Imagine that you’re browsing your social feed when you discover a video of someone you recognize participating in a Carpool Karaoke sing-along stunt, similar perhaps to something you’d find on late night television. They’re not celebrities or really famous in any way, but the production quality makes the two-minute video well worth the watch. Months later, you find video footage of that same individual in a recording studio working on a hip-hop single. You know he’s particularly musically talented, but somehow you can’t stop yourself from searching for the song on Spotify to hear what it’s all about. Not bad, surprisingly. A few weeks later, you’re at a corporate event where that same person—now somewhat more recognizable after having put himself out there—is pouring his heart out in front of an audience of thousands, sharing his struggles with loneliness and how that’s impacted him both professionally and personally. Who is this person, and better yet, why are you so drawn to him? He’s not an actor, musician, or any hired gun really.
For the marketers reading, what if I told you that that vulnerable, self-deprecating person on camera and on stage was your CEO? Founders and executives, what if that person was you?
I can appreciate that your first reaction may be that there’s no way you’ll ever get me (or my CEO) to sing along to Abba or Backstreet Boys on camera while driving through Palo Alto. You may also question the need for a chief executive to open up about personal struggles with mental health and be vulnerable in front of a professional audience of prospects, customers, partners, and analysts. But the truth is that these examples are not fabricated, but actual programs that we’ve challenged our CEO at Gainsight, Nick Mehta, to participate in. His courage and willingness to put himself out there has helped us communicate our company values and unique culture to the world, while positioning both Nick and the overall Gainsight brand as market leaders. Being able to run this play at scale is a “superpower” for companies who are creating new categories.
In the business-to-human (B2H) world in which we are now living, your executive team is on the record as official spokespeople for the business, or said another way, outward expressions of your company purpose, values, and culture. There’s no getting around that—customers are interested in doing business with brands that they admire, and as we discussed in Chapter Five, would be very willing to change vendors to better align their own personal sense of purpose and values with the products and services that they purchase. Today, brand is inextricably tied to people, and your executive team plays a critical role in representing the faces and stories of the people at your company and in your community. This is especially important in category creation, where tribes and communities of people who are brought together by common purpose will always look to a leader for inspiration on the path forward. As the CEO of a company that’s creating a category, that responsibility falls on you to authentically position yourself to the market at large as purpose-driven, an expert in your domain, and above all, human.
This process isn’t exactly comfortable for most executives, or perhaps it’s a lot more comfortable to be authentic and vulnerable in a small group setting. That’s where marketing can help—capturing the authentic voice of the executive spokespeople and providing opportunities to deliver that message at scale through a practice known as executive communications or “exec comms.” The trust that executives can establish by being their authentic selves in more intimate settings is a powerful lever for any business, but layering an exec comms strategy on top to establish that trust at scale is what makes the strategy a superpower. Your executive team can’t possibly be everywhere at all times, but well-developed marketing programs can aid the effort of establishing trust and brand affinity with the market at large.
Exec comms programs have typically lived within the public relations (PR) or corporate communications function—viewed as an extension of company effort to expose its executives to journalists and the media, speak at events, or even address important topics with investors or analysts. But PR and corporate communications are being reinvented in today’s digitally connected world, as is the exec comms discipline. It will be just as important to position executives as category ambassadors to the media as it will be to teammates, customers, the community, and the market at large. As I discussed in Chapter Seven, the cost and level of effort required to produce high-quality content has dropped significantly, pushing ownership of the exec comms strategy somewhere between the communications and corporate marketing (or brand) teams.
Wherever the function lives, and whoever gets the charter, Marketing will undoubtedly play a key role in coaching executive spokespeople and expressing their authenticity through programs that your intended audience can relate to. Julie Ogilvie, a research director at SiriusDecisions, developed a framework for marketers building a program around what she defines as the four Cs of exec comms:1
Perhaps there’s a fifth C to add to Julie’s list—culture. As we discussed in Chapter Five, the very framework of creating a category is dependent on being able to establish company purpose (informed by the personal purpose of the executive team) and then to live that very purpose out loud. That purpose is often expressed through company values and result in a company culture that the category itself can take on as its own. Within an exec comms program, it’s important to keep culture at the very core of every opportunity that an executive may have to represent the company externally—whether in media or a brand campaign. It’s also important that it’s delivered in a way that’s authentic to the executive. At Gainsight, one of our company values is “childlike joy,” this idea of bringing your inner child to work every day. For us, and for Nick especially, campaigns such as Carpool Karaoke or a self-deprecating rap performance felt authentic to who we are. Somewhat silly programs like these will not be appropriate for every brand or executive team, but what matters is finding your voice that is authentic to who you are and what you stand for. Authenticity, in whatever form it may take, is the most effective strategy in establishing trust and building market leadership in your new category.
