The Debrief
Contentstack Rebrand
by Bill Kenney
What does it take to lead a high-impact B2B rebrand that delivers both strategic clarity and real business value?
In this episode of The Debrief, Focus Lab CEO Bill Kenney sits down with Contentstack CMO Gurdeep Dhillon to explore the full journey — from recognizing the need for a more robust rebrand initiative to activating a bold new brand in market.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- How a prior refresh clarified the need for a full rebrand
- The four criteria Contentstack used to select their agency partner
- How to structure internal collaboration and avoid bottlenecks
- What early signals indicated strong ROI, just weeks post-launch
Whether you're facing a similar inflection point or you're planning ahead, this episode offers a grounded look at how to lead a rebrand with clarity and confidence.
Episode Resources
Full Transcript
[Bill Kenney]
Hey everyone. This is Bill Kenney, CEO and co-founder of Focus Lab, a global B2B branding agency. I'm back with another episode of The Debrief.
In today's episode, I sit down with an old pal and three time client at this point. His name is Gurdeep Dhillon. He is the CMO of Contentstack. We had the pleasure of working with Gurdeep when he was at Marketo. We then had the pleasure of working with him at Zuora and now at Contentstack. What's great in this episode is I lead out these conversations always with, how did you find the right partner?
Now, you would think, because of what I've just told you, he would give a very straightforward answer. He did a wonderful job at unpacking that and sharing how he was unbiased as much as he could be, with four very specific criteria that he shares.
We go further into the project. We talked about what was the most challenging, what it was like to try to bring C-Suite in at the right stages, and maybe when they are not needed. How it's. challenging to make sure that everybody feels heard in a big rebrand like this, and then finally, we get to the ROI of this project that's only been live for two weeks, and we get to his final tip that he would share with any CMO who is about to enter a rebrand. A wonderful episode with a wonderful human being. Let's get into it.
Back again, sir. Wow. So you and I have crossed paths now for God, is it for years? Are we at a decade or so? Like when were you at Marketo?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
I think we're at seven, eight years, so yeah, it's pretty wild. Third rebrand.
[Bill Kenney]
That feels like a very long time ago. Um, I mean, not for nothing. That was a real catalyst project for us in a lot of ways. Obviously, a well-known name. It would have been, at that point, one of the biggest well-known projects that we went through. And really, such great work, such great people, it spawned a new process for us.
And, uh, here we are, let's call it eight years later, talking about another project. So welcome to the show. You've not been on this show, even though you and I have been connected and been friends now for a while. So we're gonna talk about the Contentstack rebrand. Are we, are we, do you, you call it a rebrand?
I call it a rebrand. Sometimes it's a refresh. What do you think?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
No, I think this one's a rebrand
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. It feels like a rebrand.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah. Yeah. It's, I think it's big enough in scope that we, uh,
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
You know, we did a refresh last year. Uh, it wasn't enough and we knew we needed to go bigger.
[Bill Kenney]
It's funny for me, I'm always, you know, when people come into the projects, I understand why they can get caught up on this word a bit. Like, well, it's not a rebrand, it's a refresh. I'm like, okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, you call it whatever the hell you want to call it, we're gonna help you make the thing better.
Yeah. it makes you more comfortable to call it this, call it that. But we're gonna move this thing forward to some degree, uh, or to a large degree. But before we get into the meat of the project, for all of the people watching and listening that don't know who you are, you just wanna tell 'em who you are and what the hell you're doing.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
What the hell am I doing? Yeah, that's the daily question. I'm Gurdeep, I'm a CMO at Contentstack. I’ve been there for about a year and a half. I’m having the time of my life, great company, great team, uh, an amazing product with incredible customers, which honestly is a marketer's dream.
Um, I came to Contentstack from Zuora, uh, I was there for almost four years.
Uh, prior to that was at Adobe. I got to Adobe through the Marketo acquisition, and then before Marketo, I was at SAP. So I've done the really big company thing, the mid-size company, and now smaller with Contentstack and just having a great time and a great run. Um, I have pretty much always been in marketing, focused heavily on the demand gen side of the house.
