This episode of the Humanizing Growth Series has two guests rather than one: the chief marketing officer and the chief executive of Optimizely, a company that helps clients unlock their digital potential. It serves over 10,000 brands worldwide, providing technology that helps businesses use digital channels to get closer to their customers.
The subject is a transformation both of them led. Episerver acquired Optimizely and took the acquired company’s name. The pair treat the result as a reset of the whole business rather than one company absorbing another, and most of the conversation is about what that cost and what made it hold.
Key findings
- The brand launched in January 2021 and the rebuilt corporate website followed in August of that year. The pace was deliberate, and the website launch is named as the moment the change became real for people.
- The rebrand ran through the pandemic with everyone working remotely, and the company saw a great deal of attrition. It also hired about 600 people during the same period.
- Naming was treated as an identity question, not a logo question. Employees of the acquired company had a name for themselves, and the merged company deliberately gave everyone a new one drawn from what it does for customers.
- The chief executive states the commercial condition on the marketing function plainly: marketing has to feed demand, and pipeline and opportunities are the lifeblood of a business-to-business company.
- The interviewer cites research from Spencer Stuart that the CMO has the shortest tenure of any leader in the boardroom, and that the main cause is a lack of alignment on expectations.
- The company stopped its activities in Russia at the moment the war started, over the first weekend of the invasion.
One identity out of two companies
Bringing two cultures together required one brand, one identity, and one purpose. Atzberger describes this as the transformational leadership problem. The acquisition was treated as an opportunity to create a company of their own making rather than to absorb one into the other.
What people call themselves turned out to be the hard part. The change looked very difficult while it was happening. Atzberger’s conclusion is about persistence rather than persuasion. Transformation moves if you are consistent and have a compelling story.
The renaming decision itself was evidenced. The team studied the digital gravity of the brand, with data behind it, before choosing which name survived. Atzberger argues that context is what makes a change acceptable: given the rationale, people can stand behind it.
The cost of the transformation
Allegri Williams does not present the journey as smooth. The company rebranded in the middle of the pandemic with everyone remote, at a point when she had barely met her own leadership team in person. Cultural change under those conditions was very difficult, and a great deal of attrition followed.
Her lesson from it is about the limit of a leader’s persuasion. Not everyone from the acquired companies shared the new vision, and those people left while roughly 600 others joined. She grounds the decisions in the company’s north star and accepts the rest: everyone has a choice about where they work.
What makes a CMO and CEO partnership work
The two had worked together before, and Allegri Williams names the effect. She entered the job with a high degree of trust, which she calls paramount given the transformation she had to lead. Without that tight alignment on vision and direction, she does not think she could have moved as fast.
Trust is not sentiment here. It is what survives the operational failures of an integration. Atzberger names the elephant in the room: marketing has to feed demand, and pipeline is the lifeblood. Brand work is foundational, and it is not the result. In his words you cannot say the logo is pretty and call that a result.
He still defends brand as the condition for demand. The brand has to be the halo effect for the entire business, even though attributing demand to it is hard. The shared measure both of them return to is growth of the business itself.
Working across functions without authority
Marketing touches and supports every part of the business while owning none of it. Allegri Williams handles that by separating warmth from accountability. Business partnering is not the same thing as getting on well with people, and the trust breaks down where each function’s role is left undefined.
Atzberger describes the same problem from the other chair. He cares that the company hits the total goal more than which function delivered it, but wants clearly accountable owners of each piece of pipeline. The failure mode he wants to avoid is a finger-pointing culture, and the skill he names for it is building villages across the organization.
Purpose, and what a company should say out loud
Allegri Williams ties purpose to work rather than to charity. Connecting a personal passion to the business strategy is what unlocks creativity, in her account. Hers is specific. As a cancer survivor she cares about giving people back precious time through technology, which is also how she judges marketing work that never reaches anyone.
On taking public positions, Atzberger separates the clear cases from the complicated ones. The killing of George Floyd required no data, only a stance. The company stopped its Russian activities as the war began. He is equally clear about the limit: nobody visits the company’s website to learn its political stance.
His alternative is to contribute through the business itself. The useful question is what the company can do to help other companies be better prepared for change. He also wants decisions made on evidence rather than assumption, which is the same instinct that drove the naming decision.
What each of them tells the audience to do
Allegri Williams addresses marketing leaders directly. Do not avoid the difficult conversations with your chief executive. In her experience, raising what is holding her team back early advances the strategy faster. Atzberger’s closing point is that humanizing what a company does for all its stakeholders matters more than it appears to, and that it resets everything else.
Scope and limitations
This is a live conversation with the two executives who led the transformation they describe, and the account is theirs. No independent measure of the rebrand’s commercial result is offered here. The attrition figure is not quantified, and the 600 hires are corrected on air from an initial misstatement.
The tenure research quoted is attributed by the interviewer to a partner organization, and no sample size or method is given in the conversation. The source itself is an automatic caption track of speech, with no speaker labels and frequent mistranscription of names.
Source
This page summarises HGS #43: Kirsten Allegri Williams (CMO) and Alex Atzberger (CEO), Optimizely, by Institute for Real Growth.