the middle that we're looking at click-through rates. And then as you said, we even created these two brand new landing pages where we were looking at start trial clicks and we were driving all these traffic to see these different assets we created. We had videos, we had search ads, we had lining pages as we said. So yeah, pretty crazy few weeks. I remember that summer. Well,
Gabrielle Stafford:
We had fun though.
Edward Ford:
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was great. It was, yeah. And it was fun giving the updates in the company meetings about how this is developing and whereas the whole company were really bought into it. And I think this is one of the other interesting things we could also touch on later is that the buy-in and bringing everybody along with you on that journey, so it's not just the marketing team but the whole company. And so what were the results? What were the findings? Where did the data lead us?
Gabrielle Stafford:
So it was so interesting because as you said, the whole company was bought in and people had really firmly had beliefs about how they thought this was going to go right up to the executive team level.
So you remember we had our pastel colored cartoon kind of startup, classic B2B SaaS brand. We had our sophisticated on this side and our abstract on this side. And what was really interesting is that the abstract performed better for I think the vast majority of the tests that we did than the existing one and got some really, really positive results. So if we had just done one test where we had said we want to go more abstract, that would've performed better than what we had right now and that's the way we would've gone.
But because we had gone the two extremes and we also had sophisticated, to everyone's surprise, the sophisticated version blew both out of the water.
There was such a strong signal, it was across every single test, across every single metric. The sophisticated version was what our audience and prospects reflected back to us. That's what they expect us to be. And I think it was such a clear that in terms of bringing the rest of the business with us as we went on this brand journey, we then had clear data and a clear signal from our base that this is what they expect and messaging is going to be so much easier. Recognition is going to be so much easier if we take a slightly more sophisticated approach than we had been doing.
So I think it was an amazing learning and I was surprised at how clear the message was because my terror was that we had spent two months doing, I think three months talking about it, two months trying to make it work another month actually doing it, and that we would end up with blur across all three. It's like, oh, now what do we do now? And I was already kind of planning if that happens, what do we do plan B? But it was such a clear resonating result from our base that I think it was testament also to the fact that, okay, we did something new and we tried something new, but it worked and it ultimately saved us an awful lot of time in trying to iterate to that point. So yeah, I was blown away by the results and they far exceeded my expectations.
Edward Ford:
Yeah, it was crazy to see when the results came in that the data basically told us the direction to go and it eliminated all the need for conversations, all these opinions. And I think as you said, when you're discussing a brand, it was at the start of this project, everybody has an opinion and that can often influence the direction you go. But those discussions were eliminated because it wasn't a discussion, it was a decision like here we can really see where we should go. And yeah, we did the nine tests. So seven of the nine came back in favor of the sophisticated and refined, and those were all statistically significant. We had one in favor of the playful and abstract, but that was too close to call. It wasn't statistically significant. And then we had one no result where we didn't have any winner and no findings.
So a very clear signal from the market in terms of which direction to go. And I even remember the leadership team were going to dress up in one of our monthly meetings depending which direction they were going to dress up in like crazy clothes if it was the playful and abstract, and then they kind of had suits out and ties on because the sophisticated and refined one.
So I think that was Mikael as CEO and Dups as CTO. So you could really see the impact it had in terms of bringing leadership and the rest of the company along, which I think was one of the other great benefits of this in addition to just understanding the direction we should take the brand. And actually just to kind of follow up on this, obviously it was the worry that we might not get any result from it, and it's a lot of time and obviously we put budget behind it. How did you get buy-in from leadership to move ahead with this?
Gabrielle Stafford:
So buy-in actually happened at an offsite, we do an offsite in the mid June every year in a beautiful location beside a lake in Finland. And we sat around a table and there were really differing views at the leadership level about which way we should go. One of you was everything's fine, leave it the way it is, don't touch it. The other view was, well, let's try something new. And then there was let's go even more abstract and more playful. And really it was coming around to the fact that, right, well if we don't know, if we don't have a clear vision, our customers need to tell us. And even if we had had a clear vision and there were some pretty senior members of the leadership team who had some very strong opinions, we had to go out and ask our customers and prospects, because your brand is not what you define it to be.
It is what your customers and prospects reflect back to you by what you put out in the market. And your brand is not just a look and feel, it's everything about the business. It's every touchpoint somebody has.