Um, and now I’m really enjoying dipping my toes into more of the brand and product marketing side. It's super fun.
[Bill Kenney]
Hell yeah. Yeah. That's, uh, quite a journey. Yeah. You've been at some very notable places.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah. And then, you know, on the personal side, based in the Bay Area. I’m married with three teenage daughters. So send me your well wishes. Even the dog is a girl, so, you know, surrounded by women.
[Bill Kenney]
Which is why you're such a wonderful human being. They have really shaped you to be such an amazing person.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
My emotional IQ, Bill, is off the charts. That's my story.
[Bill Kenney]
Uh, and then my poor wife is stuck with me and my son who are boys all the way through. Uh, great. Awesome, awesome. All right, so let's talk about the project. I kind of talked about very quickly, the goal with the show is really to uncover these projects in a way that a case study never could, to really bring light to the hard parts of a project. What are the things people don't think about before they get into them? So I'm gonna kind of lead us through that chat, which starts with, how does someone know and use you as an example? How did you know that Contentstack needed to go on this rebrand journey? What were the cues?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah, I love that question because it validates the fact that we put in the work to do this. I would say three things. Um. Number one, we knew we were at an inflection point as a company, but also as an industry. It's wild to just think how recent chatGPT and the madness of AI is actually not more than like two years old.
It's, it's just, it's crazy. We've never seen this pace of change and so we knew because of our place in the MarTech landscape and because of where the market was going and where we knew our customers were going to need to go, there was this big inflection point that was exacerbated by the fact that we acquired a company called Lytics a year ago, and that brought us into the data space.
And so we were evolving as a company beyond, we used to say, just a CMS to truly a digital experience platform. And it was like, well, our identity is not that, so that feels like it needs to change.
And then I think the last thing is just the competitive landscape from a brand point of view is very undifferentiated. A lot of red, a lot of just similar looking stuff, and we thought there was an opportunity to separate ourselves from the pack. That's why we said we need to do a rebrand, not a refresh like we did last year.
[Bill Kenney]
Got it, got it. Um, not to put you on the spot, but when you come in as a CMO and you can see that. How was that received then, right? Now you have to kind of bring that to C-Suite and everybody in and around you to say, Hey, I think we need to do this. Is that often challenging? Was it challenging in this respect?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
It is often challenging. However, it was not in this case because we were very well aligned as a leadership team on the vision of the company, where we wanted to go, and we knew, and this has been validated by customers, by partners, by prospects, and by analysts that in order to make this leap, we did need to kind of leave the old identity behind because otherwise we would be perceived as what we were when we started, you know, seven, eight years ago and not what we aspire to be, which is, the modern digital experience platform that takes out the legacy.
So, that was actually not hard in this case because we were 100% aligned. Um, and you know, that's surprising because we are founder-led, right? Like, like we've, Neha and Nishant are the founders of this company and they have an emotional attachment to the brand.
[Bill Kenney]
Right.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
But, what I love about their leadership also is they knew that this was a prerequisite for us to make this big leap forward.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Kudos to the both of them. I know that sets you up in your role, really well. If somebody is, I guess, struggling to get C-Suite to understand the value of maybe this type of a shift, what would you tell that person?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Um, I mean, everything starts with the why, Like, if you can get people nodding their head on the why, like, why are you even doing this? Why are you even in the game? That unlocks, I think, the gap between your current state and where you need to get to, and that's a strategic conversation. A brand refresh is one way that that can manifest in terms of a tactical, like the work that gets done to get you to the future state.
I think it's a natural outcome of having those important conversations about where are we going? And how does that compare to our current state? As a marketer, there's a perception that we just love doing brand refreshes.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, there sure is one of those, yes.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
You know, I'm not gonna lie, I do love it, but it's why we're doing it that really matters. And if you can articulate, I mean this is true for anything, but if you can articulate that, you get people nodding their head and then the execution of it is just logical.
There's no, there's no emotion in it. It's like, yeah, we have to do this. And that's easier said than done.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yeah. People skills. High people skills.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
It's all about people.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. You didn't need to use all of your superpower that you've acquired now, uh, in that moment. Okay. So leadership is aligned. You probably even kind of came into a leadership that might have already thought and understood those things, and maybe you just poured gas on it, so then you have to go out and find the right partner.
