This rebrand started with a new CMO and a 20-year-old company ready for change. It ended with real diamonds given away in a crowd. Here's everything in between.
In our latest episode of The Debrief, Focus Lab CEO Bill Kenney sits down with Rhiannon Staples, CMO of ClearCo, to walk through the rebrand that brought their brand identity in line with who they'd actually become. From building a structured agency selection process, to rallying an entire organization around a new vision, Rhainnon shares what it really takes to lead a rebrand from the inside.
Tune in to hear:
→ How to take the guesswork out of choosing a branding agency
→ Why a rebrand is the foundation, not the finish line
→ How a structured process keeps senior stakeholders on track
→ What a brand-led activation looks like with a dialed-in concept
If you're a B2B marketing leader ready to build a brand foundation that lasts, this one's for you.
Episode Resources
→ Check out ClearCo in action
→ Learn more about 301 Walsh Events
→ Learn more about Craft&Crew Web Developers
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, where I sit down with past Focus Lab partners, and we relive the project. We talk about what it was like to go through their particular brand/rebrand effort.
Everybody has different pain points as it relates to brand, so today, I'm sitting down with Rhiannon Staples. She is the CMO of ClearCo, and we relive that project. We talk about how she knew it was time to go through the rebrand. Hint, that's why she was brought into the company. What was the hardest part of the project for her? I won't give you any hints there, you'll have to watch. And then ultimately, we get to the activation bit, Rhiannon and I talk about how she and her team brought this new brand and the concept of clarity to life via their first in-person event.
Super successful, really great conversation with Rhiannon. Lots to learn here. Enjoy the episode.
[Bill Kenney]
It's not been that long since the project, but it's been long enough and I've seen what's been happening on LinkedIn specifically, and I know what you've all been up to. But before I get into that, I want you to take the mic, and I want you to introduce yourself. Please tell people who you are and what you do.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Thank you. I’m Rhiannon Staples. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of a company called ClearCo. Thanks to the work that we did with Focus Lab, formerly called Clear Company. We are a talent management platform that helps companies hire, develop, and retain the best talent. I've been leading marketing teams for the past 15 years and just joined as ClearCo's new CMO in May of 2025, brought on board to help the company rebrand.
[Bill Kenney]
The one-year mark, here we are.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yes. Absolutely.
[Bill Kenney]
Wow, you've accomplished a lot in the first year.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah. I came in with a pretty heavy mission.
[Bill Kenney]
There's a lot of things that go into these projects, so my hope in these conversations is people hear from, not me, but you how these projects go down, and not necessarily just with Focus Lab, but what they are like to go through in general, what matters in them, what doesn't matter, these types of things. So the first question is: did you know it was time to go through the rebrand?
[Rhiannon Staples]
So you know this story, but I think it would be helpful for other CMOs. It is not common that a CMO is coming into a new role where the board and the executive leadership team are the ones telling the CMO, "We need a rebrand, and that's why we're bringing in a strategic leader to help drive us through this transition."
Usually, it's under the guise of "We've got a demand gen problem," or, "We've got a customer retention issue."
[Bill Kenney]
Yes.
[Rhiannon Staples]
And the marketing leader has to be the one to convince the board and the executive team you've got a deeper issue, and it's your brand. Your brand underpins all of this.
So it was a bit of a fortunate opportunity for me, but also a bit intentional, because when you see an opportunity like that, you jump at it. You grab it. You recognize you're working with a team and a company that gets it. And that's the spark of something that can be really really bright. So I ran with it.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, of these interviews, I think we've done 47 or something. I think you're the first that I can recall that was literally brought in for that effort. It’s the exact opposite usually.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah. We're a 20-year-old business, and I had worked in the HR tech space previously and had not heard of the business and that was part of the sales process or the value prop for me coming into the business was like, I know this is like greenfield.
I've got a lot I can work with here. But the company is 20 years old and has changed dramatically over the course of the past 10, 12 years through acquisition and product development. And the way that we were presenting to the market, the positioning was completely off. So that was really what the board understood and what the leadership team understood is the company, the marketing was actually behind where the product was. We had to do some work to catch up. So that was their reasoning for wanting to drive this project forward.
[Bill Kenney]
Shout out to the board and leadership for recognizing that brand matters, and that was the tip of the spear, the pain point. That’s not common, but that is a superpower when that organization understands that.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Okay, so you knew you were being brought in for that, and I don't even know this isn't a gotcha question. Were there already names in the mix of who to work with? How did you all determine or go on that hunt to ultimately find us?
