Uniting two organizations under one brand

About the Brand Enabled Podcast & all episodes

Brand mergers lead to more lucrative business opportunities, a wider audience reach, and a bigger growth potential. However, it also means going through a challenging time bringing together different brands with their own identities and cultures. Joining Gabriel Cohen is Amy Barzdukas, who shares her contribution to the brand merger between Polycom and Plantronics. She talks about her experiences in choosing a brand name, the things to consider when creating a business logo, and the right way to approach executives. She also shares about the efforts of her current company WiTricity in revolutionizing how electric vehicles are powered – by getting rid entirely of charging plugs.

Welcome to the show, Amy. It’s great to have you on.

I’m delighted to be here.

You’ve got an interesting background. You spent a lot of years at some very large organizations like Microsoft and HP. You weren’t necessarily in traditional, typical brand roles. What was the first time in your career when you started to get your hands on a brand with a big B?

I had little minor forays into it, I suppose at Microsoft and HP but I started diving in when I was working for Polycom. Polycom was its own company and we were doing a big rebrand shortly after I was named CMO. We were ready to roll it out and Polycom was acquired. I was about ready to roll it out and it was like, “We’re being acquired by Plantronics.” It’s great. I had done all of this work. It was the first time I’d gotten and nobody ever saw the light of day.

When Plantronics bought Polycom, we had to rename the company. We had to rebrand this combined company to equal size companies so all of the standards like lead horse, reverse lead horse, put them together and you come up with Polytronix or Plancom or nothing was going to work. That combined company rebranded as Poly and it was an amazing adventure.

Most of us above a certain age, maybe above 25 probably all recognize the Polycom brand but think about it in a narrow form. It was the precursor to video when it was just voice. What else was in that business? Outside of what we typically think of as Polycom, what were the other parts of that business?

Polycom had the phone’s piece but it also did video. When I joined Polycom, in fact, in my office, as was in everybody’s office back when we used to go to the office, we all had video screens. We did video meetings all the time. This is before Zoom even existed. The video was a big part of the company but it was expensive. It was a complicated install. It was on-premises servers. This sounds like pre-historic times now to talk about it but we were early advocates that you could work from anywhere.

That was a big part of Polycom. Polycom invented the conference phone and that was a great thing. Part of the problem was that they never broke. You can still go into somebody’s conference room now and I can tell you that the phone is several years old and it still works fine. There were desk phones as well. All kinds of phones were sold through different telephony providers.

If I close my eyes and think about it, I can probably hear the sound of a Polycom phone, especially the internet over IP phone ringing. I still have that sound in my ears. What was a little bit of the background of the Plantronics acquisition then?

Plantronics is perhaps most famous for the headsets that were given to the Apollo pilots. Starting with some of the latter Mercury missions and for all of the Apollo missions, the headsets were made by Plantronics. The very famous first transmission from the moon and Neil Armstrong was through a Plantronics headset.

Plantronics also had different kinds of headsets that were used by airline pilots, control towers, and by Joe Schmo. Ones that you would use at work or at a call center or even for jogging or riding a Peloton, big sports headsets. When the companies came together, it was with the view that this was the end-to-end collaboration across all of the things that you would want to do in an office in whatever way you would want to communicate.

When that combination happens, how long did you have to figure it out? Oftentimes at that moment, everyone’s focused on what’s the name going to be. We know there are a lot of strategies and other work that has to happen in even before the name, which then happens before the identity. How long did you have? How much pressure did you have? Did you have a seat at the top table as well to be able to start to set expectations and influence what needed to be done?

We started talking about, “What’s the name? What’s the brand? Who are we?” while I was on vacation before the deal closed. I was talking with my new CEO about anything before it got underway. The deal closed in July and we wanted to have our unveiling at the big collaboration trade show called Enterprise Connect, which was in March. Not a long time to get soup to nuts. As with any branding, there’s the fun part, the creative part, what does it look like, how do we bring this all together then there’s the less fun stuff about legal entities.

It’s not rolling the brand out and splashy ads but you’ve got to think about physical plans. We had signs on building global companies, so everything had to be first inventoried. For example, we had a manufacturing facility in Mexico. None of us knew they wore uniforms, so we had to design uniforms as part of this. It was pretty far-reaching in a very short amount of time.

Even going back to then the actual creation and development of the brand, even before the name, did you go through research? Was there a brand positioning or brand platform exercise? Take us in the process.

