The Debrief
Totango Rebrand
by Bill Kenney
What does it take to align multiple brands post-M&A and launch a bold new identity that actually lands?
In this episode of The Debrief, Focus Lab CEO Bill Kenney talks with Totango CMO Karen Budell about the strategy, collaboration, and creativity that led to one of the most effective brand activations in SaaS.
Karen shares how her team brought together distinct cultures, rallied around a clear brief, and unveiled a unified brand that resonated deeply with customers — culminating in a standout conference presence that turned heads and sparked conversations.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- Why clarity of purpose matters more than speed
- How creative risks can elevate brand perception
- Behind the scenes of their “record store” booth concept
- Tips for leading a successful B2B rebrand
- And so much more!
Episode Resources
- View Totango's new brand in action: https://www.totango.com/
- Totango <> Focus Lab case study
- Learn more about the community's Karen is a part of:
Full Transcript
[Karen Budell]
And literally as I'm driving, I'm not kidding you, Bill, I saw someone gearing up to base jump off the side of the highway. I'm having this conversation about a pivot and I see someone ready to jump off a bridge. Seeing that I was like, you know what? Let's be courageous. Let's go in this other direction. Why wouldn't we take a risk?
[Bill Kenney]
Hell yeah. And if that's not just the end of the episode right there, I don't know what is.
[Bill Kenney]
Hey everyone, this is Bill Kenney, CEO, and co-founder at Focus Lab, a global B2B brand agency.
I'm back with another episode of The Debrief. In today's episode, I'm sitting down with Karen Budell, she's the CMO of Totango, and we go through that whole journey together. How did she know it was time to go through a rebrand? How did she find an agency partner? What was the most challenging aspect of the project? We talk about what was most rewarding for her. Then we get into the activation, and this is what makes this episode special. We spend a ton of time talking about how they activated the work at a conference with their booth specifically.
I'm not lying when I'm telling you I got chills because I was so damn excited about how successful the activation was for them. How they took the strategy, the messaging, and the identity, and turned it into what they turned it into at this event. I'm so freaking happy for this team.
I'm so proud of the output and now you all get to relive that journey with me and Karen. Enjoy.
[Bill Kenney]
Okay. Okay. Okay. I've been really waiting for this episode. You put me on pause appropriately. I was like, Hey, Karen, let's record. You know when the project is done and you're like, yeah, cool.
Let's actually wait months because we have a big event that I think will be really important to relive in the interview. So here we are. But let's not go there yet. I'm going to shut up for a second. I'm gonna give you the mic and have you introduce yourself and tell people what you're doing, who you are.
[Karen Budell]
My name is Karen Budell and I am the Chief Marketing Officer of Totango. I've been at the company nearly three years and have followed a non-traditional path to marketing and SaaS leadership. Uh, fun fact about my career journey is that I started off as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune's Newswire service.
So if you wanna know anything about the city of Chicago, it was my job for a year to drive around at a moment's notice when news was breaking and I had to go get the breaking news and supply it to the city's newspapers and radio stations. So, I got to know every corner of the city. Was first on the scene for a lot of big events. Learned how to get all angles of the story. But, you know, that served me well. Helped me be a better marketer, a better leader, and learning how to ask questions, learning how to connect the dots. I was a reporter for about five years, transitioned into marketing and found my way as a chief content officer at an agency. So I do know and love the agency life, Bill. I've not only worked with a lot of agencies, but I've been on the agency side. So now a few more things are connecting the dots for you.
Right. So here, here I am, all the different experiences, I think, shape the perceptions that I bring to a project and how to tackle a creative challenge.
[Bill Kenney]
Great intro. I love hearing fun facts that I did not know after spending so much time with you during that project. I did not know this about Chicago. And now you're at Totango, which we'll get to now.
[Karen Budell]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
So, before we get into the actual project. I'm always interested to hear someone in your seat share their perspective on what were the pain points like how did you all know at Totango that it was time to invest in branding?
[Karen Budell]
Yeah, I would say that this was almost too easy of a decision to make when it came to, you know, what do we do with the brand? Because we had gone through quite a bit of M&A in a short period of time. So Totango was around 15 years old. Interestingly, when I joined the company almost three years ago, they had just completed a brand refresh, we'll call it. A refresh to update the website and revise the logo, and so I stepped into that. But at the beginning of 2024, Totango merged with Catalyst, which was a competitor in the customer success software space. We had two different identities that were out there in the market, very different looks and feels, tones and voices.