[Rhiannon Staples]
So I went through a pretty thorough process. I wrote a brief that I shopped around to several different agencies. I started with my network, asking around to understand what agencies other folks had worked with. Focus Lab came up repeatedly in that conversation, amongst a few other names.
Really tough process because I ran across some really strong creative agencies. We knew that Focus Lab was the right fit for us at the end, and I was able to choose Focus Lab confidently. But the long list was probably about 10 agencies that I had initial conversations with.
I took that down to about four agencies that I actually shared the brief with and asked for a pitch from. So I was pitched by about four agencies and then made the decision with Focus Lab. But it was a pretty well-structured process. All agencies were evaluated similarly. The pitch process included other core members of the team, and we'll talk a little bit about what our brand team looked like.
But folks that I knew would be involved in the project mattered to me, what their assessment and evaluation was of the pitch because I wanted them to be really bought into this project. And it was, basic scoring and Focus Lab outscored some of the other agencies. It was important for me in that process to find an agency that wasn't just creative, but had also seen companies through the stage of growth that we're at. So finding an agency that felt like the right size fit, and equally an agency that could help us get it done on time, because I was on a mission to deliver something.
I don't know if we'll get into this in our conversation, but that was a big factor ultimately for me working with Focus Lab, was the rigidity and structure of how you run your projects. I went into that project with a lot of confidence that we would deliver in the most efficient way possible without sacrificing quality, and that was really important in the evaluation process.
[Bill Kenney]
We can get into that now. I was gonna ask if there was, like, a scoring rubric? What was your decision making criteria?
And it sounds like you've hit on one of those things, which was, were you gonna be working within a process that you knew would meet essentially the timeline, but the needs and the cadence of the project? Were there other things, and was there a rubric?
[Rhiannon Staples]
There was. Scoring on a scale of one to five across a number of categories. I don't have all of them in mind. Timeliness was obviously one of them. Creativity was a big part of it. How responsive the agency was, like how much they listened to what I was sharing, how attentive they were to the brief versus just giving me a basic pitch that was like rinse and repeat. That was important for me.
[Bill Kenney]
Joining the call from Lake Placid, the final pitch. I've remembered that correctly. I was in Lake Placid.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah, you were.
[Bill Kenney]
I’m remembering that now. I was out on a deck at the Airbnb. It was hot as hell out. It was so incredibly hot, and I was, like, in direct sunlight.
[Rhiannon Staples]
I thought you were sweating because of the pitch. I thought you were just nervous.
[Bill Kenney]
No, I felt very confident and casual with you all because of the energy that you all bring. It was very nice as far as pitches go. But yeah, I forgot about that.
[Rhiannon Staples]
It was important to me also to understand who would be involved in the project, and I was given some visibility to some of the team members at Focus Lab, and that was important to me as well making sure that I understood who was gonna be involved throughout the process.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, I'll just say this for the people watching and listening. It's very common for us to get the request that we wanna meet the people on the project. I understand where that's coming from exactly like you just said, right? You want to know more than just me or Will in this example.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
You want to see what these people are like, even body language style, communication style and this stuff, and it becomes very challenging for us in the way that we book because we don't know who will technically be on the project until we know the start date and all these other things.
So we do our best to pull team members in, but we also work in a way that everybody's shipping work every Friday, which we can get into, And they are dedicated to projects, so then I have to say "Okay who has the capacity for a moment in time and join a meeting and meet some new people that they may or may not work with?" But I think what you got to experience is we are able to do that, and even if it's not the exact team members, which I think in your case it did turn out to be, or did it not?
[Rhiannon Staples]
A couple of them, yeah. For me, it was important to understand if the folks that were connected to this process outside of the people I were having the commercial conversations with, if they reflected and told the same story, the same mission, the same focus, the same energy because that's ultimately what I'm looking to drive in my brand, right?
Is consistency in the experience no matter who you're talking to in the business and the organization. So I think you're a hundred percent right. It's not about the actual individuals. I have to trust you've hired all equally talented designers, writers, et cetera. But are the people that are showing up to that conversation echoing the same sentiment, the same story, the same energy that I'm picking up from the initial folks that I've been driving the commercial conversations with?
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. I'm glad you got that impression, and I'm glad it was accurate, and we can say that.
[Rhiannon Staples]
It was.
