Welcome to today’s episode where we’re going to talk about advanced strategies in branding and communications with Nikki Festa O’Brien, CEO of Greenough Communications. We’re going to explore how brands can articulate their stories more effectively, manage financial communications, and about the critical relationship between marketing and communications.
About Nikki Festa
Nikki Festa is CEO at Greenough Agency.
With more than 20 years of agency and in-house experience, I am a seasoned brand marketing and communications professional who specializes in the Technology, Healthcare/Life Science, and Energy/Climate Tech sectors. I have successfully led integrated campaigns for clients ranging from startups to public companies, helping them achieve their business goals and elevate their brand reputation.
As CEO of Greenough Communications, I oversee the strategic direction, operations, and growth of the firm. I work with a talented team of experts who deliver creative and impactful strategies for our clients. I am also passionate about teaching and mentoring the next generation and have shared my insights and best practices at several universities and industry events. I am also honored to be recognized as one of the Top Women in PR by PR News.
Resources
Greenough Agency website: https://www.greenoughagency.com/
Register for the Medallia CX Day webinar: Building Loyalty: How Top Brands Create Forever Customers with CX – https://bit.ly/3M7dkQM
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
Welcome to Season 6 of the Agile Brand, where we discuss marketing technology and customer experience trends, insights, and ideas with enterprise and technology platform leaders. We focus on the people, processes, data, and platforms that make brands successful, scalable, customer-focused, and sustainable. This is what makes an Agile Brand. I’m your host, Greg Kihlstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on Martech, Marketing Operations, and CX, bestselling author and speaker. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services, and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com. Now let’s get on to the show. Welcome to today’s episode where we’re going to talk about advanced strategies in branding and communications with Nikki Festa-O’Brien, CEO of Greenough Communications. We’re going to explore how brands can articulate their stories more effectively, manage financial communications, and about the critical relationship between marketing and communications. Nikki, welcome to the show.
Nikki Festa O’Brien: Thanks so much, Greg.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Why don’t we get started with you giving a little background on yourself and your role at Greenough Communications?
Nikki Festa O’Brien: At Greenough, we work with Fortune 500 companies, disruptive startups across the technology, healthcare, and climate transition. My role as CEO is to really focus on the milestone moments for these clients, whether that be messaging and positioning, crisis, financial comms, internal and employee comms, change management, all things of that nature.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. So yeah, we’re gonna talk about a few things today, but I wanna get started with talking about driving brand strategy and how to articulate a company’s story. So what are some of the key considerations when you’re developing messaging and positioning for a brand? How do you ensure that these align with the company’s overall strategic goals?
Nikki Festa O’Brien: Yeah, it’s audience, audience, audience. If you can deeply understand a brand’s target audience, what makes them tick? challenges that they face, their daily workflows. And this includes your internal audience too. That makes the messaging and the positioning so much easier to put together and also have the biggest impact because you know that you’re speaking the same language as who you want to speak to. So that’s really the top three audience, audience, audience that you have to take in for consideration and really understand.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, part of part of that connection with the audience is telling the right story, right, telling a story that resonates deeply with them. And not only resonates with the external audiences, but also with those internal audiences that are going to be evangelists for the brand and things like that. How do you approach that, you know, finding the right story and crafting that story?
Nikki Festa O’Brien: Yeah, starting outside in before moving inside out. And what I mean by that is considering what the customer’s prospects are looking for. What are the challenges that they face on a daily basis? What are some of the external factors that impact their day? And then trying to marry what you offer, whether it be a service, a product, to solve those moments for them.
Greg Kihlstrom: And so can you maybe share an example of a, of a brand story, you know, don’t have to name names necessarily, but you know, just a, a, a successful brand story transformation that made a significant impact.