It was extremely fortunate when we announced that the deal was going to be done. At Polycom, I had our annual brand tracker. It was about to go out. We grabbed it back and were able to add some questions. Plantronics similarly was about to do one. We let them both run. We looked at both of them and we were able to have very fresh and accurate data on brand awareness of both Plantronics and Polycom.

What did people know about them? What did they think about them? It informed us early on how to think about the brand because what we learned was both brands were very well-known in their respective spaces. Both brands were respected but neither one of them had a particularly emotional connection. People knew both of us. They liked us but we weren’t sparking that emotional connection that drives the loyalty we were looking for. That gave us a starting place for how to think about the new brand and to focus on injecting a lot of humanity into it.

How was that articulated then through a story? Was there a core single-minded idea that represented the new brand truth?

It was about making human connections because what we did with video at that time was still relatively new. Highlighting the fact that your headsets, your phones, or your video screens shouldn’t get in the way of what you’re trying to do, which is connect with other people. That became the brand truth. We wanted to move away from a couple of things that happened. For anybody who was marketing collaboration, hardware, and software at the time, there would be a great beautiful conference room showing happy and shiny people collaborating.

We wanted to move away from some of that hack-need view of the way things worked and to focus instead on the emotion of the connection. Not the literal, “We’re all working.” We were doing some early shoots and I had to keep going into the conference room because I would walk out and the team would make the guy take his phone out of his pocket. They were constantly going around cleaning the lipstick off the mug. I’m like, “This is real. We have to have real people here with real connections.”

Human means leaning into those imperfections as well. How did you arrive at the decision to move forward with Poly? Take us even into some of the conversations. That must have been very interesting around the fact that you weren’t going forward with a new name. You were carrying the equity over from one of the core brands but with a slight modification but essentially, killing the other brand that you said Neil Armstrong had initially communicated the moon landing.

It was a tough call. Initially, we had thought we would either go with Plantronics or Polycom. We were trying to and there was a lot of emotion around that. Both companies had storied histories and long-tenured employees who felt very connected to their brands. We were struggling with this and I have to hand it to the agency that we worked with. It was a profit at the time. The guy who was running the team with us said, “Have you thought about Poly?” We were like, “Wow.” We started thinking about the many ways that we’re helping people to connect and the many stories that both companies had.

We were able to start to see how poly, meaning many, played across all of the pieces. As we translated that into the logo and the story, we were able to build this logo that was like a propeller that leaned into the aviation past and present. It started to become a very compelling and easy-to-tell story to employees. That started to make the difference. We also leaned into legacy in terms of some of the colors we chose. The Plantronics had an orange that they called lava. Polycom was all about red. We killed the red, kept the orange, and so we were bringing in pieces from both sides to try to show that this was a union.

It’s funny you tell the story of the orange because one of my first-ever projects was working on the AT&T acquisition of Cingular. It was very similar in the sense that we killed the Cingular brand. I still remember my brand strategy professor from business school calling me up, going, “You’ve destroyed $12 billion of brand equity here,” yet I explained to him what the business strategy was and that we were moving more to this notion of bundling.

You needed to carry forward a single brand but what connected with me was it was a very similar strategy. What are some of the equities that we can carry forward not only to keep that brand alive but as a way to tell that story to all the singular employees, so they still felt that sense of connection? Funnily enough, it was also an orange that was layered into the AT&T brand.

Orange is a personal favorite color of mine but it can be hard to do right.

Why is it a favorite?

I find it incredibly optimistic. I would be lying if I didn’t also say that I’m a little bit of a fan of Hermes Orange.

Did you find that then, in reality, that was able to appease some of the Plantronics people? Even though you didn’t go with the Polycom name, that association is much closer tied to Poly.

When we rolled everything out, the Polycom people and the Plantronics people were unhappy with the new brand, style, and everything were roughly equal. I felt that that was a success. We’ve managed to irritate both sides. One of the things that was important and something that anytime you’re doing a major rebrand is HR needs to be your best friend.

Our CHRO and I were like arm in arm for months leading to the rollout because part of what we were also trying to do was to build that new company culture and to bring some of the things that were best about Plantronics and some of the things that were best about Polycom together. The rollout of the brand incorporated a lot. We built internal champions who got sneak peeks and educated them. People around the world were there to be brand champions and to help explain things. We had big party rollout, special events, and contests internally for people to help start to celebrate and make people aware. If we hadn’t done that, it could easily have been a disaster.

Talk a bit about the logo process because I understand that was very interesting.