[Bill Kenney]
So let's talk a little bit about that weekly process because and then we can move on to the next series of questions. But this weekly process you noted, which gave you comfort, we ship work every single Friday. Five o'clock. Eastern Standard Time, all the deliverables go out, so you would get your single or multiple deliverables of writing work, strategy work, design work, and then you would be expected to review that somewhere between Friday at 5:00 PM and our weekly meeting, which if I remember correctly with you all, it was on Tuesday.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Tuesday, yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
So that gave you the Monday then to do your internal review, get your opinions and your thoughts together, share those with us and then come to that meeting ready to discuss those. Did you have any thoughts about that process coming in that were, I wonder if we can follow this well? Is that going to be too tight of a turn? Or were you just simply excited about the system that there was just a process?
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah. I was excited about the system and the fact that there was a process. I can't say that every member of the core brand team felt the same way. I definitely had some folks who were like: "Wait a second. So we're gonna be working weekends for the next six months?" Yeah, you are. Or not, if you can work quickly on Monday, that's your choice.
[Bill Kenney]
That's right.
[Rhiannon Staples]
But I appreciated it because you have to put guardrails around it, otherwise you can just swirl on decisions. So I appreciated the forcing mechanism. It was probably the thing I was most excited about in working with your agency, and that I felt really stood out with Focus Lab. And you delivered on it. It also wasn't BS.
What it affords me the opportunity to do is scheduling on my side too, because it's not just about people on your side. For our project team, I had a number of senior stakeholders in the business whose time is really limited. So for me to be able to say months in advance, "This is the cadence we're gonna run," afforded me the opportunity to have our PM block time on their calendars and make sure that there was this kind of consistent rhythm that we all adhere to. And it really helped us deliver the project on time, so I appreciated the forcing mechanism.
[Bill Kenney]
You'd be shocked and maybe not of how many other agency owners or staff that I speak with that have no idea that you could just create this type of cadence. And I hadn't even considered how valuable it is for you to tell the C-suite and leadership, I can already get on your calendar for months out and plug all these things in. It's a foregone conclusion, and we do run that tight of a ship that those things are -- that's real. We're gonna hit all of those.
[Rhiannon Staples]
I'd imagine it probably weighs differently depending on the personality type you're dealing with, right? So dealing directly with a CMO who's running the project versus a creative director who's commissioning that project. They might want a little bit more flexibility.
[Bill Kenney]
Sure.
[Rhiannon Staples]
I’m typecasting, which isn't fair, but this is one of six different things that I'm driving in my business too, right? I don't have the luxury of just focusing on this as a CMO in a scale-up business. I need to make sure that this slots in with everything else and I don't lose focus on it or attention. Yeah, it worked for my role and my personality type as well.
[Bill Kenney]
We find that even if people come in not loving it at the start, they come around. All right, next question. So the board and the organization realizes brand matters and we need to do something about this. They find you, kudos to them because you're awesome.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Kudos because you're awesome.
[Bill Kenney]
So then we start the project. got two very specific questions. I wanna hear first, what was the hardest part of the project? What was challenging?
[Rhiannon Staples]
You can't go back. You only go forward in the project. There were definitely times where maybe a few weeks after a decision was made, or I've had a chance to think about it a little bit or whatever, and there would be times I know in the project where I'd go, "But this thing that we decided, three or four weeks ago can we go back and revisit that?"
And the team never said no to that, but there was always a reminder of The fact that we've gotta move forward. We can always keep going back, but it's gonna slow us down. So rigor in place in terms of delivery of the project, great, but you also have to make sure that you're driving in one direction, otherwise you undo all of that progress.
I feel like your team pushed back in a really tactful way, but were also flexible where it wouldn't derail us. But that was hard because we were making really big decisions about a huge investment for the company. And you wanna make sure that you've got it right, and sometimes you've gotta make decisions quickly.
Sometimes you've gotta make decisions without all the information that you might want. You gotta trust your gut a little bit. And that can be really hard, but if you wanna be in a C-suite, you gotta do hard things.
[Bill Kenney]
You said it. I can recognize and empathize with that pressure. Okay, so this is the week where we're gonna sign off, right? Even that word feels "Oh, God."
[Rhiannon Staples]
So big.
[Bill Kenney]
What if I mildly change my mind over the weekend, right? And it's "Oh." Yeah, I feel you on that. That's tough. And it goes both ways, right? We have to help say, "You're gonna be fine."
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yes.
[Bill Kenney]
Not life or death decisions, but we're gonna continue to iterate, but we can't go way back or we'll just get stuck in this kind of like constant what if cycle and... But we need to also create space for that moment to be human and not just "Nope. Nope, sorry. We can never look backwards."