And, you know, these two cultures were coming together as a merged company, looking at unifying the employee base, but also the product suite. Then as we were starting the brief process, as we were starting to evaluate who we would work with, a couple months into that we just had another curve ball thrown our way and the company acquired a small AI startup, which added another team culture and product to the mix.
So we knew it was really important for us to unify our identity. For the inside, for the outside, and give us a brand platform to build a lot upon for the next chapter for Totango.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. We work with a variety of clients, obviously, but we do start to see more and more of people in your position, right? The catalyst is, no pun intended, M&A.
[Karen Budell]
Yep.
[Bill Kenney]
There's multiple teams now coming together and you all were a pretty strong example, a healthy example, of very different identities. Both in voice, visuals, and all that. Bringing those two worlds together was a fun exercise. For somebody like yourself, there's so many options out there, right? I can't even keep up as an agency owner.
[Karen Budell]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
So how does someone in your seat define or decide, I should say, like who are they gonna work with? Tell us about that journey. Is it hard for somebody in your seat to find an agency and to pick one?
[Karen Budell]
Yeah, I mean, the first instinct for a lot of leaders and myself included, is who have I worked with before? Who do I know at an agency that might be a fit? So that's kind of where you start. You go to who you've worked with, where you've had a good experience.
But increasingly in my case for this project, I went to my community. I'm pretty active with Pavilion, Women in Revenue, with CMO Coffee Talk. And there are other leaders that have gone through a rebrand. You know, I've been through over a dozen probably in my career, but they've been through one more recently than I have.
And so you tap your community network. Who have you worked with, who've you had a good experience with? And that's ultimately, you know, what helped me develop a short list, what ultimately led us to work with you and Focus Lab. But I see this a lot and I'm still hearing this from other marketing leaders and go to market leaders I talk to.
People go to their community for recommendations, for advice. And if it's not the community first, it's an LLM. So, you know, AI and community are the two places people are turning for answers these days. And that's still like your classic human plus AI, right? You need both.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, we see it directly on the other side. AI is becoming a really strong player in our top of funnel activity. A high percentage now. It's not just like, oh, we got one lead this week. Through that. It's like no half or more of the leads in any given week might have come through LLM.
Okay, so somebody in the network was like, we've heard good things about this company. You should work with them. So you reach out and we get to work, we say, great, we're gonna work together. So we get into the project. Now, this was a long project. I mean, what, how many months do you think it was? I can't even recall.
[Karen Budell]
I think we, I wanna say we started in July. July or August, and didn't debut the new brand into the world until January, so you know, like six months or so. Which is funny because when I originally knew that we were gonna have to explore brand post the merger, I was getting a lot of pressure to move fast, really fast.
Like weeks, like a month, like maybe two months tops. You know, big decisions come not only in brand, but naming. And, you know, this isn't my first rodeo in that respect. I worked on the renaming and rebranding of SurveyMonkey to Momentive. Back in the day that came out in 2021 and the huge decision to rename a public company at the time, um, to reflect the shift in business strategy, to shift the market that was being served.
Which, you know, there's two other answers if anyone's playing along on brand bingo, like reasons to rebrand, right? M&A shift in business strategy or, or market and buyers that you're serving. So, to go from feeling that pressure to move quickly to suddenly finding myself in a position to let the brief and the process play out actually felt really luxurious in a way.
Even though there are certainly points of stress and pressure throughout the process. We really were able to explore every corner of the creative process, which I think got us to the best result.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. You know, and I can understand and I and I, don't poke fun and I know, I know you were not as well at the leaders that are hungry to move fast, right? There's an initiative. We gotta go, but don't understand the nuance that you and I understand of how much work it's gonna be, even just from the, like, you know. Let's dumb it all the way down to like, why would a logo take that long?
Well, it's not a logo, but even that, sign off in a week. Do you know how many variations of a thing you're gonna have to look at to fall in love with it, to understand it, to embrace it. And you know, it's like these things take so much time to kind of mature during the project. Um, so yeah, six months of work together. So I'm gonna hit you with two questions.
What do you think was the hardest part of the project?
[Karen Budell]
Oh, you know what I really struggled with? Initially was the process itself, the way in which the creative was delivered week to week. And that's very unique, I think, to Focus Lab and the way that you all work. But every Friday we received a set of deliverables. We knew what we would be getting, and we got those deliverables.