So what we were looking for was not a set of colors or a visual look and feel. It was a direction. And I think because we are a data company, having that stakeholder management conversation and basing it around, right, let's test it. We have differing views, it's going to be what our customer says it is. Let's ask. So we asked and got a resounding clear signal of which way to go.
Edward Ford:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the other really great things about the test is that we just didn't finish it there, but then as you said, we were very iterative and we validated that direction. So what we kind of did as a follow-up was essentially build a microsite of our most visited pages on the website in this new sophisticated and refined direction. And we took Canada as a test market as it's a sort of good market that represents who we're speaking to globally. And we took 50% of our paid Canadian traffic and we diverted that to this new microsite and then the other 50% went to the existing website. And then we compared the performance of this. It was almost like a six page micro six or 10 page microsite versus the full blown website. And this microsite absolutely destroyed the existing website in terms of performance.
So we saw things like a drop in CPC, we had more users visiting the sites, we had more sessions on this micro more pages per sessions. We saw longer sessions, we saw fewer balances, we saw more actual sessions, and we saw more event clicks so we could really see that this was the right direction. And then that gave us the confidence to move forward.
And I think what happens when you do these kind of traditional branded website renewals is that you don't know until the day you hit publish globally what's going to happen at the top of funnel traffic. And it appears our conversion rate is going to drop off. The charts are we're going to destroy the top of our commercial funnel. And you don't know, it's this horrible launch day feeling where you're really anxious. But I remember for us it was this rollout when we were so confident because we knew we'd tested, we validated it and got feedback. So I think this, I would highly recommend other brands take this systematic approach if ever considering a brand renewal.
Gabrielle Stafford:
And I think it's really important to one, do that systematic approach and that is a lift and shift from huge e-comm websites where you would never have anything change everything on one day. That would be insane in a big e-comm website. You just do it incrementally. But I think it's worth noting that it took us another six months to actually get from our six page microsite to the full blown, I could be lying there could be even longer than that. It took us a long time to get from that microsite to the new website because we tested every step of the way and we just kept that in countries and channels and countries and channels and countries and channels. But by the time we had the whole site migrated, we had doubled conversion on the website and were therefore able to cut the marketing budget because we could get the same results with less money because we had tested along the way.
And especially in B2B SaaS, when you do a big rollout, a launch day, very often everything will plummet and then go back up again. And we just had constant growth. And that would be my recommendation hands down, as with you Edward, don't do a complete overhaul test, learn, iterate, and make it really agile. And we are still changing the website all the time and constantly testing it. And I think that if you were to take anything away from today, it would be don't change everything all in one, go test and learn, test and learn, test and learn.
Edward Ford:
Yeah, exactly. And I think it's relative as to whether it took a long time because I think compared to the old way of doing it where you kind of build and launch, maybe it took a long time, but our approach has been more to, as you said, constantly iterate and update rather than doing one big launch. So yeah, I think this is a good thing for people to think about in terms of how they approach brand going forward. This show is brought to you by Supermetrics, the marketing data hub that helps you connect, transform and export your data to any destination. Over 750,000 marketers worldwide use Supermetrics to turn raw marketing data into business growth. Visit supermetrics.com to find out how.
Okay, I want to turn to you now Kate because as Gabi said, you joined Supermetrics as this test was ongoing towards the end and you were tasked with then taking these results and moving forward with developing the brand. So what was it like for you coming into the business as head of brand and finding this big brand test ongoing and concluding?
Kate Gleeson:
I definitely would say that it made my life easier because I guess what you've touched on is the subjective nature of brand. And I think that if a company is going through a period of change, be it that they're going through substantial growth, be it that they're really scaling their teams like a marketing team. So in my case, I was the first brand person coming in and to task someone with rebranding. When you've never worked at the business, it's like your first day in the business, you don't really know the essence, the soul, the culture. You need to spend time with key stakeholders, customers, it would take someone so long to do it properly with qualitative data. So to have quantitative data there in front of you to give you a really clear direction was much easier for me.
So I definitely think that anyone listening that is going through not only a shift in terms of where their company is going so they know that their brand needs to change to reflect that, but also that they've had to hire to also cope with that kind of growth.
This is probably the best approach because it takes the subjective nature out of it and it also allows someone on board properly without having to do anything crazy from an individual and subjective basis. I just look at the data. So for me it was much easier. So what I could do was essentially, I think I was there week one and I got up to speed with the tests and then it was, okay, there's a very clear direction we need to move further with this.