[Rhiannon Staples]
Our team handled that really well, Bill. I felt like there were some empathetic conversations, really empathetic conversations with your team when those things would be raised or it was okay for us to talk about it and help us get through it, so to speak. Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Good. It's one of our core values, lead with empathy. I'm happy to hear that.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Check.
[Bill Kenney]
All right, so what was, second question of this section: what was the most rewarding aspect of the project?
[Rhiannon Staples]
There's a lot of those. I love the outcome. I didn't walk out with a neutral feeling. Just a really strong, passionate feeling and reaction to where we landed. The reception has been amazing, so that's great. It was interesting when I came into Clear Company and folks would say, "We're so glad, we've got a CMO in place that's gonna drive this rebrand."
I think most of the company recognized it was desperately needed. But everyone had a bit of a different perception about what we meant by rebranding the company. There were some folks who came to me and said, "Oh, we're so excited about the new PowerPoint template you're gonna deliver to us," or, "We can't wait to see the new color scheme."
And I had a bunch of folks say, "We're so glad you're gonna finally look at changing the company name." I was like, "What do you mean changing the company name? That's -- we'll take a look at that." And we did this in the project. It was part of our brief too. It was something we knew that we at least had to entertain and objectively and strategically assess whether or not a name change was merited for the company.
And in the end, where we landed was that we had a perfect name for our company. We just had never really leaned into its potential. So I think the most rewarding thing in this process was the fact that we were able to retain the spirit of Clear Company and its origin with the clarity, the North Star clarity concept that we came up with Focus Lab.
It was so evident. It was so in front of our face. It was so obvious. But it was so clear and we couldn't see it. So that was really rewarding to know that we objectively assessed that circumstance and reached a really thoughtful, intentional decision about leaning into the Clear name and owning it rather than just taking the easy path and sticking with it, because a name change is a pretty material shift for the business.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yeah, so it ended up being the right decision and path, and the easier path.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yes. Yes.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yay. So it's launched now. identity, messaging, and all that's been live for... you would know your launch date. I don't know it offhand.
[Rhiannon Staples]
End of March. Yeah. We launched at an event called Transform in the HR Tech Space last month. Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
So you've got... End of March, so a couple month-ish.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Six weeks.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. I wanna hear two things, but I wanna hear very specifically. We can talk about, it's almost too early to say, what's the ROI in these types of things, right?
Brand is the long game, so we don't need to go there. But yeah, that activation was very unique, so maybe we can spend time on that. I see people talking about activations all day on LinkedIn now, it seems anyways. Anytime I see that word, I'm like, "They got that right." It was unique, it was authentic, it was interesting. So you wanna maybe spend some time and talk about that?
[Rhiannon Staples]
I can, yeah. And shout out to our friends over at 301 Walsh, who you also introduced us to who helped us with this activation. We're a scale-up business, so we have a fair but modest budget to spend. So the thought of going out with a huge brand campaign that we were gonna spend, hundreds of thousands or millions on post-launch just wasn't in the cards for us.
But we needed to figure out a way to make some noise in this space and show up on the board. So we knew this event was happening, hence the reason the timeline was so crucial for us, right? Because that was the line in the sand. That event was happening with or without us. I wanted it to happen with us.
And everything we worked back from that. So we launched the website a week earlier with an organization called Craft&Crew. We helped to re-build a new website, got all of the kinks worked out, and then we actually launched to the market on the 24th of March at Transform. The reception was incredible.
But the activation, as you noted, really stood out for us. So the North Star concept of our brand as a company called ClearCo, is clarity and the clarity that we bring to organizations, leaders and HR teams. And we brainstormed with the 301 Walsh team, and they had come back with this idea to give away diamonds in our booth at Transform as a way to cement this concept of clarity.
What better way than to talk about clarity and diamonds? And it just hit instantly. As soon as they pitched it, in much the same way, like as soon as you pitched the Hoberman to us and our logo, I knew immediately. I knew immediately when they pitched the diamond concept. So essentially the activation was a case of sand with hundreds of cubic zirconias and a couple of real diamonds. Lab-grown diamonds, but diamonds nonetheless, folks come to our activation, they're able to sift through the sand, pick the gem that they want. If it's the real diamond, they get to keep it.
We'll mount it for them. So we worked with a really incredible jeweler out of Las Vegas, who was on site with us, with a gemologist. And it just created a ton of buzz on the floor. And who doesn't love diamonds? It was just such a fun, engaging activation. Hands-on, which I think matters a lot with activations these days, like experiencing it.