Nikki Festa O’Brien: Yeah. One client that I worked with for a number of years, we’ll say fortune global fortune 500 company in the ERP space, they had a new CMO start and you know, we had a couple of collective goals. She was very ambitious, very exciting to work with. And she had a goal to really make this brand be a world’s most valuable brand by all sort of lists and considerations, awards, et cetera. Also to really approach the messaging and brand positioning with purpose. So a lot of the time we spent together when we were going back to the roots and deciding what we wanted that new brand messaging and positioning to be. We were identifying use cases that had impact. So while what they did might not have been the most sexy or the most purposeful on the outside, what it allowed companies, nonprofits, across a variety of different verticals, what it allowed them to do and accomplish was purposeful. So really bringing that to the forefront. And then another goal that both her and the CEO of this brand had was to not just have the best messaging, the best positioning, have the brand with the best reputation, but that all their leaders also were recognized for the positions that they played in developing that. So for her, it was getting on those top CMO lists, being recognized as someone who moved the needle, not just in the way that we position the brand, but for moving the needle for the brand itself. So it was a really exciting challenge that we had in front of us. And one that really brought us back to the roots of the company. It had been a couple decades since they changed their tagline, since they’ve sort of evolved and taken that next leap forward. So the process that we went to was interesting because initially, We had made recommendations to media influencers, analysts, which we did all of that too. And these are, you know, people that had followed the brand for many, many years. So let’s talk to them about, about what they had been thinking about the brand all this time and where they think that they kind of sit now in the new world order. But one of the things that through some of the conversations, even with the extended team we worked with at the, at the company. was we were hearing more interesting and insightful things from the employees. And this was probably five to seven years ago. So this was, this was at a time where people were still in the office and really, you know, we’re sitting around a round table and having a lot of lively conversations and throwing out ideas. And so we actually decided to do interviews with the long tenured employees first. and the new employees as well, so that we could get sort of the history and legacy, but then also what do the people think that they can go to now when accessing sort of the brand and the mission and the vision and the values of the brand. Then we went to your traditional sort of media influencer and analyst, and then obviously the customers. We identified these really great grouping of customers with a great cross-section, entertainment, healthcare, energy, commerce, and brought it all together to culminate in a message and a positioning that we thought would really propel the company and the brand forward. And it was definitely felt across the board, everything from, you know, the stock being up, the CMO won, you know, best, most influential CMO list by Forbes. and cited a lot of the campaign as the reason why she was bursting on the list for the first time with some really heavy hitters. And then even their annual conference, there was a different charisma, there was an edginess to the production of the event, because we were able to pull from the inspiration and from the campaign that we had been running all year long.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so, you mentioned a few you know, potential metrics. But, you know, one of the things about brand strategy, I mean, with, you know, with some types of marketing, you know, return on ad spend is a relatively straightforward metric or, you know, number of widgets sold is, you know, can be calculated or whatever. But, you know, with brand strategy, you know, you mentioned a few metrics of success there. You know, how do you generally look at effectiveness of brand strategy and how do you recommend that it be measured?
Nikki Festa O’Brien: The number of times I’ve asked that in a day. Brands are meant to be felt. There’s tangible and intangible elements of that. And definitely data and metrics that support that it’s resonating with your target audience. Some of the ones, so obviously we had some hard metrics like the stock being up and attracting certain audiences. The coverage that we were getting had moved completely upstream to a more C-suite and business level. But some of the other metrics is things like message pull through. That was something that was important to us because we wanted this brand to be synonymous with a number of keywords and trends that were happening at this time. So if we were doing their messaging and positioning workshop, let’s say today, we would want to talk about sustainability, we’d want to talk about net zero, we’d want to talk about AI, right? We’d want to have some of those topics where we know that they play, but is the topic of the conversation today, and also mapping it back to the value that they provide to move those things forward. At that time, we had a different set of keywords, but that message pull through was really important to show that we’re making impact. Also share of conversation and the power of the voice. So, and the share of conversation is, were we able to suck the air out of the room for the competitor set? Were we able to dominate in those milestone moments and sort of write the narrative in a unique way and in a leading way compared to those that we were competing with. And then the power of voice, that’s a metric that a lot of people throw around. Everybody measures it a little differently. We had our own calculation for it. That was a combination of share of voice, share of conversation, message pulled through, and then also value-based metrics. When we think about our brand measurement reports to make sure the surveys that we were doing to make sure that people were responding to the messaging, to the positioning in those ways. And that showed sort of the power of the message, power of the campaign that we’re putting out there based on a mix of that data. And then making sure it resonates inside the walls of your company. Something that is an undervalued metric, but shouldn’t be, is the employee engagement. So when we saw every time we posted on, let’s say LinkedIn or a new video on YouTube, or we had a roundtable event at their headquarters, the employee turnout, engagement, commenting, reposting, all of those things, they sound so small. But when you saw the difference between before this campaign and that work, and after, you would think differently of the impact of every single one of those engagements, because it increased tenfold. So we knew that we were motivating the people within the walls, which means how could we not be motivating those outside? Right, right.