So I was tasked with helping on the project management side of moving the test even further. So it was rolling up the sleeves and just getting stuck in and that was really nice. So I was essentially part of the microsite build. So we looked at six of the most popular pages on the website and implemented that very clear direction that we'd gotten from the first test into the microsite.
And we built out, we spent time with sales, we understand the customer problems, we went a little bit more touching on more of the qualitative data, speaking to sales, understanding customer's way of thinking, and also thinking about how we could improve the microsites and take it further from there. Yeah, I mean it was great because each step that we took the data was consistently showing us that we were going in the right direction. So there was no nightmares at night thinking, oh my god, what is this the right direction? Is this the right color? We were using customer data so much easier
Edward Ford:
For sure, I could imagine. And so how did you go about developing the brand? Because as Gabi said, we pushed very hard in both these directions. So we had the very playful and abstract identity and then this very sophisticated, very refined identity that had obviously come out as the winner. So how did you pull it back and still make it more like us as well?
Kate Gleeson:
Yeah, and I think that that's a really important part of building out a brand, especially when a company's going through a transition in terms of growth, because of course it's what our customers say about us. At the same time, every single staff member is a reflection of your brand. So they also need to be representing what your customers want from you and what your customers are reflecting back at you. So there was also a step in kind of joining that up because we have a lot of passionate staff and we are so lucky. I think anyone listening to this that is on LinkedIn can see how passionate our staff is and we have such a strong culture. So it was really ensuring that internally that everyone was also bought in that they felt listened to, that they felt that the direction was a clear reflection as well of where we want to go, our competitor differentiators our customers and everything in between in terms of the soul of the brand, the personality of the brand.
So in terms of joining up and kind of joining that quantitative data up, it was really about leaning as well into the qualitative data. So what I did was I spent time listening to the key stakeholders exceed the CEO and sales teams and customer people that are dealing with customers every day and ask them to describe what they think supermetrics is in four words and what our competitor differentiators are. Where are we unique in this space? Where do they want to see us in five years time? So ensuring as well that this read that we were getting also reflected the people that are representing your brand every single day. And where we met was visually where we met was somewhere a little bit not too on that two corporate side. If we went maybe too much leaned, maybe too much into that direction, people wouldn't feel it's an actual reflection of our soul internally.
So we made sure that as we were, the read was very clear, our customers want, they want to feel safe, they want to feel, they want a very clean and clear user interface. They want very direct language. We were getting a very clear read of the brand language, the brand personality, but we also wanted to ensure that we didn't go that we wanted to keep a little bit of color and playfulness. And so visually it was about ensuring that we also met somewhere where internally people were excited about and that they were going to really buy into and ensure that when they're doing sales presentations, when they're speaking to customers, that they are also reflecting the brand. So from there it was very much qualitative data that can support your quantitative data. So it's definitely a blend of both.
Edward Ford:
Yeah, absolutely. And as Gabi said, brand extends across the whole organization and I think particularly for a software business and the SaaS business that extends straight into the product. So it's not just the brand and materials, the marketing materials, the website, but the whole product experience as well. So how did you work with our product team in particular and other stakeholders to bring this cohesive brand experience to life?
Kate Gleeson:
Yeah, I mean it goes back to kind of like what Gabi said around marketing and brand. And a lot of times in businesses it's the marketing team that might just rebrand and then no other aspect has rebranded or taken that kind of shift. So we definitely did not want that to happen at Supermetrics. We wanted to make sure that every single touch point from where a customer experiences supermetrics to let's say that could be on social media to when they land on the website to when they trial the product, that it was a very clear and a very uniformed approach because if that gets disjointed, then your efforts are really not, it's not going to be a great brand experience. So I suppose we talked a bit about those conversion metrics and we want to ensure that I think those conversion metrics really showed, right, this is really, really working and this is really, really working and this is resonating with our customers.
We want to make sure as soon as that takes place and they're experiencing the product, that their experience and their feeling towards the brand is completely the same. So what we did was as we were iterating and moving and from the data, we knew this is where we're going and we're not changing because it was a very, very clear, there was very, very clear positive results there. It was working with product to make sure that the new brand personality was reflected when someone was experiencing the product. So what we did was we essentially, I would say we communicated and we spent time and we had chats with product to understand, especially the product design team, to understand was there any blockers they were finding with the new brand identity from the product perspective, how were they implementing it? Were they bought in? That was a project in itself.