It kept folks there in our space for a bit of time because there was quite a long queue for folks who were looking to choose from the diamonds. We had an equal number of male and female winners coincidentally, or maybe it was a little more. But I got to see one of the guy's wife's faces when he called her on FaceTime and said, "Hey, you won a diamond."
So that's exciting, too. Yeah, and it was Vegas. So you just wanna see people win. Obviously it was a lot like a craps table almost. Once somebody would pick it out, the crowd that was there would go wild. Yeah, so it was a really fun activation, but more than anything, it was just so authentic and real and so directly related to the brand.
It was not manufactured or inauthentic at all. It's just really... Just, yeah, it really set that standard and understanding and message of clarity that we wanted to send home.
[Bill Kenney]
Kudos to you. The thing that resonates with me two- twofold is that, yes, it is so deeply connected to the concept and then therefore the brand, that it makes it more powerful, right? I think people are fishing for straws. They're like what's the activation gonna be?" I don't know. Let's do the... This is
[Rhiannon Staples]
The claw machine. Let's do the arcade
[Bill Kenney]
The gold bar thing and, or we- we'll give away a random guitar, and it's what the hell does that have to do with anything? But that's because activations are really hard.
[Rhiannon Staples]
They're so hard.
[Bill Kenney]
It’s really hard to come up with a thing. But if there is a core narrative and a core story that is really dialed in, and it's simply one that was so fresh it was, like, burnt into y'all's brain probably, this idea of clarity. Oh, diamonds. And then you actually use that to come up with something creative. You had both factors working for you. Surely nobody had seen that before, so you had something novel but also authentic, like you said.
I wish I could've been there to see that. Were people -- were they trying to be, like, fun and creative themselves? Were they trying to determine, oh, I don't know, that's probably a CZ, and they put it back or not because they were on a clock?
[Rhiannon Staples]
They weren’t on a clock. \Unless there was a long queue, and then we would try and get folks to move along. But no, they're in the sand, so it's really hard to tell even when they're out. A brand new CZ is almost indistinguishable next to a diamond.
[Bill Kenney]
So fun.
[Rhiannon Staples]
So fun.
[Bill Kenney]
I’m glad you all had that moment, and I think you and I had even discussed previously, run that one back. Do that again.
[Rhiannon Staples]
We've got a few events this year, and we're gonna -- we'll, we'll run it for all it's worth. I'm sure it's just a matter of three or four shows till it gets knocked off by some other organization. But yeah, to go to my procurement lead and tell him we were gonna buy diamonds was an interesting conversation, "You're gonna do what?"
[Bill Kenney]
Not for nothing. People can knock it off, but you can own it as a brand. It is authentic, and you can probably build off it in new creative ways that if another company does it, it's it's a light on you a little bit to go "Oh yeah, they're doing the ClearCo thing." Yeah, you're right. They're doing the ClearCo thing.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Because it's so authentically tied to the brand, it is -- it will be challenging for another organization to simply or easily replicate. Yeah, for sure.
[Bill Kenney]
Very cool. Very cool. There's nothing I find more rewarding than types of moments for our partners, right? The joy of the backside of the projects to be past those decisions in the moment of the, is this the exact right decision? Do I like this logo? Is the orange too orange? I relish in these moments of you coming back from that just probably being on cloud nine of, like, how successful that moment was with so much effort leading up to that moment. You talked about it, what, six months or something
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
All these decisions leading up, and then that's that's the moment, and you're like, "Ah.”
[Rhiannon Staples]
And I hadn't slept for a month, Bill. Going into that event, the nervousness of launching the brand, launching it there and just knowing this is gonna go be a wild success or it could be a wild failure, and I'm here for all of it, whatever it might be. But it -- I had no idea going into this, if it would have the result that… I had belief but couldn't know until we were on the floor. So I was grateful that it turned out the way that it did.
[Bill Kenney]
So you're past the event, great success. Now is it back to the daily, the day-to-day work, which is long and hard? Is there another event coming? What's happening with the product? What would you share that's maybe new and exciting?
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah. I've said repeatedly and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about this on the podcast. I've said repeatedly that the launch of the brand is just the beginning, it's not the end. I think a lot of people think like that's the finish line. It's actually the starting line. I really worked hard to hit that message home with all of the folks here at ClearCo.
A rebrand of this scale is not insignificant in terms of the lift, so I wanted to put some of the pressure off. If you think about all of the tools that you have internally and the assets and resources and training, and we use, we deliver a platform that's used by a lot of companies to build training videos of their own like… a lot, there's a lot of downstream impact on a rebrand like this, and I really wanted to take the pressure valve off a little bit and let folks understand like it's okay. We're gonna try and get the most critical assets and roll out that is complete by launch, and then we should be looking at these tranches of additional content assets, et cetera that will follow.