You know, in the past, I've, God, I've been, whether it was in the room or on a Zoom, have had creatives present to me, and that's the first time I saw it. This was a package delivered and then I could absorb it and take it in myself on my own time. We got a small group together internally within my marketing team, and we talked about it, and after that is when we reengaged with the Focus Lab team.
And I think I shared that with you in the group. I struggled with that in the beginning.
[Bill Kenney]
You did, yeah.
[Karen Budell]
I'm very much, you know, I'm an extrovert. I enjoy the energy I feel from working with others. So this whole remote world is a challenge for me. You know, I love being in the room, going to events with folks.
But yeah, that asynchronous communication for a big, strategic, creative project like this took a while for me to get used to. But then I will say, I came around and I really loved it. And I think that process is what helped us get to the result and the outcome that we had in the end.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, we, we do hear that. Yeah. Maybe it's 50/50 or not quite that spread, but because it is different, there is that initial kind of shock and awe like, oh geez I just feel like I'm in a silo. I'm over here like on the other side of the fence, right? You threw a thing over the fence and I'm gonna throw it back to you.
But then we use those meetings in the recorded video that is paired with the deliverable video, to give some of that context and energy and excitement around a particular direction. It's different. I definitely understand it's different.
[Karen Budell]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
What do you think the benefit of that async deliverable cadence was, though, for your team?
[Karen Budell]
Well, I think creative feedback and creative assessment it's such a challenge, right? There's a lot of subjectivity in it, and folks may not have a lot of experience in describing what they like or don't like about creative through a more objective lens. Like how do you give creative feedback through the lens of the brief?
What was the strategy? What were you trying to achieve from the outcome? It's so easy for us as humans to default to, I like this, or I don't, and here's why. But I think having the ability to review the work as a small internal team allowed us to really have open conversations and not put a polish on it. You're not, you're not editing yourself for the person that made it in the end. So you can have really honest conversations. That took us down some really interesting paths. I mean, I'll tell you, we did a hard pivot. We had a front runner and we were heading in one direction early on with the logo and initial identity.
And I will never forget because I was in my car. I'm having a creative conversation on a speaker phone, and literally as I'm driving, I'm not kidding you, Bill, I saw someone gearing up to base jump off the side of the highway. I was driving on my way to Reno Airport and I'm having this creative conversation about a pivot and I see someone ready to jump off a bridge and like it's one of those moments, you'll always have it seared in your memory, but I think seeing that a lot, I was like, yeah, let's, you know what? Let's be courageous. Let's go in this other direction. Why wouldn't we take a risk?
[Bill Kenney]
Hell yeah. And if that's not just the end of the episode right there, I don't know what is. For the people watching and listening, this is why we record these. This is the reality of these projects, right? It's not just the case study at the end and the activation that I'm excited to talk about. It's these, what feel like monumental, life changing, jump off a bridge decisions and the pivots that happen and all these things that are the real meat of a project. Fantastic. I love it. And I love where you all ended up, so I'm excited that that moment happened for you.
[Karen Budell]
Yeah. Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
You never really know how these things will go and why a certain pivot will come either, right? Sometimes it's one person in the room, not even on our side, that's being the ultimate champion of a direction and really trying to get everybody to move in a single direction. Or it's an overwhelming majority that feels really great about the other direction, and it just kind of goes that way.
[Karen Budell]
I mean, can I just say on that point, because I've been there, I've seen it happen, or I've been part of a team previously where it's really easy to be swayed. For the, you know, highest paid person's opinion, or someone that's not really close to the project and comes in with a strong point of view.
It's easy to just kind of give in and carry on. But I would say the one thing I kept thinking about was we've got such a really clear brief. We had good inputs. We talked to the leadership, so we knew what we wanted to achieve, and I felt like it was my job to kind of keep steering us in that direction.
And if we went off brief, we had that document, we had that artifact to go back to. I think that's increasingly hard for today's leaders. I've talked to a lot of marketers that just feel like to maintain that agency through the process and, and keep folks on brief and explain why we're doing this and what we're trying to achieve.
It's hard when you're in it, I'm sure you see that, but I wanna acknowledge that for all my fellow go to market leaders out there.
[Bill Kenney]
It is hella hard to do that. The make and break of that dynamic, the success or failure of that dynamic is largely pinned to the point person or persons inside the project. You, Carrie, specifically, right? The type of people and leaders you are inside your organization, the type of trust you're able to build. With founders that are ultimately maybe the super veto over the top of any decision that needs to happen. And, how we would like to think that we enter the project too and help navigate the same dynamic. We're all trying to navigate that dynamic together. Now, if we weren't great at that and/or you weren't great at that, that tidal wave would crush the whole project over. It would literally just sweep over the whole entire thing. And we see it for sure. Sometimes we know the point person on the other side is just not set up for success. It's not their superpower.
