Expert Mode: Reinventing an $18B Professional Services Giant—Inside Kyndryl’s Brand Genesis
This article was based on the interview with Featuring insights from Maria Winans, Chief Marketing Officer, Kyndryl by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
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.
For enterprise marketing leaders—many of whom wrestle with legacy perceptions, siloed cultures, and growth mandates—Kyndryl’s story offers pragmatic clues. In our conversation, Winans outlined four decisions that transformed a corporate carve-out into a people-centric services brand. Below, we distill those lessons, sprinkle in her own words, and translate each move into takeaways you can apply tomorrow morning (coffee optional, curiosity mandatory).
1. Make the Name a Strategic Storyline
When your legal team rejects 199,999 candidate names, you either laugh or switch careers. Winans chose option A, blending kinship and tendril to coin “Kyndryl.” The first root underscores trust between experts and clients; the second evokes co-growth. “We took the word kinship for partnership…and the word tendril that symbolizes growth, and we put it together. And we said, tada, it’s Kyndryl”.
Why it matters:
- A coined name let the team shed old-company baggage and signal a services mindset.
- The linguistic mash-up telegraphed both relationship and expansion—two outcomes every enterprise buyer demands.
Leader takeaway: If your brand is pivoting, resist the temptation to merely tweak visual assets. Instead, craft nomenclature that bakes your business model and customer promise into a single, memorable word.
2. Codify Culture Before Campaigns
Kyndryl’s offering is intangible expertise, so culture became the product. Winans embedded three behaviors—restless, empathetic, devoted—in what she calls “the Kyndryl Way”: “Restless…empathetic…and the last word, very powerful, devoted…The Kyndryl Way became our cultural platform”. By articulating behaviors early, marketing and HR sang from the same hymnal, accelerating decision-making and flattening hierarchy.
Why it matters:
- Culture statements usually collect dust; Kyndryl’s verbs read like performance metrics.
- The language doubled as external brand voice—restless to innovate, empathetic to listen, devoted to deliver. Customers heard the same promises employees internalized.
Leader takeaway: Draft a three-word culture contract that staff can remember under deadline pressure. Then align recognition, content tone, and even KPIs to those verbs.
3. Trade Spray-and-Pray for Surgical Account-Based Marketing
Once public, Kyndryl ditched mass demand gen and hugged its top accounts. “We needed to surround our customers…We introduced this whole notion of account-based marketing”. Field marketers were embedded alongside sales, expanding conversations from IT leaders to line-of-business heads, while messaging shifted from products to co-created solutions.
Why it matters:
- ABM eased clients through the spin-off uncertainty by proving Kyndryl knew their business at a one-to-one level.
- Focused resource allocation let marketing pilot new value propositions quickly and retire ineffective tactics quietly—an agility edge in complex enterprise cycles.
Leader takeaway: Map your “vital few” relationships, stand up an ABM pod, and measure progress via buying-center penetration rather than vanity impressions.
4. Lead From the Uncomfortable Middle
Building a Fortune 500 brand in a pandemic is, to understate it, slightly stressful. Winans argues that tension is fuel: “Don’t be afraid to feel discomfort…When you’re uncomfortable, you grow…be bold…Don’t play it safe”. Her mantra permeated naming workshops, culture sprints, and even the New York Stock Exchange bell-ringing, where every employee virtually hit the button—because founders, big or small, deserve front-row seats.
Why it matters:
- Courageous messaging stands out in saturated B2B markets where copycats echo “trusted partner” in four-point font.
- Employees emulate C-suite behavior; a bold CMO invites grassroots experimentation rather than permission-seeking.
Leader takeaway: Audit one upcoming initiative for “safe default” choices. Replace at least one with a decision that makes you mildly uneasy—and set up measurement to catch issues early.
Conclusion
Kyndryl’s launch proves that brand building in an enterprise context is both architecture and anthropology. Architecture, because you must design structures—names, value propositions, ABM plays—that can bear enormous operational weight. Anthropology, because those structures succeed only when thousands of people choose to live them daily.
For marketing leaders eyeing spin-offs, rebrands, or simply overdue refreshes, Winans offers an implicit checklist: craft a name that carries strategy, declare behaviors before taglines, pursue intimacy over reach, and treat discomfort as a KPI. Follow that advice and you’ll wield brand as a lever for reinvention rather than a coat of paint on yesterday’s house—no squeaky erasers required.
