ICIMS CMO Jody Kaminsky on rebranding an enterprise around AI

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Speaker B: This episode is brought to you by Apollo IO. A lot of the conversations on this show come back to the same problem. Teams have plenty of tools and the work still ends up scattered across them. Sales is a good example. Prospecting happens in one tool and outreach in another. And the time spent moving between them is to time not spent selling. Apollo I.O. is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach and follow up into one place instead of several separate tools. It's used by sales teams of all sizes, from small businesses to large organizations. And it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free@ApolloIO. That'sApolloIO. Hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom, host of the Agile brand, and here's a question for you. How do you rebuild a brand around AI in a category where being wrong about AI costs someone a job? Agility, uh, isn't moving quickly on the latest technology. It's being able to change what your company stands for repeatedly without your customers losing track of who you are. Today, we're getting into what it actually takes to lead an established enterprise brand through that kind of change. What triggers a, uh, brand transformation and how you keep it tethered to where the business is actually going. How to make AI claims credible in a market where every competitor is saying roughly the same thing. And how to prove a brand shift moved the business. And what you accept, you can't prove. Welcome to season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season, we're going all in on Expert mode. MarTech, AI and customer experience. Talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. Again, I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of MarTech M AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes. And leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor, TechSystems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world adoption. For more information, go to techsystems.com now let's dive in. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Jodi Kaminsky, Chief Marketing Officer at isims. Jody, welcome to the show.

Speaker C: Thanks so much, Greg. I'm honored to be here.

Speaker B: Yeah, looking forward to diving in here. Before we do though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at isoms?

Speaker C: Yeah, sounds great. Um, so I have been in marketing for 25 plus years. I've always been in B2B SaaS marketing, uh, specifically in the HR technology space. And I currently work for a company called isims that makes recruiting and hiring software for enterprise companies.

Speaker B: Great, great. So, yeah, let's dive in here and we're going to talk about a few things. But I want to start by what I touched on in the intro. And it's just leading a brand through transformation. Certainly I talk with a lot of leaders. Lots of things going on. Whether you're a CMO that's dealing with choosing what platforms to use or you're a CMO at a platform that is going through a, uh, transformation. There's lots, lots going on. I think the move to adopt AI is affecting a lot of this right now. You've recently led a, uh, brand transformation at iSims. And maybe we could just start with how did you start with the, what were the key business drivers that kind of signaled that it was time for a change? And then how did you align that with a, uh, new brand vision?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think one of the wonderful things about being in marketing for long enough is that brands have to evolve. If you have the luxury of being a brand that has been around for more than a decade, your brand is going to need to evolve with the times. I mean if you think about, you know, brands like 3M, um, or even American Express that started as like a freight logistics company or even Amazon, if you're old enough to remember the advent of Amazon like I do. Um, you know they, they started out really as kind of an online bookseller and they've evolved tremendously over, over the decades. Any brand that is around for long enough is going to need to evolve. So I think, um, being the CMO is understanding when it is time for your brand to get updated. Maybe when your brand is no longer reflecting the realities of what you actually do for your customers, or the market has changed dramatically or a brand new technology like AI has become a core component of what you deliver, then you know, it's time for your brand to evolve. And I think the um, magic is in figuring out how to update your brand so that you don't lose any positive equity that you have built up for your brand, but you also update your brand to reflect who you really are today and what you deliver to your customers today. And it's kind of finding that balance.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think uh, another challenge is so you know, the, the ISIMS brand is built and the tool itself is built around helping organizations hire smarter and people and put people first. In the age of AI, certainly there's a lot of, and rightfully so, but you know, there's a lot of um, hesitancy sometimes about full on AI adoption, people a little bit concerned about how their roles are going to change and things like that. So you know, not, not without, not without reason. But how do you balance the positives as well of, of some of these things with some of some of the trepidation maybe and come out with a positive story that also is true?

Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, I'd like to um, focus on the second point you just made about being true first because I think to me anyway, the, the ultimate measure of whether a rebrand or a brand update or any brand message really, I think the true measure of whether it's effective is whether or not it's really authentic. Is uh, it really a true representation of the experience your customers have with your brand. And I think in this day and age, if those things don't match up, if your brand isn't authentic to the experience that your customers actually have, I mean your brand will just get called out, you know, instantly in real time. Um, and you know, you see that happen all the time uh, on social media with brands that make a misstep or do something that is not authentic to who they say they are. So I think the most important part is the authenticity and the truth and being an accurate reflection. But to the first half of your question on how you weave uh, AI into your brand message in this really. And we're in a really especially interesting time over the past couple weeks with more discussion, um, in the spotlight around um, the pace of AI innovation and whether or not we need to intentionally slow down and put more guardrails into place. So it's a great time to be asking that question and to be thinking about that question. But I think it's also a little bit about demystifying, um, the risks and use of AI in hr, aspects like recruiting and hiring. I think, you know, when you think about the process to recruit and hire an employee for your business, there are tons of spots in the process that are ripe for automation where a human being doesn't actually want to be spending the time that they're spending. Think about interview scheduling as a great example.

Speaker A: Uh,

Speaker C: you say AI in hiring, and people instantly might feel like that's really risky or scary because you don't want AI making hiring decisions. But when you really understand the complexity of the hiring process, there are tons of places that are right for automation, like interview scheduling, where a recruiter or a hiring manager, they don't want to be spending hours of time going back and forth with candidates on their availability and the hiring manager's availability, and somebody gets sick and you have to swap it out. So there are so many, just dozens and dozens of fantastic use cases for AI to supplement what humans do in the hiring process, not to be making hiring decisions for them. M. And that's really a key part of our brand message, is the way that we use AI in our platform, first of all, is compliant with the plethora of regulations, and there's more and more regulations every single day that govern AI and hiring. So number one, we need to comply with those regulations, which of course we do. Um, but I think, number two, it's, it's just demystifying it a little bit and helping our customers understand where AI really can help them and can take things out of the process that humans do not want to be doing anyway and give them more time to be building the relationships up with candidates, proactively understanding their hiring managers needs, building talent strategies for their business. And it's just about striking the right balance with your brand message.

Speaker B: Well, and I think it's. Yeah, to, to your point, it's. It's using the right tool for the job. Right. Uh, I, uh, don't want to have to talk with someone on the phone about scheduling any meeting. You know, I, I use, uh, some. Some calendar tools even for the show, you know, to make things as streamlined as possible. Because I remember the days of sending 100 emails back and forth or phone calls of, hey, does this time work? No. Does this. You know, so to your. To that end, I, I feel like customers, uh, um, you know, uh, job applicants, whoever they are, I think when it just helps and when it solves a challenge, it could Be AI, it could be a person. You know, it's just a good thing. I think when it's. Maybe when it's obviously, hey, AI is being, I'll just say slapped on a, on a problem that AI shouldn't be used for. That's. I think that's where maybe it gets a bad rap because it's, it's again, you know, you're talking about using the right tool for the right job.

Speaker C: Yes,

Speaker B: I think, uh, there's, there's a lot of instances with other platforms and other things where it's just like. Okay, well, yeah, you. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Right?

Speaker C: Yes, such a great point. I think, you know, there's that aspect of it where you're slapping AI into every use case, even if it doesn't make sense. And I think as consumers we're all starting to have those experiences where sometimes the AI addition is really, really helpful and sometimes it's just annoying.

Speaker B: Yeah, right.

Speaker C: You know, you don't need it in that particular space. But I think then you also see a whole lot of AI washing where people are calling things AI that really have been around for a long, long time and are just things like workflow automation that's existed or, you know, or uh, rpa, you know, that's existed for many, many years or machine learning. And you know, they're just labeling it as generative AI, even really when it isn't that. And that just adds, I think, to the confusion.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So let's talk a little bit more. I want to go back to your point about authenticity and talk a little bit more about, you know, taking the new brand to market. Talk us through the process of how did you validate it? What role did customer or market research play in shaping that final decision or direction?

