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Every marketer loves a clean slate—right up until the moment the eraser squeaks across a whiteboard the size of a football field. Spinning out 90,000 employees, $18 billion of revenue, and decades of IBM heritage into a fresh-faced brand qualifies as one of those supersized whiteboards. That was the brief handed to Maria Winans when she became employee #2—and first CMO—of Kyndryl. Her task went far beyond designing a logo; she had to forge a business identity resilient enough to steady enterprise clients’ mission-critical systems yet flexible enough to grow in unpredictable directions.
Forget chasing fleeting trends or scrambling to react to public sentiment. Today’s most disruptive companies are rewriting the playbook altogether. They are not followers of narrative; they are the authors. By strategically engineering narratives designed to shift perception, lead dialogue, and align with their audience’s deepest values, these organizations don’t just stay relevant; they dominate.
It’s one thing to build a recognizable brand. It’s quite another to scale that brand across countries, cultures, and continents—especially when your customers expect personalization, integrity, and clarity at every touchpoint.
When most people think of launching a new beverage brand, they picture sleek branding, influencer campaigns, and prime shelf space in upscale grocery chains. Dominic Minogue had a different idea. Instead of chasing the wellness aisle or flooding the market with flavored seltzers, he launched Dirty Water—the “dive bar hard seltzer”—in one of the most competitive markets in the world: New York City.
The promise of AI is palpable: A brand manager clicks ‘Generate’ and an AI console delivers five hundred ad variants in under a minute. Such scenes illustrate why the adoption of artificial intelligence in business functions has rapidly accelerated, with a significant increase in firms leveraging AI year-over-year. According to the McKinsey: State of AI report, 78% of firms now use artificial intelligence in at least one business function, up from 55% one year earlier. Marketers laud the efficiency, with nearly all (93%) reporting adding generative tools and features in their tech stack in 2024.
Marketing has entered a new AI-powered era—one where audiences can no longer distinguish between human-created content from the latest algorithm. With 77% of CMO’s incorporating generative AI into their copywriting, campaigns and creative processes, it’s clear artificial intelligence is quickly reshaping how brands communicate.
In a time when consumers are buying into values as much as they’re buying products, authenticity has become the holy grail of brand strategy. The problem? Too many brands treat authenticity like a checkbox—or worse, like a costume. That’s where Phylis Rothschild, CMO at Pete and Gerry’s, offers a refreshing counterpoint.
Joining me today is Emily Ward, VP of Global Marketing at Turnitin, a leading edtech brand focused on academic integrity and student success. Emily has spent more than 15 years in the education space, shaping marketing strategies for institutions under the Laureate Education network, leading global marketing at Anthology (formerly Blackboard), and now overseeing the global marketing strategy at Turnitin.
There are a lot of great ideas for products and brands out there, but sometimes the difference between success and failure lies in getting the details right and understanding the customers and users of your product. Today we’re going to talk about growing a brand by focusing on the details that matter.
H&H Bagels isn’t just a bagel shop—it’s a cultural institution. Whether you know it from Seinfeld, Sex and the City, or your own morning walk on the Upper West Side, the brand has always been iconically New York. But what happens when a brand that’s inseparable from its hometown tries to scale nationally? Can you grow without diluting what made you beloved in the first place?