I share all that to say yes, I recognize it, and I also wanna give kudos to you. And Carrie and your project team, of course leadership as well, they were all great. Like we all went through this project together.
[Karen Budell]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
I think you navigated that dynamic really well. You played a perfect middle. You understood what the briefing needed to be, you understood the concerns. You empathized with the business, you empathized with us, what the needs of both groups are, right? It's tough to bring both groups together and make all those decisions, and work through that. So high five to you.
[Karen Budell]
Oh, well, thank you. High five. I'm gonna pass that high five along to my team and maybe something to share with folks listening, in what I feel was a, a real key to our success, which was we kept the core team on our side really small.
[Bill Kenney]
Yes.
[Karen Budell]
And it's so easy and tempting to add everyone, you know, everyone wants a seat at the table.
It's really easy to let that group balloon, but we kept the team small and on our side we had a kick ass project manager, and that was Carrie Crimmins on my team. We could not have done any of this without her. That woman can move mountains. I would trust her with anything. She is great at keeping our eye on the ball and she herded the cats on our end and literally helped Calvin Herd. Calvin Ulery, our designer, has like 20 cats, so, you know, she was a cat herder in the literal and figurative sense throughout this project. But, with Carrie, with Calvin, with Chris Winkler, who's our product marketing leader, like that was the team.
We kept the weekly team that small and of course we brought others in, at points. But like when it came to the core team, that was it. And I think that helped us really have those honest conversations, know when we needed to seek a little bit of feedback from our larger extended group, but that's what allowed us to move fast.
That's what allowed us to stay on track.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Fast, still six months, but fast.
[Karen Budell]
Yeah. But fast week to week. Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Right. Because if you now have got 12 people and there are 13 people in there, like six months goes to a year and a half before you even blink an eye. Right. 'cause it starts to become just a different game. Yeah. That, that project team, I'm glad you brought that up.
That needs to be a takeaway for anybody listening. The project team has to be small and it has to be kind of like the SWAT team. It
It really is like some power players that are entrusted to now deliver on this project and to see fit when it's the right time to pull somebody in for an opinion or that we don't need that yet. We, we got this.
[Karen Budell]
Right. Right.
[Bill Kenney]
You all did that well, very well.
[Karen Budell]
Thank you. Well, yeah, it was a great team. But can we talk about the result? Because I could not be more excited and proud of where we, where we landed.
[Bill Kenney]
Right. Before we get to the activation, what was the most, well okay, maybe that is the answer. What was the most rewarding part of the project?
[Karen Budell]
Well, yeah. The process, I think, brought our team together in an incredible way, right? These are challenging times, and we could not have done this without being open and collaborative and communicative. So, we all worked even better together just by going through that process together.
But I am so excited about when we flipped the switch on the website. Because we merged companies and businesses, so we put all of our efforts into revamping totango.com. And when we launched that, actually even before that, when we previewed it with our customer advisory board, the feedback. I've never, never, in the maybe 10 or 12 rebrands I've worked on, had a rebrand unveiled and only received positive feedback.
Like, it was incredible. You know, like that's the thing. One hundred percent positive sentiment. Like what a win. And people loved it. We stayed true to the brief, but we also stayed true to some of the heritage that was at the core of the brands we brought together, I would say on both sides.
That was definitely recognized by our longtime customers and team members. And I could not be more proud of the results and how it elevated the brand's position and the reputation that we'd been working really hard to shift over the last couple of years. So that moment, the feedback, the reaction was like, yes, just bring it on.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, it is such a stressful moment. You know, you don't see these shows anymore, but people go in for a makeover and they come out and they look totally different and they're probably wondering like, do I look better or worse? Do I look weird, different, cool? That's a stressful moment for a business when that brand drops and especially for people like you and I, because we just know there's gonna be somebody out there that's like, I don't get it. It's stupid. It looks like this other thing I saw two weeks ago, it's been ripped off. And it's like, God, it's such, it's such a minefield to walk through, after all that work and energy and decision making. I'm so happy for you that you had that.
[Karen Budell]
Yeah, that, that's probably the only time that will ever happen.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, so it's good we relived it. Yeah, squeeze some more juice outta that.
[Karen Budell]
Totally.