Speaker C: Yeah, I love that question. Um, we took a very data oriented approach to our rebrand. I've done a, I've been in marketing for many years and I've done several rebrands throughout my career and I've seen them done in a very, um, sort of siloed way where it's maybe just a CMO or a CEO saying, oh, I like this logo, I want it to look like this. And then I've seen it done in a very data oriented way where you actually ask your customers and your buyers and your market for input. And that's the direction we took with this rebrand for Isense. I think part of the reason we did that is because I am really a stickler for the authenticity aspect of your brand. I feel really strongly in any space, um, B2B, B2C. If your brand message is not authentic to the experience that your customers have, you're instantly going to lose trust with your existing customers and your future buyers and that's not going to help your brand. So it was really important to me that where we landed be authentic to what our customer experience actually is. So the way that we started our brand update process was by doing uh, market research with our customers and with prospective customers to understand what they think is true about our brand today, what they like about it, what they don't like, what they think when they think of us versus some of our competitors out in the marketplace and really what they would be looking for from their ideal provider of recruiting and hiring software. And we took that data and we let that, we aligned that up against our vision and what is true about us and what will be true about us in our future. And we looked for where those overlap points were and that became our new uh, brand message. And that new brand message is if you're not familiar with the recruiting and hiring software, space is really around powering exceptional hiring. So what we decided is that we are a software solution for companies that need to really be excellent at hiring, that need to excel at hiring where hiring the right talent is a differentiator for them. So if you're a business that hiring is not that important to you and it doesn't make a big impact in your ability to deliver products and services, we're probably not the right solution for you. We're a very, very powerful, flexible recruiting and hiring platform and we really are only a fit for companies where hiring is critical to their business outcomes. And so that was part of our uh, rebrand and part of our new go forward message.

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Speaker B: I know we talked a little bit about this, uh, you know, validating and, and, and things. But, you know, how do you, how do you back that up? Like, how did you decide were, you know, were good ways to make sure that it was authentic and.

Speaker C: Yeah,

Speaker B: to kind of, kind of back that up.

Speaker C: Yeah. So like I said, we were very data oriented. So not only did we gather data up front about perceptions of our brand today, then after we gathered all that data, we came up with something like 500 potential taglines and dozens and dozens of different logos and core vision statements. And then we narrowed those down. We didn't make buyers read hundreds and hundreds of options, but we narrowed them down to a set of maybe 10 to 12 that we thought were strong and were authentic to us. And then we went back out to the market and we did focus groups, we did online surveys, and we did interviews with hundreds of customers and buyers to say, okay, here are some of the things that we're thinking about for our new brand message. Tell us, does this ring true to you? Is this relevant to you? Is this differentiated? Does this just sound like what everybody else is saying? Are we just, you know, drinking our own Kool Aid? And we're not really saying anything different than anybody else. And so we did several rounds of that until we got it knocked down to three, um, front runners. And then we solicited input both from internally here at our own company because we wanted our employees to believe in our new brand, so we let them vote. Um, and then we talked to some industry analysts and experts in our field and really honed those three options down to what we landed on as our final new logo, new tagline, and new go forward message.

Speaker B: Nice. Love it. Love it. And just for those listening, what Is the tagline.

Speaker C: The tagline is power powering exceptional hiring. So it's really meant to convey if you need to be exceptional at hiring, if hiring is really critical to your business, we are the platform that powers that. If you're in a business where maybe hiring isn't as critical of an issue, then maybe we're not a fit for you. So it's just as much about who we're not for as who we are for.

Speaker B: Yeah. Love it. Love it. And so let's talk a little bit. You know, I've had a few conversations on this show about just this idea. You know, brand marketing is sometimes seen as less tangible, less measurable than demand gen. Uh, you know, what, how, how did you think about measuring success? And, and when, when in the process did you start thinking about measuring success of, of this, of this brand transformation?