The logo we sweated over. It’s three Ps together, so Polycom, Plantronics and Poly. It looks like a propeller. We worked on it forever and just about when we were rolling it out, somebody said, “That looks like this logo on this headset manufacturer over here.” We had registered for trademarks. We’d done all the filings, all the searches but other companies company’s headsets had not filed anything. It was not publicly available. It was not for sale, so we knew nothing about it.

It’s not like it wasn’t in any way a lapse as part of the process of doing the competitive due diligence. It was one of those moments where something was being almost developed in parallel.

They weren’t identical. They were frighteningly similar but there was this moment of panic. The first thing was like, “Did somebody steal it or did we not know?” There’s all that flurry but then there’s also the realization that maybe for logos in the world, they go in endless variations. If you want to do things with the letter P, there are only so many things you can do with and they’re going to start looking similar.

The unfortunate part was the employees who were like, “What? You couldn’t be bothered to do a Google search? ” We could be bothered and in fact, we did but you can only say that so much before you start sounding defensive. We shouldered on. We went with it. There was legal activity. It was all settled. It’s all resolved. Everybody’s happy and we’ll see how long the logo lives. Poly, since I left, has been acquired by Hewlett-Packard, which also has a pretty historic logo. I don’t know how long my work will still live.

What are your big learnings as you think about what that experience brought you in terms of logos? You mentioned this notion of there being four logos. How did you get to that?

You’ve got round logos and square logos. You’ve got anything that is not a discreet object if your logo is the head of a dog or whatever. If you’re making shapes, there’s only so many shapes. What was important and the learning was it wasn’t a random shape that we chose. It had meaning and we had spent so much time building that meaning into it. It made it much easier for us to defend our logo because we could tell the story of all of the things that it stood for. It’s important not to choose something because you like, “It’s cool looking.” That’s not going to help you should something come up.

It sounds like you lent into this idea of there’s a real opportunity to have a story for what an expression represents that almost becomes what you need to tell. That you extract it from there. Oftentimes, I find that we find that’s used a lot as part of the launch but over time, it tends to then dissipate. New employees that join in the convening years don’t know about that story. It seems to get lost.

At Poly, we’ve referred to the logo as the propeller. The propellers were part of the story when we rebranded Omnitracs, which is now been sold and is part of Solera. You can’t go look at what I’m talking about but we branded it as an O for Omnitracs but it also resembled both the steering wheel and a tire. We called it the steering wheel because part of what Omnitracs was focused on was the transportation and trucking industries, which is all about getting you where you need to go safely and getting the goods where they need to go safely. The steering wheel was part of that story of who we were as a company.

One of the things that we hear a lot that branding professionals have struggled with sometimes is being able to have a conversation with an executive about a brand. As someone who’s been in a CMO role, can you take us behind the closed doors of some of those conversations with a CEO, a CFO, and some of the experiences and learnings that you’ve had? If you can even include some examples of where things didn’t go because that’s where you get some of the great learnings.

The first thing is that I’m a very passionate believer that a good brand does not come out of committee and it certainly doesn’t come out of consensus. You have to be clear on what you’re trying to accomplish. You also have to be clear on the rules of the game and who gets a vote before you start or you can find yourself in very murky surroundings because brands like almost everything else in marketing, everybody can see. Everybody’s an expert. Knowing who is going to be a player and what they care about and figuring out how to have influence is a good thing to have upfront. When we were rebranding Omnitracs, put it out in front of the executive committee and purple.

We think it’s more indigo and they’re like, “Purple? Can we meet? Is purple a color? We can be purple?” I had not anticipated that. I thank you, Ray Greer, my CEO at the time, who said, “It looks great. We’re going with it.” All of the purple chatter went away. Although, the rest of the executive team did make a point of sending me emails in purple fonts and dive in diving into the purpleness. You have to be both confident in your convictions and you need to know why something is a good idea.

Part of the reason at Omnitracs that we did go with that indigo purple was because it had great contrast against the green that we used for the logo. It had a very rich digital footprint that was clear and scaled well, so I could explain that it was not a random choice. It was chosen in fact from laws of complimentary colors and what will render well digitally as well as in print and a whole host of other issues.

The most important thing when you’re having those closed-door discussions is you need to be able to be convincing. The first rule of CMO-hood is numbers are the language of the boardroom. You don’t walk in to show pretty pictures. You walk in to show how you’re driving growth, retaining customers, and driving revenue. You then have permission to show the cool stuff that you’re doing. With a brand, you have to be able to speak in the whys and why it matters as much as you do on the elements of what plays out.