Greg Kihlstrom: In addition to some of the publicly traded companies that you’ve worked with, you’ve also worked with communications for those organizations that are on the road to IPO. Certainly financial communications, can be tricky for, you know, whether you’re public or pre-public, however you want to look at it. But I guess to start with, you know, just in general, you know, what makes some of the financial communications particularly challenging and how should companies approach these communications differently from some of the more general brand messaging?
Nikki Festa O’Brien: It’s funny, between 2020 and 2022, I did more IPOs, even SPACs, than I had in those. full 15 years prior combined, which was, it was a wild time. That road to IPO was really truncated. You know, some didn’t know they were going to IPO at the beginning of the year. By the end of the year, there we were. So the runways were really short. And then there were others that that was, you know, a dream and a goal of theirs. But, you know, it went from three to five years to three to five months. So it was rather interesting because there is a different strategy. There is a different approach to the communications engine that you want to do when you know someone has the public markets in mind. I would say some of the most challenging aspects is that they’re all different. I’ve not done an IPO with a brand, even if they’re in the same space, that look the same as the other. So there’s something that I always recommend my team and, or in combination with the brand’s team do, which is an audit of the space in that exact moment. And then continuing to every quarter, take a look again. You know, what is the feeling, what kind of coverage of the companies that are IPOing getting? What kind of questions are being asked? Because it changes from even month to month. Right now, it could be changing week to week. So that’s something that’s really interesting and insightful. And something that stands out to me as probably the most challenging is how different every company approaches sort of, we’ll call them the rules of the road on the road time. So I had one client that was super bold, love to take risks. would hear our guidance and then sort of beat to their own drum and say, okay, that sounds great. Really glad you said that. You can even put it in writing if you want, but we’re going to do it this way. And that’s fun for us, but also, you know, you don’t sleep very much during that time. And this particular client. They never ended up IPO-ing, but one of the things that they asked us to do was they really wanted to secure a piece of business press coverage that said that they’re going to hit $100 million in revenue by a certain year. And for months, we told them what a bad idea this was. There’s so many reasons why it’s a bad idea, but even just foundationally, they had IPO as their goal. And if they don’t hit that revenue by that that timeframe that they wanted the headline to read, there’s a lot of questions, a lot of defending that would need to happen. If they overshoot it, great. But if they undershoot it, it’s not so great. So they didn’t end up IPOing. We did end up securing the coverage after months of sort of debate on whether it was appropriate. And they did not meet that revenue goal by that year. They had a different kind of exit. And those are the moments where I think it’s hard because no matter how many flashing red signs you put up or how many proof points you put in front of them, sometimes they just think they’re going to be an exception, or that’s not gonna be the case. And we firmly believe that we can only go so far, right? I always say, push back three times, the fourth time you go, go at their pace and in their way, but make sure you’ve documented what you’ve said. You know?
Greg Kihlstrom: Right, right. Well, yeah, and I mean, you know, it’s an industry that you’re kind of taught that the only successes are the exceptions. I think in reality, there’s a lot of companies that do really, really well, but aren’t, you know, household names or unicorns or whatever. But I, you know, I think there’s the industry in general, you’re kind of taught from a early on to that you have to like break the rules and everything like that. But you know, there, there’s reasons why there are rules, right?
Nikki Festa O’Brien: Yeah, exactly. And, and how something that could serve you in that moment could hurt you later.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, I want to move on to our last topic here and, you know, maybe a little controversial topic, but, you know, we’ll end on this and, you know, something that you’ve said before is that marketing should report to communications. And, you know, certainly this goes against some of the traditional structures out there. But, you know, I wanted to hear your thoughts on this and maybe elaborate why you believe this arrangement benefits corporate strategy.