Now, we've kind of prefaced this to suggest there could have been a bias, but let's try to remove bias out. How do you go find the right partner? Or maybe even the better question is like, What do people look for? What did you look for in trying to find the right partner for this?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah. And Bill, I just wanna preface, I'm a huge believer in not. Prescriptively telling my team, you know, what vendors to go with and who to partner with. So we basically did an RFP type engagement to say, who's the right partner for us to go through this effort?
And I think there's four things we were really looking for. Um, one was we knew we had done the refresh and we wanted this to be way more comprehensive.
This was a true rebrand effort, and it needed to be different in scope to what was done before, to, you know, just kind of put some makeup on it and that, and that was not what the company needed.
So that was part one. We needed a partner that had experience handling the end to end project. Um, this might sound cheesy, but a true partner, like a company that was gonna treat us like their most important customer, that was going to put in the effort to understand us, make bold, provocative recommendations, but then listen to our feedback like that, the two way partnership, was really important. Um, alignment on vision. Like we knew the message we wanted to take to the market. We needed a partner that could understand and internalize that and then translate that into a brand identity that made sense.
And then my team wanted me to call out that, a big part of this is like the work doesn't end when you launch. The post launch transition is actually hard for the teams because these things tend to be phased out. And so we were looking for a partner that would give us, I would say, ongoing support and guidance in that post-launch transition period.
And so those four things were like the crux of what we were looking for as we evaluated partners. And yes, a hundred percent, I was biased towards Focus Lab, but I let the team go through the process to get to the answer themselves, and I knew where they were gonna land, so it all worked out.
[Bill Kenney]
I know what you're implying there, sir. I can read between the lines. Kudos to you for letting it be as unbiased as possible, right? Letting the team also weigh in. Um. I also know it's not easy to discern some of those things in, let's be real, like two or three calls, right? Yeah. You could discern if we as Focus Lab could stay on post-project and do the work with you because we have that as a service offering, but you can't truly discern how we will be as a partner necessarily.
You obviously knew, so you had experience to help with that. So yeah, I understand the challenge of talking to five different companies and going like.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Well that's where like, that's where this conversation is brilliant on your part because you know. Let's say I hadn't worked with you before. I would've wanted those references. I would've wanted to hear from others who'd gone through.
Um, now in this case, I was the reference so I could reinforce that these things that you guys just weren't giving lip service, like this was actually gonna be real.
But from a content marketing perspective, this is perfect because you've got the success story, you've got the advocacy that's happening. So, you know, I think stuff like that is really important for agencies to do, because otherwise people are trying to take your word for it.
It's kinda like when you interview someone for a job.
[Bill Kenney]
That's it.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
You know, you're trying to find culture fit, you're trying to find all these things, but how do you really know from a couple conversations? It's hard.
[Bill Kenney]
It's really hard. Yes. And that is why we record these videos. As well as giving back the knowledge that you're sharing, people can get an idea that we did and why it worked and how somebody feels.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Right. So you, you land back on us, as you said. You knew it was gonna happen. I appreciate the faith that you had in us. But I understand and also value that everybody should be talking to multiple people, even just to create contrast, right? So they can understand how different organizations operate, et cetera. Uh, all right, so let's get into the project then.
We start the project - this is a lengthy project. It was a full rebrand. It was not something that was done in a month or two, so we went through a lot together of all of that, what do you think was the hardest aspect of the project?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
You know, it's funny you started out by saying, did I have the C-suite on board? And I would say, well, the answer to that question was yes. I still think as typically happens with these projects, the biggest challenge was on our side.
It was internal alignment. It was change management. Going from two [brands] and having a lot of cooks in the kitchen.
When we say full rebrand, that includes our mission, our vision, our values, like these are meaty topics that people across the organization have either an emotional attachment to or a vested interest in any changes that we make to them.