One of the harder things about a brand is its intangibility in some ways. There’s so much about digital marketing where you can drive direct attribution and show that linear connection. With a brand, you need to do more of a dance. You need to show the linkages and connections. From your experience, what has been the way that you’ve either story told through the brand to be able to connect it to business outcomes or the sorts of quantifiable numbers that you’ve used to make the case?

If you have NPS as we did at Microsoft and HP, you’ve got a clear connection to what people think about the company and how they’d recommend it. One of the most interesting ways to think about and measure a brand is to use it as a yardstick for product development. This is something that we were doing at Poly. Once we’ve done the brand, we were like, “Does the sound quality or is the noise canceling on this headset meet our bar? Does it meet the Poly bar?” This is what we know we stand for people.

If it’s not meeting that bar, we shouldn’t do it. That is a way to get people across the boardroom to buy into the notion of the brand because now you’re using it as a means to get product aligned. It’s a means to say, “Is that the customer service people would expect from our brand, or is that the sales approach people would expect?” You’ve got something that is much more than an amorphous but it’s something that people live and breathe every day and that becomes very powerful.

You were telling the story of having an understanding of what’s important to people and it reminded me of there’s a great Japanese business concept that’s called nemawashi, which is the core idea of laying the groundwork. They say that when you’re doing business in Japan, every meeting that you walk into should be a formality because everyone already knows what you’re asking for and what decision’s going to be made. It sounds like you applied a bit of that in executive discussions. How should you go about doing that?

One of the most valuable executive training that I ever had was when I was at Microsoft. It was one of these two-day deep dives and it was about how to influence the other players. Instead of thinking about, “How do I influence finance?” Finance is not a monolithic thing. It’s, “How do I influence Chuck in finance?” that matters. Chuck may be worrying about different things than Diane in finance.

It comes down to understanding your stakeholders as individuals understanding what they care about and what they don’t care about. That is effective management. I don’t know that it’s specific to the brand, to sales, or to any particular discipline but it’s about understanding what people are worried about and how to demonstrate to them that what you are doing is going to make things easier for them in their roles.

Is there a way to get that information with that? If you ask the question very directly, what do you mean? I don’t want to tell you what all my worries are.

Certainly, you know what your colleagues’ metrics are, so their measures of success are on the business side. Using your eyes and ears to determine a little bit more about what things tend to set them off, that’s emotional intelligence right there.

You went from working with some incredible very well-known corporate brands with a lot of infrastructure, and a lot more resources and you’ve gone into a very exciting industry that’s serving electric vehicles. Before we talk a bit more about the industry, how different was it? How have you had to adapt in thinking about a brand at a founder-led, smaller startup organization compared to being at the likes of Poly? Have you had to adjust?

How have I not had to adjust? It would still be the same discipline but going from companies with 100,000 people to a company with 100 people has certainly been a big change. The founder is no longer with the company but many of the people who were there at the company’s founding. The company, WiTricity was spun out of MIT. WiTricity means Wireless Electricity.

I cheerfully tell anybody that had I been with the company when it was founded, it would not be named WiTricity both from a brand perspective and because it’s dorky. It is a hard word to say. We get WeTricity with WiTrist and all kinds of variations. It doesn’t particularly localize well but what we’re doing is cool. Coming in, there had not been a CMO prior to my arrival. It’s been building a discipline and a path from scratch, which has been very exciting and as hands-on as I’ve been since I started in marketing a long time ago.

A lot of the people reading are going to be very interested in this category, whether it’s 2 people, 20 people, or 2,000 people in electric vehicles. Talk a bit about how WiTricity is transforming the game as we would traditionally think about vehicle charging.

One of the number one objections to EV’s general case in the US is the hassle of charging. People worry about finding a charger. They worry about the range. They worry that they’re unsafe in a public charger, lose their charger, or forget to plug in. Somebody else is going to plug in all of these issues surrounding it. The hassle of charging is a big deal. We make it easy because all you do is park. You park over a pad that is about the size of a large pizza box on the ground or installed in the ground. It can be level with the surface of the street and that’s it. You just park. It charges wirelessly over that air gap.