Nikki Festa O’Brien: How did I know this would be one of the things that would come back?
Greg Kihlstrom: Right, right. Be careful what you say.
Nikki Festa O’Brien: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, it received a big response, which is exciting. And I think All my comms colleagues and peers all really seconded the notion. And even a lot of the marketers I work with and ones that I don’t had a pretty good and positive response to it. And I will say, while more strongly worded than I intend it to actually be as a commentary of the industry, things are finally starting to shift. And for me, comms hasn’t really got that renaissance. that it really needed to kind of push things in the other direction for, for the field and the industry. It’s such a critical function. And one of the things that really sticks out to me, you know, over 20 years, mostly agency side, I have had an in-house role once, but I’m, I’m an agency rat as I like to call myself. And with that, I see clients, you know, 5,000, $50,000, 50,000 person companies, 500 person companies, 50 person companies. The one common denominator is that the comms team is usually a team of one. And that’s tough when you think about external, internal, a lot of them in control brand, the financial pieces, the executive comms. It’s a lot of different channels. And marketing has the same thing, right? They have SEO paid and display and all of those things as well. You know, we really have to prepare for a business case with our clients. Anytime we need budget for anything, they don’t have their own budget. They’re, you know, balling for it with their marketing counterpart or product, or an individual executive will need to sponsor a certain initiative that they want to get done. So for me, I really wanted to make a bold move and have a shake up there because it’s time. I mean, even right down to the publications, there’s a lot of CMO driven columns across major business outlets and industry trades. There’s a few PR, but really it’s Eleanor Hawkins at Axios holding up the comms profession. And that just launched a couple of years ago. So for me, I wanted to make a justification because that’s really important. You know, comms should have a seat at the table, should have a budget, and should also be seen as a driver and a leader. like any other C suite.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. And is that, is that kind of the, uh, I don’t know if it’s middle ground or, you know, the kind of compromise there of like, you know, at least to get the seat at the table and the budget. And you know, is, is that, do you think that’s where companies should be headed at least for the time being?
Nikki Festa O’Brien: Yeah. Even just giving them the C suite title.
Nikki Festa O’Brien: I can’t tell you how many comms leaders with double the years experience that I have. that don’t have the, you know, the CCO title, but they have all of the C-level responsibility. So I think, yeah, I think that is absolutely the middle ground. I could, I could also sit here cause I’m very passionate about marketing as well and give you all the reasons why, you know, they’re separate and, and all of those things. But, but one of the things that really struck me about comms, especially in the last five years is that comms is brought in the room first. and is the last one to leave and knows the audience, going back to the audience, audience, audience from earlier, they know the target audience better than any other department within a brand because we have to. We have to write on behalf of that audience every day. So there is sort of a feeling that if communications owns the message, in marketing executes on the message. Maybe it’s not a reporting structure, but there’s definitely like a chain partnership that’s happening kind of back and forth.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And so, you know, along those lines, then, you know, there’s a lot of marketers listening to the show and, you know, what can they do to and a lot of marketing leaders listening to the show, you know, what can they do? What’s their part to support this?
Nikki Festa O’Brien: That’s a great question. It would be nice you know, when they’re sitting at the table and they’re talking about, you know, different launches or strategies or communications or messaging to ensure that their, their comms leader is sitting next to them, representing the work in there for the conversation too, because we’re only as good as, as we have for information or context, we can do our job much better with that. So maybe making sure that that comms has the seat next to them, um, at the very least.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah, I love it. Well, thanks again for joining, Nikki. One last thing before we wrap up, based on this conversation, what do you hope that communications folks will take away from this when they’re planning their next branding effort?
Nikki Festa O’Brien: To stop thinking about brand and comms as a nice to have. If you’re looking for funding, if you’re looking to attract buyers, boost reputation, influence pipeline, communicate your CrowdStrike outage, to work through a ransomware attack, a restructure, or to compete in a crowded space. There’s a communications for that. It’s so often seen as, well, potentially this is something we should invest in, or potentially this is something that’s worthwhile. It absolutely is. It influences all the major areas of your business and the bottom line.