[Bill Kenney]
Let’s get to the activation then. Let's get to the activation. So you put me on pause, you said, Hey, we're gonna do this thing. It's gonna be really cool when we bring it to life at an event. I'd like to do that, and then we can talk. And then I saw it and I was like, holy shit. That was so well done. I was even pulling it up today, looking at it again in prep for this conversation,
[Karen Budell]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
I was like, oh my God. So for the people that have no idea about this project, they've not looked at the case study, I'm gonna let you story-tell that, tell us how you got to that point.
[Karen Budell]
Yeah. Well, I would say going back to the strategy phase of the work we did with you and the team, we explored our brand archetype. We leaned into the athlete. We have a love for the game. We have a love for training and evolving the game. That just felt so true to you know, who, who we were, who we wanted to be, but we also explored the brand concept of rhythm.
The name Totango came about because it takes two to tango. It's about a business and their customers in this kind of endless stance of working together to find value, to find and achieve success. And so we leaned into this brand concept of rhythm and that led us to some really exciting copy lines and ultimately our tagline, revenue on repeat.
Which is just so awesome when you think about what we do. We help recurring revenue businesses drive growth from their customer base, ultimately to retain and renew business revenue on repeat. Like that's what we all want. But leaning into that, leaning into the brand concept of rhythm and fun. Fact number two, which I didn't even think about in the process.
I was a DJ in college. I had a crazy time slot, but I would go to the campus radio station, KWR 90.3 FM and I had my show. I've always loved music and we just leaned into this concept of rhythm and revenue on repeat and thought, how do we get people to want to show up at our booth and talk to us.
You know, sure, you can hand out swag, the best swag on the block, but what's gonna intrigue them? What's gonna get them to interact with us? And so, we explored this concept. We worked with a great event producer Calvin, our designer. And, the team got together and we explored this concept of music and a little bit of nostalgia: a record store.
And Calvin started working on some mood boards. And this just took us down this wonderful creative labyrinth where we explored all corners of music and that tactile nature of going to the record store and flipping through the bins of vinyl covers and looking at the beautiful art and interacting with that and listening to the different beats and the sounds.
So we were like, let's do it. Let's make the booth a record store. Let's also make the records that are in the bins and on the walls. So that was probably the most fun, like taking classic album covers and reimagining them with words and copy lines that reflect, you know, a SaaS business and recurring revenue on repeat.
So, you know, we took the Clash London Calling and it reimagined it as "Growth Calling" and reimagined a Sex Pistols cover as, "Nevermind the Churn". I think the favorite one that I came upon, uh, one day as I was just looking for inspiration online. We've got a great color palette that's, you know, this bright surge green, and a pop of Forte Orange.
And I was like, what about Dark Side of the Moon? Can we reimagine Pink Floyd? "Dark Side of Churn" and Calvin was all over it. That was actually the favorite, record cover from the conference, uh, word on the street. So we just had fun bringing it to life. I actually have them right here.
We printed them their actual covers. We put swag inside. We made these amazing little coasters for your home office desk with a little record. We put some stickers and a one-sheet about our offerings in there. Oh, this is another great one. I mean, just even like having fun with the Beastie Boys.
[Bill Kenney]
Were people taking those?
[Karen Budell]
People took them home.
Like we, we printed a couple hundred to fill the bin, but like, I'm like, oh, you wanna take this home? People were coming back and collecting them. The smiles on people's faces. This was at a B2B conference with maybe 1200 executives in post-sale functions. So customer success, customer service, revenue generating roles, and, you know, it's generally a pretty, like it was an Orlando conference room, not a lot of buzz.
You know, in the middle of the day you're serving an early happy hour. But the smiles on people's faces, the excitement as they flip through the bins and the conversations that that opened up were just so much more authentic. We overachieved on our onsite meetings, on our booth scans, on the richness of conversations, and I think the biggest brand challenge that is so tough to measure, we created space in these people's minds.
So when they see us again or they have a need, they are going to remember the moment that we created.
[Bill Kenney]
Yes. Hell yes. You're literally, I'm not even messing around, you're straight up giving me goosebumps. I'm just such a goddamn brand nerd, I'm so excited to have been a part of this journey. I'm so proud of how you've taken that and even built on top of that. How much joy you're getting out of it. And now that it's actually like creating real outcomes. That's it. That's like, that's the perfect storyline. I want one of those.
[Karen Budell]
I'll get your address. We'll, we'll, we'll send you some album covers.