And if we are buttoned up by the end of 2026 going into the new year, then that feels to me like a success. And that's hard for a lot of people to accept. But no matter how much inventory work you do, there are gonna be rogue assets and materials. We're a 20-year-old business. There is stuff hidden in digital drawers everywhere.
[Bill Kenney]
Yes.
[Rhiannon Staples]
I can't possibly find them all. So we'll get onto it in a moment, why bringing all the employees in the business along for the journey is such a crucial part of that. But so that's, in a nutshell, one of the ways that I'm thinking about it is that it was the beginning, not the end.
So we've launched it. We've got a few more events that we're going to this year where we'll show up in a similar way, which is super exciting. The next step for us is bringing the product into the fold. So we rebranded the product from a logo perspective, but the aesthetic of the product is largely the same as it was prior to the rebrand.
And that's less about our decision not to rebrand the product and more about a recognition of the downstream impact that it will have on our clients, and we wanna be really thoughtful about that rollout and making sure that we're not just, putting everyone through the task of updating assets and materials and resources because we wanted to put a new coat of paint on things. So we'll be really thoughtful about how we roll that out, but seeing it in the product going forward is a big part of it.
The other aspect of this, I talk about brand as a three-legged stool, and what we've done work on is all about brand perception. We've worked on the color palette, the logo, the naming, the story, the product positioning. All of that is the perception, the way that we wanna shape understanding of our company in the market.
The other two legs of the stool are important to look after as well, and I think we'll, we will shift our attention in the quarters ahead. One being brand awareness, which is generally what marketing does, right?
All of the things that we do to get our brand out in the market. And the other being brand confidence. No matter how good you look and how good your story is that you're telling or how much you're spending to get that story out there, if you don't have third parties backing that story up with confident evidence of your brand. Because what do they say about the brand, right? It's what people say about you when you're not in the room.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah.
[Rhiannon Staples]
If that's not happening effectively, all of the positioning and awareness work that you're doing, the stool will fall over. So that brand confidence piece is super important.
So we're investing really heavily in looking at how we make sure that we're aligned with trusted third parties in our space? A lot of it's like the analyst organizations and helping them understand the positioning, the story, the company, the product, the value. How are we helping our clients tell our story in the market?
We've got thousands of really satisfied customers. Customer advocacy is a huge component of brand, and I think a lot of organizations underestimate that impact. They think you can do all of that packaging work, but every single one of your clients has a microphone today.
So making sure that you are authentically showing up in your s- with your story and positioning and that authentically aligns to the way your clients are speaking about you in the market, I think is an important part for any CMO leader to look at and an area that we'll be investing in heavily over, over the coming quarters and years.
[Bill Kenney]
A+. I like the stool analogy and this is why I record these episodes, right? People go "Oh, yes. Don't forget there are three legs to this thing. It's not just that initial effort, and that is not the finish line. It is day one."
But yes. Yes. And I think the other takeaway there that I would just plus-one and highlight is I think most organizations believe a narrative that maybe even agencies like myself have put out in the early years for far too long, which is, everything needs to be flipped like a light switch.
When that rollout happens, everything, social, all your internal documents, everything at your website, your Zoom backgrounds, like literally everything needs to turn over, and god forbid if there's an old asset still out there or if the page on a website has not been updated, but it gets visited six times a year type of thing, right?
We would be so hard-pressed on that in those early years, and just not that way. That's just not reality, right? So take some of that pressure off. Hit those high-level assets, whatever those are, the really front-facing ones, and then just continue to just update things as you can, and the brand will still be fine, right? You're not gonna chop the legs off the stool by missing that one moment right there.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah. Yeah. I think the market will give you a lot more grace than you'd expect.
[Bill Kenney]
Yes. I didn't know that as clearly until a couple very prominent projects really, in my opinion, rolled out a little haphazardly. But after three to four months, it's all shored up. Nobody's, none the wiser, and any new customer at that point is completely none the wiser.
They're seeing the whole new brand in its totality. So those things are a period of time. And again, I just, I highlight that to take pressure out of the room of the people stressing about the, "There's that one moment, and how am I gonna get it all done?" You don't have to get it all done. Chase the next most important thing.
[Rhiannon Staples]
That's it.