We spent time understanding things around typography, iconography, use of illustration, use of color. It's completely different and it can be completely different from a product perspective. So really understanding how it could be joined up if there was blockers, and then understanding how we kind of overcame those blockers together and putting in a very uniformed interface that very much reflected that initial direction that we tested as well. So that took roughly, was it maybe three months, Gabi? I think the initial iteration was three or four months. But I would say even that is still a journey that we're on because as we develop and grow our advertising and our website, which is our primary go-to-market mechanism, as we continue to learn and grow, we just continue to work with product and try. And our goal is always to make the most seamless customer experience possible so that it makes complete sense from a customer point of view, and they know where they are and they know what they should do next. Have we gotten all the steps perfect yet? I'd say no, but it's definitely an exciting journey that we're on and we want to really take a customer first approach to it.
And it's very much defining what your brand personality is, your brand language, and building that system. So once you have that direction, like building that brand system and then working with product to making sure that that system, that brand system, the brand architecture that you've created is reflected within the product from a colors perspective, from semantic colors perspective, from illustration, iconography, everything. So we're still working with product on that, but I would definitely say that communication is key in this. So if someone's looking to rebrand and do something like this and work with customers to kind of understand that quantitative data, internal communication is really key and bringing people on that journey is really, really key so that you can bring it across every single touchpoint of your brand and of your business.
Edward Ford:
Yeah, absolutely. And it's great to catch up and reflect on this experiment. I think it's one of the coolest experiments I've ever been part of during my whole career in marketing and SaaS. But if we were to run this test again, what are some of the things that you would do differently?
Gabrielle Stafford:
I think we moved very fast, and I think that was right. We focused primarily on look and feel and overall feel. I think I would've started with some qualitative messaging and then gone to the look and feel. So if I had to do it again, I think I would've. And we've done some really exciting qualitative messaging tests online recently that have been very exciting and I think I would've started there, got the language, and you can do those very quickly now, and then taken that language and tested the exact same language. Our language was similar but not the exact same. And I would've moved having gotten the really clear direction, I would've moved faster on the website. In retrospect, I think they're the two things I would've done differently.
Kate Gleeson:
I was going to say the exact same things. I think this test is really, really unique because we use so much quantitative data and it was incredible and we were very, very fortunate to have a very clear read. I would say I totally agree with Gabi, having that qualitative data would also futureproof you as well, just in case you don't get the read that you want. We were very lucky we did. So I would say bringing in qualitative data very, very early on would be a good approach. And I think that as much as you can speak to your customers and your potential customers and ensuring that you're speaking to the sales teams, you're constantly getting feedback, you're documenting that feedback, you're speaking to potential customers, you're really understanding the competitor landscape as part of that really early on I think works really well. And we did that, but maybe I would've loved to do it from day one. We still would've ended up in the same place.
Gabrielle Stafford:
But actually, having said that, Kate, when I joined, I spent a lot of the first month on sales calls, and I do believe the sales calls were the genesis of the idea because what I was hearing on the calls was kind of different to what I was feeling with the current iteration of how we were showing up in the world. So I would completely concur, listen to sales calls, look at your reviews, see what your customers are saying before you would even start. Because I do believe, looking back on it, that's where the genesis of the idea came from. The fact that I was right new in role and as the new CMO was trying to take in all of this information, and I just spent an awful lot of time on calls with sales.
Kate Gleeson:
And I think as well, this also the customers that you're not getting, that aren't even landing on your website that you want to target. So understanding who those people are, like who are your target personas, and then going and getting qualitative data back from them, why haven't they been on your website? Why haven't they heard from you? Are they making these types of decisions in their organizations? What kind of problems do they have? What's their buying pattern? And we've used some really cool tools that have helped us do that now, where we can actually go and get feedback from potential customers that might hear about us in three years time, but we get to talk to them now and get to understand their emotional buying decision now, and that's been a game changer. So yeah, I totally agree on the sales calls and then any way that you can understand that kind of opportunity in your target audience as well that you don't get to speak to earlier on. I think to marry that I think would be really, really cool to do early on.
