Exploring the MarTech & CX Landscape
Articles about brand strategy for modern marketers.
Building a brand from the ground up is a daunting task for any marketing leader, but imagine doing so for a newly spun-off company with 90,000 employees across 60 markets. This was the challenge Maria Winans, CMO of Kyndryl, embraced following the company’s separation from IBM.
In B2B marketing, especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare, “bold” and “memorable” aren’t usually the adjectives that spring to mind. But Kristin Russel, CMO at symplr, has a different take. With a background that spans government speechwriting, spinning classes, and multiple executive marketing roles, she brings a refreshingly pragmatic—and occasionally irreverent—lens to brand-building in complex sectors.
The rise of the creator economy is a testament to the rapid transformation of the marketing landscape. No longer are brands solely in control of their narrative; instead, consumers and creators wield significant influence, shaping brand perception and driving purchasing decisions.
Innovation without visibility is invisible. That’s the harsh reality killing breakthrough companies across all industries. While brilliant brands focus on perfecting their products in stealth mode, louder competitors with inferior offerings are taking the lead—grabbing market share, captivating investors, and winning over customers. The truth is, the marketplace doesn’t reward the best solution; it rewards the most visible one. Without visibility, even the most groundbreaking ideas risk fading into obscurity.
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.