[Bill Kenney]
Um, oh man. I can only imagine what it was like for somebody in that Orlando in the middle of the day going like, ah, somebody with a fresh take and interesting to at least go look at. Thank God.
[Karen Budell]
Yeah. I mean, I will just call it, I feel like we won the conference. Everyone was talking about us. And I'll take this one step further too. I mean, look, we know that events are not cheap, but this was huge for us because, I would say our top 60 or 70 customers are members of this conference group.
So we knew they would be there. We've won some of our biggest deals, from going to this. So it was both a customer marketing and acquisition play here. But we took it one step further, we're like, if we're gonna do a record store, our employees need to have uniforms. So we wanted to make sure we had cool t-shirts and swag so folks knew who was on the team.
So we took that revenue on repeat tagline and the awesome topography that was part of our brand style and stamped that tagline on the back and that big surge green boldness.
We made custom sneakers with the logo. So, you know, we just looked sharp and everyone stood out and we had a unified look, we had a such a cool space, a record studio vibe.
It was fun, and it's so rare that you feel that when you're walking through an expo hall of booths at conferences. So I would just say, you know, I encourage fellow marketers and leaders, just take a chance because everyone, whether you're an attendee or a sponsor or a presenter, people spend a lot of time and money for these events.
They're looking to make authentic connections. It is worth the investment for them to remember you and have those good feelings associated with their interaction with your team and your brand.
[Bill Kenney]
Well said. And I think it's important to remember in the way that you all executed it, it wasn't kitschy either. It was on brand from both a language and narrative, but it was also professional. It was still playing to the enterprise client, but it was still interesting. Like these two worlds can be true. Both can be true.
[Karen Budell]
Yes.
[Bill Kenney]
And during the project, when we're making decisions around the typography that you're talking about. That was on the fence for a little bit, if you remember. Right?
[Karen Budell]
Yeah. Yep.
[Bill Kenney]
Should it be a little bit more standard because we're going enterprise and you know, we had a lot of discussions around that and ultimately it stuck around and we found a way to make it work. And the thing that's really hard, and you almost just have to trust that these things will become true. It's like, well, we, we might not know exactly where it's gonna get used or how valuable it will be yet, but like, you're gonna need assets in here.
You're gonna need things. The vision for the booth was nowhere even close to being dreamt up yet, but we're talking about rhythm and these words and these taglines, and they start to form a thing. Um, you all are just such a great example again of connecting that full thread all the way through and now continuing to build on it.
Brand is not a one-time exercise. It is also on repeat. It is also a rhythm you’re continuing to tweak and build and tweak and build, but you have the foundation to build on. And that was so clear in that booth, right?
You weren't just like you know, we're a SaaS business, modern tech. Let's just have a wild, weird booth that makes no sense and it will get attention wild for the sake of being wild. You connected all of that together and were able to achieve fun, wild, but still like on brand and relevant.
[Karen Budell]
Yeah. Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Cool. Really cool. I'm gonna hit you with one more question. I'll get us out of here.
[Karen Budell]
All right. Hit me.
[Bill Kenney]
You've shared a lot with people that are in similar positions to you. Make your project team small, you know, these types of tips. I'm gonna ask you now, you could only share one tip with somebody in your position that's about to go through a rebrand and you were only allowed to tell them one thing to do, right, or to care about, et cetera, what would you tell them?
[Karen Budell]
Oh, this is easy. I shared this with some of my peers a few weeks ago: Get clear on your why, know why you're doing it.
Everything we've talked about, it's so easy to get swayed. It's so easy to fall off course. Know why you're doing it because yeah, it's risky, and it can feel like a lot for a leader.
So, know why you're doing it. Because once the train leaves the station, you know, you wanna know why you got on in the first place. It'll make that journey and the arrival at your destination so much more clear and exciting.
[Bill Kenney]
Well said, nothing to add. This is your show, not mine. Thank you so much for joining the show. You already know it was a pleasure working with you. You had such a great team all the way through. Our team I would like to think is a great group of human beings and the group together was such a joy. That's what makes these things really special. So thank you and send thanks to your team.
[Karen Budell]
Well, thank you. Feelings are so mutual. I've worked on a lot of rebrands and brand refreshes, and this is, I could not be more proud. I don't know how else to say it. Just, it was awesome, the experience, where we ended up, the way we brought it to life. An amazing chapter and huge highlight of my career.
[Bill Kenney]
Oh yeah. it. There's the finish. We did it.
[Karen Budell]
Thank you. That was fun. That was fun.