And again, I think we would've ended up in the same place. It's just having everything at your disposal early on. And the other thing is communicate over communicate when it comes to brand, because when you're moving fast, you can tend to, and I think because as well when you're marketing, you are spending a lot of time with customers and you can really focus on that, which is the right thing to do, but you also really need to think about those every single person in your organization represents your brand. So over communicate, if you're like, why did a meaning on this to the business a month ago? Do it again just in case someone was busy over communicating. Because I think it is a journey, and the more you can get people bought on early, the better. Yeah,
Edward Ford:
Right. Yeah, I think super good learnings. And I think one thing I would add is perhaps as a global SaaS business is perhaps extending to more non-native English speaking markets in the test just to see if there were differences in how native markets or non-native markets would respond.
But I think there's, of course, in the gift of hindsight, there's a million things we could have done differently and we could have spent ages on this test, but I think you obviously have to, as you said, move forward, move fast, do as best you can with what you have. And I think that obviously the learnings we got from that were incredible. So I think we're coming to the end. So before we wrap up, one last question. Any final lessons or learnings for everyone out there who's thinking about measuring brand?
Gabrielle Stafford:
So my key thing for people to think about is be brave. If there's a way that you think it will work for your business, be brave. Find out from your customers how you should show up in the world, what are you about? And test that before you go all in. But don't be afraid to test and get it wrong. Try it again. As Kate said, we were very lucky halfway through that test, I was terrified, but luckily wouldn't have stopped me doing it though. And if it hadn't worked, we would've come at it a different way. Be brave and use data to help you with your decision-making. There are 101 ways to cut marketing data these days. Use it to help you decide the next best step for your business.
Edward Ford:
And I think that's really, really important because I think a lot of times when companies are working with data and marketing teams are using data that it's often used as a way to look back at what's happened in a way, it's like the rear view mirror and you use that to then figure out, okay, what should we do next? But we were using data as the headlights really guiding us forward. And as a marketing team, it was so helpful to kind of have this test that showed us the direction that we should go. So I think that's definitely one of the key things for me is that thinking about data, not just as the rear view mirror, but the headlights guiding you forward. Kate, what do you think?
Kate Gleeson:
Yeah, I agree with both of your points. And I think that if someone's in an organization as well and they want, there's key stakeholders in the business and they want to know, maybe the stakeholders have a clear read. For example, maybe the CEO has a clear idea on the brand and maybe the CMO and maybe the brand lead. This is really, really good because it takes all of that unconscious bias out of it, and it allows you make decisions, which is so important. That can be really daunting if someone is wanting to rebrand or things that the current brand isn't reflective of where they currently at in terms of their market position or where they want to be. So I would say that if they're experiencing those kind of that tension where I think Gabi mentioned that when she was at an offsite, there was different opinions.
This is the perfect thing to do because it takes all of that out of it. It takes all of that emotion out of it, and it allows you make the right decision for your customers in the right decision for your business, and then you can kind of move from there. So I would totally agree with being brave and using data to really help you get things done, get things done quickly, and get things done internally quickly as well.
We all have a very emotional connection to brands, which is amazing, but that can sometimes make it very difficult for a marketing team, a CMO. And so I definitely think that this allows you to take risks and be brave, but knowing that you're getting data back to make sure that everyone has confidence in those decisions that you're making as well. So yeah, if anyone's listening and they do a test like this, let us know.
Gabrielle Stafford:
Yeah, I would love to know if anyone tries to replicate this.
Edward Ford:
Yeah, definitely reach out to us if you're planning your next brand renewal, maybe in 2024 or in the coming year, take this approach, let us know and we'll be excited to see. So there you have it. Hopefully it was helpful. The long awaited legendary. I'm going to add, I think it's legend, super metrics, full funnel brand tests. Gabi and Kate, thank you so much for joining us on the Marketing Intelligence Show. This was great to dig into it, great to reflect and look back together on this test as well, and we hope you find it useful. So thank you so much for joining us.
Gabrielle Stafford:
Great. Thank you. It was lovely to have this chat. We've been waiting for a long time to do it.
Kate Gleeson:
Thank you so much. Bye.
Edward Ford:
Thank you for listening to the Marketing Intelligent Show, brought to you by Supermetrics. If you're enjoying the podcast, then we'd love for you to tap that subscribe button, leave a review, and share with your colleagues and peers. We'll see you in the next episode.
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