[Bill Kenney]
Get after the next thing.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah, managing the chaos. I think the other part of that for me, Bill and I've done rebrands before, but I, I-- so I learned this the hard way, and I tried to get it right here at ClearCo, was bringing the rest of the business along for the journey. It's not uncommon that marketing will hole up in a room and go through this big rebrand exercise, and then there's this big reveal and launch to the company.
That was completely the opposite of how I ran things here at ClearCo because I recognized that there was a lot of power in the people in the room, in other parts of the business, in helping us solve this challenge of, like, how do we make sure that the brand shows up everywhere?
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yeah.
[Rhiannon Staples]
The brand doesn't belong to marketing. The brand belongs to everyone for so many reasons. But even this asset updating piece or socializing the decisions that we're making in the room with the agency, having a group of folks in the business that were not -- it wasn't a democratic process. We had a brand ambassadors group that was hand volunteered not handpicked, but volunteered to take part in this program.
These are people who were really passionate about the company, wanted to see the brand succeed. It was cross-departmental, and it was a great audience for us to just float the decisions that were being made and just make sure that we could manage. We weren’t taking decisions back, but managing any of the matters that maybe we hadn't considered or could be fallout from those decisions.
We had advanced notice of that. But also being a sounding board back to the business to say, "Here's what's happening with the rebrand. Here's what, here's what's gonna be coming. What are the resources and tools in our department?" If they're running, product enablement or, department, being a resource to be the communication link between the rebrand and the department function.
And that was really helpful in giving us a holistic view of what really needed to be done across the business, and also creating some excitement in the organization for the project. When you have someone in your department who's in the know, who understands what's happening and can be an ambassador and a voice for the rebrand in the department, and translate why this matters to us, this team, this function it really helps the brand seed more effectively. I feel like that was a really critical part of our success.
[Bill Kenney]
Yes, and can you speak more about that even very tactically? I think this is probably one of the biggest questions we get in most projects or the biggest curiosity that we just see in the market around us of what does it mean to have the project team on your side? How many people are in that room?
How many is too many? What are the critical roles? And then even further elusive and gray is what is that brand ambassador team that's one layer separated? How many people is that, and what are those titles generally? If you could hit both of those, that's probably super valuable.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah. I don't know that our project team is a customary project team that we would often find. We had mostly C-suite representation in our project team. So I had the CEO that brought me into the business, our Chief Product Officer, our Head of Sales was in those conversations, and our Product Marketing Leader, as well as our Creative Director.
And we were the folks that were in those meetings week on week, going through the decks, providing feedback. We kept that team relatively tight. What is that? Five, six? Five or six people.
[Bill Kenney]
And that’s about what we recommend. We try to say don't go past that five, six. You start to lose the return on the extra voices.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah. I was pretty clear on what everyone's role was in that room as well. Our CEO was also a co-founder in the business, so obviously this brand was something he cared deeply about. He knew his role there was to help us progress, but at the same time not lose our heritage and roots, making sure that was seated.
Marketing and sales should be a marriage no matter what, so it's obviously why the sales organization should be there. Positioning is a huge part of this and understanding how we position in the market, both competitively as well as individually from a product perspective, so our product marketing director played a critical role.
Our creative lead, made sure that this passed muster, and we were thinking about how the strategy ultimately would develop and roll out beyond the initial project. And our head of product was also thinking about how this translates over to the product and into the product it-itself.
If any deal-breaker decisions needed to be made, that team understood that those decisions fell to me. So ultimately I had veto power in those conversations, but I never found that we really had to exercise it because we all actively participated in the feedback sessions and we were able to reach group decisions.
[Bill Kenney]
I really wanna hear about that, that next layer. Again, I think that's the most elusive for people. How do I put that together and how many people is that one specifically?
But I agree that you all had a really wonderful working relationship in that project meeting people's opinions and hearing each other as well, but how to also distill that to what we would call single voice feedback back to us. You all did a wonderful job on that front, and I would give you specifically kudos. I think that you were well-appointed to be that tip of the spear still, right? Like we see that there are not a lot of projects, but where that breaks down, it actually falls to the person in your seat. Are they able to navigate that room if there are tough decisions to be made? Are they able to wrangle the group in? Are they able to get the things, opinions, and stuff out of that group if they're not around? So you were fantastic on that front. Okay, back to you. So that outer layer, then the ambassador group, many people and what types of titles are in that group?
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah. Fifteen to twenty folks. Volunteer-based, and that was really important to me. I didn't want anyone in the business to feel like they were appointed to do this. And it was people from every department across the business. Again, voluntary, so I didn't really have a choice who showed up.
