Why All Startups Should Start With Branding Instead of Content [Podcast]

April 20, 2017

Randy Frisch

Anthony Kennada, VP of Marketing at Gainsight, joins the Content Pros Podcast to share how he prioritized branding with content to create a start-up positioned for success.

Special thanks to our sponsors:

In This Episode

Why launching a brand new category means pitching it without mentioning it
How meeting with specialists but following your intuition leads to informed and inspired innovation
Why starting a new technology platform means focusing on the human, instead of technical, element
How putting the brand first when starting out leads to better retention, recruiting, and investment

Quotes From This Episode

“If I had tenured experience and all the biases coming into the role, I don’t know that we would have, collectively as a team, really developed the brand and developed the marketing strategy that we have.” —@akennada

“We didn’t seek out to build a new category. It was a strategy that sort of emerged in time.” —@akennada

“No one was trying to invest in making them be heroes and build the industry foundation around that job.” —@akennada

“The decision we made wasn’t necessarily to build a category, but to just double down. Double down on the community, double down on content, double down on making these folks be heroes and pioneers in this brand new thing.” —@akennada

“Customer success is the next big category of enterprise software.” —@akennada

“We were going to take a position where the problem wasn’t going to be solved by technology necessarily.” —@akennada

“We would grow our database as a result, grow our viewership, but also leverage the brand equity of what they were doing.” —@akennada

“The community effort was really based on a fundamental principle that we were going to put the people at the forefront of our positioning and our go-to-market, rather than the technology.” —@akennada

“Brand is actually at the heart of everything that marketers do. But in the B2B world, we’ve kind of, for lack of better term, sort of bastardized it.” —@akennada

“When folks are engaging at the very top of the funnel with your content efforts, they’re establishing a relationship with you as a thought partner and a place to turn for advice on how they can be great at their job.” —@akennada

“Brand is the entire customer experience from first touch through to close through to how to actually support them.” —@tylerlessard

“You have to all be on the same page that this is a journey that we’re on together.” —@akennada