One of the most prolific voices on the role of leadership in category creation is Keith Krach. If you look him up on LinkedIn, his headline currently reads chairman and CEO of Ariba and DocuSign—the latter of which is a company he took public in 2018 that’s now trading at a $9.4B market cap. But even a title that prestigious sells Krach short. He’s also a mentor, leader, philanthropist, public servant, educator, and what he’ll admit to being most proud of—a loving son, brother, husband, and father. One title most applicable to this chapter was “Category Kingmaker,” a moniker given to him by Profile Magazine in 2017. Krach has been able to successfully create, and dominate, four separate categories:
Krach certainly has developed his own playbook for how to create new categories, but he would be the first to tell you that at the core of the strategy is developing a values based leadership framework in an effort to establish trust with your new market.
Krach believes that building trusted relationships is at the very heart of creating a great category, a generational company, or even simply selling your product. If you boil down the strategies that we’ve explained in this book so far, the common refrain is that people will ultimately choose to give you their business because they trust you. Teams across your organization have to become extremely good at building trusted relationships—whether you’re a front-line sales development rep (SDR) talking to a prospect for the very first time or a QA engineer validating the performance of the latest product release. Trust is typically built on a 1:1 basis, such as visiting a customer onsite, hosting a marketing event out in the field, or taking that red-eye flight only to shake the hand of a key decision maker for a big deal that may close this quarter. Those are trust-building activities, but as Krach puts it, everything in business is divided by time. Even the most self-sacrificial CEOs will need to enforce personal boundaries in order to prioritize time with family and loved ones. Even if they do not, there will never be enough hours in the day for them to maximize trust-building activities with the market, while also balancing the competing priorities of running the business itself. So how can you scale trust-building activities on a one-to-many basis?
Krach believes that the most effective form of leadership and trust building is authenticity—a virtue that Marketing cannot necessarily develop on behalf of the executive team, but can certainly amplify. All humans are endowed with our own unique set of talents, gifts, and core competencies, and great leaders are able to put down their guard and be vulnerable enough to share their authentic selves with the world. While for some of us being vulnerable is much easier in a 1:1 environment, Krach encourages leaders not to be afraid to be vulnerable on stage or in front of a camera. Your teammates, customers, and extended members of your community want to get to know the people behind the brand leading the category. What do they stand for, what’s their background, what do they sound like? Ultimately, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a wrong answer to any of the questions above, so long as you are authentic to who you are. Authenticity also means admitting on the record that not everything is as perfect as it may seem—admitting your fears or flaws or offering up a transparent perspective on the business. This means being transparent about more than just work, but also the appropriate parts of your personal life as well. If reality television and social media have taught us anything, it’s that there’s a market of people who are interested in following the lives of people they admire. We’ve all experienced the dark side of this trend—how social media will typically paint lives through rose-colored glasses. However, offering your community an authentic window into who you are inside and outside of the office can establish trust with the market in incredibly powerful and profound ways.
Being authentic means taking a step of courage, but when done right, can fuel your ability to establish trust at scale. That’s where Marketing steps in—turning courage into a superpower for your brand.
There are several channels by which marketers can amplify the authenticity of their executive team in order to establish trust with the market at scale. While these channels are often owned by different sub-departments within Marketing, it will be important to have someone (likely in Comms) own the overall strategy and editorial calendar on behalf of each executive spokesperson. Teams need to ensure that the specific messages and narratives that are aligned to each executive are consistent across each of the channels below—whether personal or professional.
Developing an executive communications strategy, along with measured execution on the six other principles I’ve shared in this section, will put your company in a position to create and dominate a new market category. Whether you’re starting this journey from step one, or are an established brand looking to break through a crowded market, the tactics I’ve shared will serve you well. Along the way, you will have built a human first brand that investors value over market disruptors in their portfolios, customers bet their careers on, and teammates feel inspired to be a part of. But how exactly does category creation correlate to the growth metrics that your CFO and investors are asking about? What are the implications of category creation on teammate retention and satisfaction? Can creating a category deliver a level of customer satisfaction greater than that of disruption-oriented companies? Let’s unpack these three topics and prove the impact of category creation as we transition to the final section of the book.