And so, I think bringing people along for the ride at the right times, on the right areas of the scope of the project. Which, by the way, wasn't just a rebrand, it was also a replatforming of our website on Contentstack, like re-implementing Contentstack in a modern way, like we wanted to be the best version of our own product.
And actually, one of the main outcomes of the project for us was we wanted our new website to be a living, breathing demo of our product, basically.
That's something we're super proud of, but like that internal alignment and change management was the hardest part. But on the flip side, what I just said, that we're so lucky, uh, the product we sell, the product we deliver to our customers, the website is such a natural vehicle for us to tell our own story because you can actually feel what it's like to work with Contentstack. But we weren't doing that in a way that felt authentic and accurate in terms of where we were as a company with innovation. So we needed to fix that. And I would say probably the most rewarding part of this whole thing is that now I go to contentstack.com and I'm super proud of how we're representing ourselves, how we're representing our incredible technology, and our company. And this is just phase one, like phase two is coming, so it's pretty cool.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Good for you. Let's go back. You jumped ahead a little bit. Uh, let's go back to the hard part.
So that alignment issue, and then I'm gonna break it down a little bit for the people that are not aware. So what we do on our side is we ship the work every single Friday, right? So we work together for, I don't know, 16 weeks, more than that, every single Friday.
Deliverable, deliverable, deliverable. Some of these are big, meaty deliverables, 80 page PDF kind of Figma presentation files, big written documents with all the mission vision work you're talking about. Your team is reviewing that. You're trying to get all the people together to get their opinions.
That's not the whole team though, right? So tell people how small that team was and how did you organize that to be ready to get back to us?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah. Yeah. And I would say it evolved over time in a strategic way, but the worst outcome would've been if the project was slowed or bottlenecked by our own doing. We wanted to avoid that, and so having critical people in the process early to align on the brand vision and architecture , uh, or archetype was really important and we were very intentional about the people that we picked. And you know, in this case that did include our CEO. and that was intentional because my personal belief is that the executives shouldn't be too far in the weeds on this stuff, but we should be helping to drive the vision and the strategy.
And so it was very important upfront to have our creative leadership team, our content and product marketing leadership, and then myself and Neha, like part of that early ideation around what was this going to be. And then as we progressed through the process, when we would get those Friday deliverables, there were some instances where we needed to solicit feedback from other individuals, but that didn't mean we were gonna pull them into the full project. Now, the danger in that was two things. Number one, you know, people were like, well, how come I'm not part of the whole thing?
And then number two was like everyone has an opinion.
It's interesting Bill, you probably see this all the time, but you do have to balance the people are gonna have to trust that you did this thoughtfully, comprehensively, and you had the right people involved and that and that the output is gonna be amazing.
We have to balance that with the fact that there's people that have been with the company for a long time and feel like they could contribute to this thing and they understand the ethos of the company and all this stuff. And it's like, yes, and you'll be involved when we're ready for you to be involved.
I mean, when I say internal alignment, like that is the hardest part.
And cause you know, there's feelings involved and people are attached to this thing. And I love that because that means they care deeply about the brand and the company. Um, but in order for the project to actually get to completion, you can't open up the aperture too wide.
So we were very intentional. We started with the core creative team and I guess I would say the team that owns the story at Contentstack, and that's like CEO, CMO, creative, brand product marketing. Those folks are like the core to owning the story, and then you can expand from there.
[Bill Kenney]
I love how you said it, because I think it is the appropriate way to say it for both parties because yes, what you're saying is, is true, which is that those people's opinions do matter. You've got people within the business, they understand kind of the soul of what the business has been, and they, and that is actually helpful within these projects.
So you called it a yes and, and I think that's actually spot on. Nobody has said it that way. I think it's often seen as change management, which is like controlling madness, controlling chaos, right? And that doesn't have the same empathetic note. Yes and. Yes, we do value your opinion. Yes, you can add value to this project and we'll get it from you in these ways.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Both parties are trying to find the rhythm to work together on this project. Instead of, yes, getting a bunch of people, uh, let's call it more than 10 people a week in the same meeting, that starts to become unwieldy. I know that we try to direct all clients to be five people or less in these kinds of weekly meetings. I just wanna hit one more note.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Very tactically though, we send work end of day Fridays and then we're meant to meet with our clients, our project team, um, together on generally somewhere around the Tuesday.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
So you're stuck with now, the truck shows up with the big deliverable. Here you are. We'll see you on Tuesday. And we need you to get your team together, get some version of consensus. And then get back to us ready to talk. Not bring all of that jumble back to us. Bring it back. Clearly baked. How do you manage that height of a window? That's a Friday to a Tuesday.
