Exploring the MarTech & CX Landscape
Articles about brand strategy for modern marketers.
This article was written for Forbes Agency Council by Greg Kihlström. With a fiercely competitive field of options for customers, simply offering a high-quality product or service is often no longer enough to set your brand apart. To truly stand out and build lasting relationships with your customers, you need to create an emotional connection that resonates with them on a deeper level.
This article was written for MarTech by Greg Kihlström. Want your ads
remembered and acted on? Use these creative levers to boost
distinctiveness, emotional impact and profitability.
88% of consumers now say trust is just as important in buying decisions as price and quality. Think about that for a moment. Trust isn’t just some emotional afterthought or goodwill product of a long-standing customer relationship. It has fundamentally shifted into a key competitive battleground and deciding factor at the point of purchase.
What if rebranding wasn’t just about a new logo and tagline, but about transforming an 80,000-person company’s entire culture and strategy? What if brand became one of your most valuable tools for business reinvention? Today, I’m joined by Maria…
Marketers love to talk about trust. It’s on their websites, in their taglines, and plastered across their slides. But too often, it’s still just that—talk. Dana Bodine, Vice President of Marketing at Trustpilot, wants to change that. Her mission: to make trust measurable, operational, and actionable.
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.