The piece that always boggles people’s minds is that it is as efficient as the plug. The first thing people will say is, “It’s got to be inefficient because your phone charger is not as fast as plugging it in.” It’s a different technology and it is as efficient. It’s pretty magical. When I get to go to our HQ, we have a couple of vehicles there that we’ve upgraded to support wireless charging. That becomes the vehicle that you drive while you’re in town. You get to the office and you park and you come out at the end of the day and you’ve got a full battery. It’s pretty amazing.

It seems like such a no-brainer. Why isn’t this everywhere? When it comes to then adding additional charging, why are they still adding the traditional way? That’s something that still boggles my mind a bit.

There are a couple of different answers. I’ll start with the fact that automakers are risk-averse. It’s a vehicle that needs to be safe. It needs to be proven. Until a few years ago, it wasn’t entirely clear how broadly electric vehicles were going to take off. A lot of the automakers are like, “Wait and see.” They spend a fair amount of the time looking over their shoulders, seeing what the other guys are doing, and trying to figure it out.

One of the keys to getting over that hesitancy was to have a standard. Electricity worked for the better part of a decade with the Society of Automotive Engineers to set the standard. That standard was ratified in 2020 and as we speak here in April of 2023, that ratification in 2020 in auto years was like yesterday. They’re all working on it.

We have seen vehicles come to market in Asia that have wireless charging from the factory. We have done some aftermarket upgrades and we’ll continue to do that partnering with others to do that as well. The second thing about charging is human nature, where anything that is new, we interpret right through what we already know. We know how to put a plug in the car to fill it with gas.

It’s human nature to default to an idiom that we’ve already understood. When you think about it, the reason you go to a gas station to fill your car is because gas is noxious, flammable, and very dangerous. You don’t want that in your garage or your driveway. Electricity is in your garage and your driveway and at the mall and everywhere you go in a settled environment. Electricity is now there.

Why do you make it a chore to go someplace? As people get over that, “I don’t have to go to a gas station anymore,” then we start getting people to go, “I can bring wireless charging any place that I’m already parked. Cars are parked 95% of the time. I don’t need a plug.” We’re seeing people go through the cycle. People who have been early adopters of electric vehicles will tell you one of the things they wish people knew was you don’t have to go to a gas station or a charging station very much. Now, the exceptions are for people who are going long distances. You need a fast charger there or for people who don’t have a dedicated parking space, then you need public parking infrastructure but it doesn’t have to be a plug.

People who are obsessed still with this notion of fast charging.

If you want to use a gas station model, it has to be fast but if you filled your car with electrons as quickly as you fill your car with gas, that’s like the power of 40 homes in upstate New York that you’re putting in your car in five minutes. That’s ridiculous. That’s a huge amount of energy.

I always equated when you first told me about this that the experience that electricity is bringing to car charging to me was almost like, “What is the Uberification of what Uber did to taxis?” The notion of, I’ve arrived. I can get out of the car and leave as opposed to having to stop for a moment. That friction point of having to pay the cab driver. It’s the same. I don’t have to come in and charge it. You park and go.

Our family has been driving electric cars since 2014, so we’ve been after it for a while. Weeks ago, I forgot to plug in the car before we went to bed. The next morning, my husband is like, “I had places to go.” As soon as I can get the WiTricity kit in my house, that problem will go away.

Amy, let’s finish with what I call the wisdom round, a couple of rapid-fire questions. What advice would you have loved to have given a younger Amy?

Have the courage of your convictions but know why you are convicted. It’s not enough for you to believe it to be so but you need to know the reasons why you believe it. You are much more able to stand up for whether it’s your work or your beliefs or your ideas if you can express them intelligently to people with a justification. That would be the first one. The second one would be to get rid of that, “Are you coming to dinner today?” Ending at the end of your sentence, much younger in your career.

What’s the right way to say that?

That’d be, “Are you coming to dinner?”

Is that a California reference? I’m trying to understand what the reference is.

It’s something that is endemic in women in particular where we do these little things to not be offensive and go take up space. It’s okay.

What would you describe as your core leadership principles?

I am a big believer in a team. As a leader, I try to be player-coach. My preference is for me to be able to tell my leaders, “This is where we’re going. This is why we’re going there. This is your role. Now, you do it,” but you have to give people the why. Some people will blindly do whatever you say but you’re going to get a lot more creative and collaborative engagement with your team if you tell them why you want them to do something, not necessarily how to do it.

What’s the best feedback you’ve ever been given?

It was great to hear somebody tell me, “We know you’re smart but that’s not enough. We need the results.”

Where do you go for learnings to stay up to speed with what’s going on in marketing and business?