So that left you with Monday to do all this.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah, well, I mean there was predictability in the cadence, like you just said. Because you guys delivered on time. So once we got past, like week one, it was like, all right, this is, this is how it's gonna be. We basically got commitment from our more senior leaders, including myself, to invest the time unless they heard otherwise from the team that this was not a situation where their feedback was required. Which is actually a really important point because there were some updates that were a little more tweaks and less less big rocks, and so we didn't need Neha to look at it.
We didn't even need me to look at it in some cases. My team did a really good job of managing that internally to make sure that over the weekend, if we had made a commitment to review and provide feedback that that was captured by Monday morning, if not, they were hounding us to say, Hey, we need this because we're meeting on Tuesday.
Um, and because it was a smaller group, like people just knew it was coming, they had already blocked time in their calendar to get it done, and it went super smoothly.
And now there were some cases where timing was crap because we had an event or something happening, and so there was a little more chasing involved. But you know, when you have alignment on the priority level of the project and you know, people take it seriously.
Um, I personally took it very seriously and especially early on because we needed to get to clarity on those big, big rock brand identity stuff, including, everybody goes to logo, but like, you know, logo a huge one, right? And that's one where we actually opened up the scope of people who could review to the broader executive team.
Like I came to that meeting with an output that we got from our normal process with, Hey, this is what we're thinking in terms of logo direction and, you know, archetype and all these things. And we had a cool like two hour session on just getting their feedback. So then they felt like they were part of the process, but not having to be in the weekly stuff.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Um, and so now they see the final output and they think, oh. Like I was part of that. I knew that was coming, right. Yeah.
So that was really cool. I think the cadence worked really well. it would've not worked as well if we needed sign off by, you know, eight to 10 people. But because we kept it to that five, six-ish, the team did a good job of capturing the feedback in one place and then not just handing that to you guys, but translating that into a cohesive Tuesday update of like, Hey, this is, this is what we collectively think.
It wasn't like, oh, this is Neha's feedback. This is Gurdeep's It was, this is Contentstack's feedback.
[Bill Kenney]
Yep.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Let's go from there.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, we call that single voice feedback and not, that's not a word that everybody kind of like immediately understands. Maybe because they're not going through rebrands all the time like we are on our side. But yeah, that single voice, right? Because if they come back and say, these are the five different people's tracks of feedback, we're left trying to figure out, who do we cater to?
So yeah, with that single Contentstack feedback, um, it makes it easy for us to then show up into that meeting on Tuesday. You guys got your thoughts together. We already know what your thoughts are, and now we're starting to form our thoughts in return and we can have a really productive weekly meeting and we stay on that rhythm.
All right. We talked a lot about the process there. That being, if there is gonna be a challenge. That is the challenge. I'm glad you called that out as what was the hardest, even though it was successful, right? Like that, that didn't mean that the process failed, that actually was there to support and make that hard thing less hard.
Uh, let's talk about the rewarding side. Was there a moment in there that felt really rewarding, emotionally exciting, et cetera?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah, I would say, talking about the logo. You know, you guys had a lot of conviction about one of the, one of the final recommendations that you made, and we disagreed.
And looking back, the back and forth and the, the seeking to understand where each other was coming from led to, I believe, something better than each of us in isolation were thinking was the way to go.
Um, and so I think it was super rewarding to have, because I remember when I said what we were looking for was a true partner. Um, it came to life in that motion where you guys were so excited about this one application of how we could do this thing.
And we were like, oh, like we kind of like this approach. Ultimately we landed on something that I think both parties agree is phenomenal.