Speaker C: Well, I challenge anyone who thinks that, uh, brand marketing is less data oriented than demand gen to sit in on the process that we went through, uh, to, to arrive where we landed, which was extremely data oriented. Um, and you know, it took about, from start to finish, took about a year, nine months to a year. Because at every stage in the process we went out to gather more data and to validate, um, our assumptions and our decisions. But I think to your point is, you know, uh, just an ongoing challenge, I think, for all CMOs is to be able to defend the investment in the brand because the value of that is sometimes less direct.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Than demand generation. If you go to an event and you get 10 new customers from that event, you can prove that event led to this much revenue. And there's a really direct correlation and it's really easy. Whereas investing in your brand, you know, it starts a ripple effect at the, at the surface of the lake. And it takes a while for that impact to impact your results. But I think there are ways that you can measure it. So some of the ways that we measure it. Well, a few different ways, uh, some of the ways that you can measure it are overall perception of your brand online. There's lots of tools out there that can measure brand sentiment for you. So number one, is overall perception of your brand plateauing. Is it going up, is it going down? And how does that correlate to your brand marketing? Um, another way that you can do it, especially today, is by understanding the sentiment of your brand in AI search and LLM search. Um, and what do the AI, uh, and LLMs out there think about your brand and say about your brand? Um, other ways that you can measure it are Traffic to your site is traffic to your site going up, going down. Um, and then we also do a twice annual brand awareness survey. Um, we do it blind so that buyers don't know what brand is asking. So that way we think the results are more authentic. But twice a year we go out and we ask buyers, who have you heard of in our space and what is your perception of that brand? And then you can line up those results to your brand investment dollars in your brand marketing.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I want to talk about, uh, well, we've talked about AI a few different ways, uh, so far. So you know, we've talked about the, the adopting AI features and hiring and, and AI and things like that. But I want another part of this is the, the buying process. And Certainly, you know, B2C buying process is changing as well, but the B2B buying process, you uh, know, I've definitely heard some recent stats on just how much it's changing and how much of, you know, the first times that for instance, your platform might be mentioned or considered are going to be inside an AI chat, you know, somebody chatting with Claude or ChatGPT or something like that. And so, you know, kind of it not only changes the funnel, but it also, you know, how do you think about when, when you're, when you're changing a, ah, brand, you know, when you're transforming a brand, how do you think about brand visibility in AI at the same time? And um, you know, how, how did those kinds of considerations go into how you, how you factor to brand transformation?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean I think everybody in marketing is in the same boat where we're in this really big transformation where you know, paid search or you know, things like Google Search were a huge uh, vehicle where buyers would get connected up with, with vendors or providers of whatever products they were looking for. And now you're really starting to see this shift where people are going to AI search or, or their favorite LLM Cloud or ChatGPT or whatever, perplexity. And they're doing a lot more research on, on their options and the products out there before they ever even come to you. So you know, there's you know, a lot of talk about the dark funnel and zero click. And I think we're all seeing that. I mean paid search used to be a really, really reliable source for high quality leads and clicks and it still is. But definitely our buyers, just like every human out there, are starting to shift to AI search. And so I think, you know, going back to the point of authenticity, we've been on this journey where, you know, in the 1950s you had a lot more control over your brand perception because the main way that people engaged with your brand was through things like advertising, where you control the message. We've been on this journey for many, many years, decades even, where you no longer control your brand message, the market, your users, your buyers control the brand message. And in, in a way, I think AI search is just the next evolution of that where um, what other people say about you is becoming more important than what you say about yourself. And that's really what's influencing whether AI searches and LLMs mention you or not, if they do mention you, what they say about you. So it really matters what your real customer experience is because that is the source that a lot of LLMs are drawing on. They're drawing on, you know, Reddit discussions and

Speaker B: right, um,

Speaker C: all kinds of third party content. They're not going to your website and copying and pasting from your website. And so you all CMOs, all, all brand marketers need to really be thinking about what is the real customer experience out there like, because that is what's going to inform the content that people see when they search on, on AI.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Jody, thanks so much for joining today. I, uh, got two last questions for you as we wrap up here. The first one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?

Speaker C: If we're having this interview one year from today, what is one thing? Well, I wish I had a crystal ball to

Speaker B: totally

Speaker C: accurate answer on that question. Um, I think, I think a couple of things, I think a lot more is going to shake out over the next year in terms of AI regulations and AI legislation. So I think that, you know, the conversation will be a little bit different about how brands incorporate AI into their messaging. You know, is compliance going to be a more important component of it? And I think, um, there's going to be a lot more, um, consolidation. There's just dozens and dozens of different AI providers and AI platforms out there. There's going to be a lot more consolidation. I think there's going to be a lot more clarity on whether every software provider is building and delivering their own AI tools. Are people consolidating onto central AI platforms and you're just plugging into those platforms. So I think we're, you know, maybe not all in the next year. It's probably going to take several years for, to get through this transformation, but I think we'll have more clarity on um, AI regulations and um, guardrails and how important that will be to the conversation.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, love it. And last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

Speaker C: Well, I listen to the Agile Brand podcast.

Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker C: Great to do it. I mean, I think just being intentional about making time in your day to pick your head up and listen to what's going on outside your own organization. It's so easy as a CMO to be so insular and just stay focused on your own little world and your own little space. So I try to make sure that I spend time every week to pick my head up and you know, listen to podcasts, read, talk to, talk to other CMOs, talk to folks like you that hear all about what's going on in the world of marketing. And I just try to make sure I spend a few hours a week doing that.

Speaker B: Yeah, love that. Well, again, I'd like to thank Jodi Kaminsky, Chief Marketing Officer at isims, for joining the show. You can learn more about Jody and ISIMS by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack, tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@uh techsystems.com that's teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting and advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com that's G R E G K-I H L S T R O M M.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.

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