But we had SDRs, we had some sellers. I had our head of procurement who's actually very brand-minded in those conversations. Product representation customer success representation. It was pretty much every team in the business. And where I might have had the gaps or deficit, I might have gone to the leaders in those functions, the executive team members or downline to say, “Anyone I might wanna personally reach out to and invite them."
But again, it was voluntary. They weren't obligated. The meetings were generally ad hoc. They weren't as stringent on the schedule like ours were, and they were usually following key milestone decisions that we reached. So like when we reached the decision about the naming or we reached the decision about the design elements, I would take that information back to those teams at that time. So again, another place where the schedule came in really well. Yeah.
Shout out to Joe Franklin, who was the creative director that worked with me on this project. He also worked with those individuals in terms of collecting information back, like what are the resources and assets in your function that we're gonna need to rebrand, just so we can start to get that holistic view of what the lift was gonna be across the business and making sure that we were prepared going into those ambassador conversations for a really positive and constructive two-way conversation.
[Bill Kenney]
Kudos.
[Rhiannon Staples]
And like I said, there wasn't decision-making happening in that room. I think what a lot of people shy away from. They're worried "How do I get a democratic process going if I pull 15 people into the room?" So I was really clear about the charter up front for that ambassador group.
You're here to be a sounding board and help us distill and understand how to message this to the rest of the company, how this might impact your individual function. And we want two-way feedback, but that doesn't mean we're necessarily gonna go back to the drawing board and change things.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. I know that that can be very nuanced. So again, kudos the value in it, doing it, because I expect there's probably a large conglomerate that would say no, that is gonna lead to that democratic kind of energy, and that's not what we want, so we're gonna actually hold that further away."
Even if that means having an ambassador group really tied in until very late in the project and a much smaller headcount, as an example.
All right i'm hit you with the final question, If you were sitting down with a CMO, I'm sure you know plenty of, and they were telling you we're about to go through a rebrand, and they just wanted your most important one for them that they had to get right or else, what's the one thing you would tell them to do?
[Rhiannon Staples]
Hands down, bring the company along on the journey. Message often, message early. Educate the business on what it means to rebrand. Help folks understand the why of what you're doing, the strategic impact of marketing versus the perception that some might have that a rebrand is just a fresh coat of paint.
Your brand is only gonna be as powerful as how well your people carry it, and if they don't understand it, they won't be able to do that effectively. So bring them along on the journey, get them involved, and it creates a great energy in the business too.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, because then you get a bunch of champions out right?
[Rhiannon Staples]
And the work that we're doing has a big impact on them too, right? We do a ton of work, obviously, in the marketing team that we've talked about in the podcast already. There's a lot of work that other teams have to do on the back of a rebrand. And trust me, there were definitely groans when folks realized "Wait a second. We have to do what?" It wasn't, like, all enthusiasm.
But with enough advance notice and enough buy-in and understanding of, like, why are we doing this? Why is this important? We were able to get over those hurdles.
[Bill Kenney]
You've made me realize in that answer, it's like you're gonna have to do that work anyways. So I think the question is, you wanna do it after the fact when it feels a little bit late and you're trying to play catch up on this is why we did this this is why it matters, and people are like, "I have all these questions."
So now you're having to do all that work in this kind of condensed, maybe high tension maybe, as opposed to spreading that work out on the front end and the duration of the work while it's happening so that therefore the moment in time can be more of the moment in time.
[Rhiannon Staples]
Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Because you're gonna have to do it. You- people gonna have questions. You certainly want to be there to help them see the answers, or else they're gonna fill in the blanks. Yeah, so it sounds like a full-time job.
[Rhiannon Staples]
It just might be.
[Bill Kenney]
Is that a full-time job?
[Rhiannon Staples]Time and a half, Bill. Time and a half.
[Bill Kenney]
Shout out to everybody on your project team that I didn't name, but you know their names, and they were great. I just look forward to watching you all go on your journey now. I look forward to going up to one of these booths and trying to find my own diamond.
[Rhiannon Staples]
That's it. We'll see you at SHRM. We'll see you at HR Tech.
[Bill Kenney] Absolutely.
[Rhiannon Staples]
All right, Bill. Thank you. It's been a joy. I've said it a million times, I love the work that we've done together. So happy with where we landed. Validates that Focus Lab was the right decision for us, and I couldn't be more pleased. So thank you.
[Bill Kenney]
That is why I enjoy doing what I'm doing. We built a business, and myself very specifically, I get a lot of fulfillment from that, and this is my way in today's world of how I help people. It’s to go through these long, challenging processes, and arrive at this moment. So thank you. Thank you.