And is differentiated and, and cool, uh, in this space. And I don't know that we would've gotten there if we hadn't had that partnership approach where you guys valued the client's feedback as much as even your team's feedback.
And we never felt like less than, we never felt like you were judging us for having different opinions. That for me was super rewarding. And I know I could speak on behalf of the team. Like they appreciated, I guess the vibe of how that, of how that went.
So I would say that where it was like we just, yeah, we had, we had a great working relationship to get to the outcome that we all felt good about.
[Bill Kenney]
I couldn't be happier to hear that. I mean, you know this to be true now multiple times over, but we really care about the working relationship. We really care about our expertise, and you can bring both of those things together. They don't have to be at odds. It's not our job to say you don't know what you're talking about, Contentstack team, this is what you should do. We're the experts.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
We have a saying inside the company now that's been around for years, which is like, good ideas come from anywhere and everywhere. It's not just us that can think creatively, and we certainly don't know your business and your customer, regardless of how much research we do, better than you.
So all these things have to come to the center of the table. Um, and you're right. I think that's another fantastic example of like, let's keep pushing and pulling each other, and as long as we understand that we're all out for the same thing, we'll never get mad at each other.
Another thing we'll ever come across is ego or judgment. It'll just be, we're all fighting for the best. All right, cool. I love where it ended up when that final form started to take shape and then it started to inspire the rotation.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
The adoptive nature. Yep.
[Bill Kenney]
Oh man. It was just kind of like, there's the unlock, right? Like it is there. Some projects don't necessarily get that level of an unlock, and that doesn't mean they're not successful either, but sometimes things just really line up in a way that you're like, it's like in the matrix when you can finally see all the things and he is like, ho, ho.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yep.
[Bill Kenney]
This had a flavor of that in that moment, and I love that for you all.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
When I saw that for the first time, it was like, fuck yeah, let's go. This is it. This is the one.
[Bill Kenney]
Exactly right. Even I was jumping into some of those weekly deliverables and creating assets because I started to get this, um, the 3D kind of like, I now want this to be a giant stone monument and like, what does it look like, like if it's inside an office space. So I was going inside a mid journey and Firefly, and I rarely do that on projects.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
I can't wait to build that. So good.
[Bill Kenney]
Just so damn good. So, so damn good. Alright, so that's the end of the project. So let's get now to the back end of this conversation, which is now, it's been live for, geez, not that long. How long has it been live? A month? Yeah.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
A couple weeks, yeah. 2, 2, 3 weeks.
[Bill Kenney]
Wow. What's cooking? Like I, yeah, I don't, I don't need it obviously didn't get hit like Cracker Barrel and we don't need to get into social sentiment, but like what is it unlocking? Even if that is purely like we're having fun making assets again, or we've been able to do this, or somebody has said that a couple weeks is not that long, so I can't be like, what's the ROI?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Well, man, we all know marketing attribution is hard and it's arguably not really worth our time because we can't control the journey and we could have a whole separate podcast about how we think about demand gen and all these things. But here's what I will say, um, for what we can measure, quantitatively, absolutely phenomenal.
Performance scores are up, SEO, accessibility, all the pieces of like the infrastructure of the website itself. Then you got the metrics like, you know, more vanity metrics, right? It's huge spikes in traffic, longer session durations, lower bounce rates, really strong engagement like people are interacting with our website, which is where the brand really comes to life as a first impression.
Um, that feels really good. I think, more importantly for me, is the feedback from customers, from partners, from prospects, from employees.
First of all, it's overwhelmingly positive. It resonates. It feels new and different, but it's like there's a sense of pride in working with Contentstack.
[Bill Kenney]
I love that.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
And that is now even stronger because we just come off as more enterprise class, as just cool and different. That's been like, as a marketer, like I couldn't ask for anything better on that front.
[Bill Kenney]
That gets your warm fuzzies going.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Right. But then, you know, when I talk about attribution, like, look, Q3, the summer months are really tough you know, people are on vacation. Like you're trying to book meetings, you're trying to grow.
I mean, you guys are probably going through it too. Like you're trying to, you're trying to grow the business. Yeah. Yeah.