I read everything. My only challenge is I often can’t remember where I read it. It could have been in Harvard Business Review, in Vogue, or in some random marketing newsletter that I get in my inbox but I just read everything. I am grateful as I’ll get out for my one superpower, which is that I read extraordinarily quickly, so I can consume vast amounts. I get very impatient if I have to watch a video to learn something because I read it three times as fast as you could say it to me.

Any secrets that you have about getting the best out of your agency partners?

It comes down to the brief. More than anything else, if you’re working with an agency and you have not done the hard work of getting the brief good and tight, you’re going to be either lucky or disappointed.

I’ll give a big shout-out to someone who I read a lot and that’s Mark Ritson who writes for Marketing Week in the UK. This is one of his biggest bugbears. There was a study done in 2022 that was called Better Briefs, where they asked 100 or so agency people and 100 or so client sides. They asked the client-side people, “How good do you think you are at writing briefs?” They asked the agency people, “How well do you think that clients are asking for briefs?” There’s this huge gap in how well. 70% of clients think they’re excellent at writing briefs and 7% of agencies said that they get good briefs from clients.

That sounds about right. In fact, one of my favorite games to play when I watch ads on TV that I don’t understand is to see a brief on that.

Amy, thank you so much. It’s been so much fun having this conversation. It’s very insightful as well.

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here and always a pleasure to talk to you.

That was awesome. That was great.

I learned something every time I do something like this and Mark, what’s his name?

Mark Ritson. I’ll send you this specific article. It is the one thing I read every week. It’s his column on Marketing Week because not only is he very smart. He’s the ideal marketer because he’s a bit of a curmudgeon and he’s a skeptic. In marketing, we’re talking about selling things and telling the positive side of it. There’s something magical about coming in as a skeptic and calling BS on everything as a marketer.

Have you read Gobbledy? Jared Blank is the author. He writes a weekly newsletter that makes fun of tech business-to-business marketing and it is hysterical.

I’ll look forward to seeing that.

My favorites are when he will pull something verbatim from the Gartner website and it’s awesome. Although, I do live in fear that one of the days something I wrote is going to show up in his column as being an utter mangle of senseless words. We now put things through, “Did Jared make fun of this? Okay, we’re good.”

I have to read you a quote from the Better Briefs thing here that I had because he’s entertaining. His writing is also very entertaining. He always has a bit of a conflict with Marketing Week because he curses a lot in his writing, which is another thing that I love. He talks about the horrors of marketers’ strategic bankruptcy revealed by this Better Briefs. He’s savage. What’s interesting is everyone, probably me included, the whole AI ChatGPT revolution and its impact on marketers.

He’s calling BS on this because what he’s saying is like, “First, marketers need to understand strategy first because this is going to be another tactical thing.” His point is much more interesting with ChatGPT is how it’s impacting. After more than a decade or so, it’s the one thing that’s going to threaten Google’s dominance of search. His main point there is it’s not necessarily that it’s going to make search better. It’s the pure perception that people now have that AI equals better search and therefore, they’re now going to be willing to even look at Bing.

I’m fascinated by the whole ChatGPT. I spent way too much time with DALL-E making images over the holidays. I have my golden doodles in virtually every type of painting you can imagine.

On your own?

No.

You could now upload your photo as well. This is what he says, “Two-thirds of big brand briefs are unclear about who they are targeting. More than half the client briefs delivered had no clear objectives. We need to put down the toys like AI because they are toys. Partly because they are toys and partly because while we are about with them, the basic building blocks of what we should be doing sit jumbled and unassembled on the floor of the playpen all around us.” I love that.

He’s on my list now. That’s great.

He’s very data-driven. He’s an academic, so a lot of his thinking is not premised on Byron Sharpe’s work but he’ll discuss it and debate it a lot. A bit overly CPG-focused but I always learn something from his stuff. I will let you go.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. It was lovely to catch up and I loved it when we would catch up every quarter, so I’d love to carry on doing that.

Likewise.

About Amy Barzdukas

When trying to scale up, it helps to know what “big” looks like. Amy has successfully parlayed her success in marketing, communications, and product management in large companies – Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, Inc. – to help set the business, marketing, and GTM strategies in much smaller ones, including her current role as CMO at WiTricity. What is common across all her roles is her success in navigating change, building brands, and modernizing marketing on a global scale.  She has been recognized with awards for transformation, campaign performance, and creative development, but more importantly, she has a track record of developing future CMOs.