We launched our rebrand in the first week of September. Our September pipeline is up 200% year over year, 200%. Now, there's a lot that goes into that. We had our ContentCon event in Europe, but 200% is not like a blip. That's a huge difference. Um, I mean, people are finding us and when they find us, I think their first impression is now really strong and it's causing them to want to learn more. And so, as the CMO, I can't ask for anything more than that.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yeah. Hell yeah. I love to hear that. Um. I didn't know what you'd be able to say only two weeks live. I'm pumped for y'all, right? 'cause you know this just as well as I know it, this is a compounding game now. So if you're already seeing and feeling that now that will, in theory, only get stronger the more that the brand has time to sit out there, and really build upon itself.
Because this game is obviously not just about a color or about a logo. Um, now that the brand lives up to its promise, people start to live more within the platform and the new innovation that's coming out, and then they tie that value back to the visual identity and all these, you know, it's, it's like a perpetuating machine at that point.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Seeing it come to life actually at our ContentCon event was so cool. People just immediately noticed like, whoa you guys like upleveled.
[Bill Kenney]
You leveled up.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
So yeah, a hundred percent. And now next week we're at, shop Talk Fall, uh, which is their fall event. And our booth is, like, so sick. Um, so it's just, yeah, it's really cool.
[Bill Kenney]
That's where I was. That's literally where I was going next. Let's talk about it a little bit without, I guess, giving it away. I was gonna say what's coming up next? Because I know for me, and I think probably for you too, sometimes these tangible expressions of a new identity tend to be really exciting.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah. So we're definitely, we're thinking about how we show up in live experiences because this
is not just a digital rebrand, and there's more to engagement and, and marketing than just digital. So we wanna, we wanna wow people with in-person experiences, for sure.
So we're very excited about like third party events, first party events, we're excited about some of our sponsorships that we do for like, you know, in-stadium type experiences.
Really cool stuff we can do there. Um, another one is swag. We are a big swag company and the applications, like people are, remember, do you remember that, um, Rubik's Cube idea
you guys had for us? Which is like, kind of like the logo looks a little, we're, we're like leaning in on that.
And we're gonna try and come up with a Rubik's cube concept that brings the logo to life like in and of itself. And then, basically phase two of the web relaunch, which is, you know, the design is there. We're all loving the dark mode and the, and, and the way that it, like pops.
But, you know, phase one was really just like a CMS re-platform. Phase two is when we really bring adaptive digital experiences and personalization and Agentic to life. And that's coming really soon. So I'm really excited about that part because that will, even more so, any visitor to our site will not just experience our brand identity but also, be able to feel the power of Contentstack. And to me that's like, that's like the best of both worlds.
So I'm really excited about that phase two, which the team is working really hard on right now. Now that we have this new identity, how do we bring that to life across different channels, digital and physical next year? And the team is already having a lot of fun with that ideation.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, this, you're actually, you're spot on with where I was even thinking, you know, I've talked a lot about design here. I wanna be really fair to my team and the strategy that goes into this and the writing that goes into this. Coming out of it with the brand concept, it's your move.
Right? So much is kind of woven into that statement in this idea of rotating elements and that as a concept. Vision in motion. We've got all this like stretched text going up.
And so you really got the verbal and the visual coming together. Kind of like you mentioned, it was just kind of like everything kind of unlocked and really came together. Um, which led to comments like this, lemme read this, you posted this technically a day ago, but when this goes live, it won't be a day.
“Uh, in the last week, we've demoed to one of the largest media companies and largest transportation, uh, transportation companies in the world. Feedback, wow, you've blown us away. You made me realize I'm solving a much bigger problem than just replacing my CMS and a bonus from an analyst who had said we probably wouldn't be able to surprise him, in quotes, I am humbled.”
Which then you left the sign off of LFG Rocket Ship. You've got a product that's obviously wowing people and they're realizing like, wow, this is bigger and better than I actually thought it would be. Now there's an identity paired to help to kind of pull them in, like you said, right?
For them to get a taste set of like, no, this thing, this is a game changer. We couldn't be happier for you all.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. And the brand piece, it's given us swagger of like, I mean it sounds simple, but even like the PowerPoint template, walking into a meeting with like, yeah, we're gonna say words and we're gonna show you stuff, but like we look awesome.
[Bill Kenney]
We got our act together.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Like it makes a difference. It makes a difference. And people are like, people are texting me, they're like excited to build decks. You know, like, that's so cool. It's like, I'm excited to build slides. Like no one's ever excited to build slides, but because the template is new and it's so sleek. So it makes a difference, and when you walk into a demo like that and it's like, boom. And then you go into the product and it's a double boom, like, it's so cool.
[Bill Kenney]
Alright, so we've covered a lot and I'm gonna force you to a single answer here.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Oh boy.
[Bill Kenney]
You are sitting down with a CMO or even a leader of an organization and they were about to enter a rebrand, and you could just tell them one thing, either do right, to look out for whatever that one thing might be, what would you tell them?
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
I would say, uh, especially if it's to a fellow CMO, do not go down this path unless you have the team in place that you trust to do the hard work. And I think that's important because in order for the project to truly be successful, the executive team kind of has to stay out of the weeds.
I truly believe that like you have to. Whoa.
[Bill Kenney]
You brought Jesus out. Hold on. Wow.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Is this the rapture, Bill? Is this it?
[Bill Kenney]
Holy cow. I don't know what the hell just happened there. Holy shit. My light just went bonkers.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
I just gave the most incredible answer and like the sky's opened up. Um,
[Bill Kenney]
Go ahead.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
I just, I think you can't be in the weeds. You gotta, you gotta trust the team. And so you can't do that if you don't have the right team in place. And so for me, I felt like I could be involved early and often with vision and the really important decisions, and then trust my team to partner with you guys and follow this thing through to the end.
And I was informed when I needed to be, and consulted when I needed to be, but it was driven by the team. So you gotta have that team in place and they have to be experienced enough and trusted enough that you can, let them run with it. Uh, so that would be the number one thing.
[Bill Kenney]
Well said. Uh, your team is pro. It's worth mentioning, right? You're right, that makes a difference. And when they're pro like yours, it makes all the difference.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Um, you have organizations that enter this and they think it is largely the hard work is on us, right? Because to be really clear what Gurdeep is saying, like when he's talking about getting the right team, he's not saying hire the right agency team.
He's saying make sure your team, on your side, this is their priority. They have the skill to at least enter a project. They don't have to have gone through 28 rebrands, but they have to have the skills, people skills, um, detail orientation, logistics, management stuff to actually engage in this project and to be able to get through it as a group.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
A hundred percent.
[Bill Kenney]
Not just you, sir. As the CMO trying to lead this entire effort.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
And actually going back to like challenges, like the, one of the hardest parts is when there's basically a handoff of the brand kit, from agency to team and if the team hasn't been a driver all along, like that handoff can be really hard. Because now you gotta take that and bring it to life through the web redesign through other stuff.
If it had just been like me running point and involved in, and then, oh, here, okay team, here you go. They'd be like, what? like, what? What should I do with this? This is crazy. So yeah, I just think it reinforces that the team makes all the difference.
[Bill Kenney]
Yep. Again, it's, it is well said. You've got the experience to share those perspectives
Well, kudos to you. Congrats to the organization. It really was a pleasure working with you all. You were all pros, great perspectives, good energy in the meetings, uh, even when it was challenging. So, um, thanks for showing up in that way and thanks for trusting us to be the partner.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Likewise. We really, really enjoyed the project. I think our company is extremely proud of the outcome. Uh, I'm humbled to be part of this conversation with you and you helping us, uh, you know, evangelize the work we've done together.
If anyone who's listening wants to talk to me directly, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn or whatever. Um, happy to share more detail, but it's been an absolute pleasure. So thanks Bill to you and the team.
[Bill Kenney]
I get to watch from the sidelines now.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Wishing the best for you all and just can't wait to watch you grow. Growth is, growth is eminent.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Cool man. Thank you.
[Bill Kenney]
Yes, sir. All right, cheers.
[Gurdeep Dhillon]
Have a good weekend. I'll see you Bill.
