Segment to superstar: How SiriusXM grows passionate audiences

Gabriel: Welcome to another episode of Brand Enabled with me, Gabriel Cohen, and Holly Osborne. Holly, when I think about satellite radio, I think about SiriusXM and I think most people do. They think about that three-month free subscription that you get when you get a new car followed by all these renewal notices after the free period ends, we associate Howard Stern, we think about the UI in the car, and that’s kind of it. And we think about maybe the 2010s.

So I am so excited today for us to dive into and learn about this category beyond those base expectations… such an interesting brand and such an interesting story… with JulieAnne Evanina, who can not only tell us the SiriusXM story and her career and path, but it’s rare that you get someone who’s been at one place for 18 years.

When you think about the guests and the other people you’ve spoken to, it’s been interesting hearing the career arc of their journey across different places. So today we’re going to get to go deep in a category that we all know, but like this deep, right? – And for anyone who’s listening, I’m doing like a very thin line at the surface level.

Anything you want to add Holly before we introduce JulieAnne?

Holly: Yeah, I have to say, we want to hear from JulieAnne, but I got to be a hype kid for just a second, because not only did JulieAnne and I hit it off right away, I feel like I’ve worked with her or something. Like there’s this kind of kinship. So I think we’re in for really fun conversation today.

I am a huge SiriusXM, not just fan, but defender. You know, when you reach that arc in the brand where like even if the brand did something wrong, I would defend it. Like even if it accidentally was double-charging me or they got rid of my favorite station or something. And I think it’s because… and this is something I want to unpack with our amazing guest today… is that it has something for not only everyone, but all the parts of you. And without meaning to sound cheesy, none of us are just one person. There are moments where you want to kind of headbang in the car because you’re feeling like, “I’ve got to get my energy out. I’ve got to get my aggression out.” And other moments where you need to hear something intelligent, you need to hear something soothing, you need to hear something nostalgic. This is a brand that gets all of us and kind of is there for all of those moments of our lives.

But yeah, Gabe, like where do we intersect it aside from in our vehicles? And that’s been probably a huge focus of the brand. And so without further ado, JulieAnne, thank you so much for joining us. You are a great guest.

JulieAnne: Hello Holly and Gabe, so great to see you today and to be with you for this conversation. Really appreciate you having me.

Holly: We’re the lucky ones to have you.

Okay, of a bunch of things that we have to dive into, the first thing I want to start off, just right out of the gates, with is a story about a Christmas sweater. But it’s not just any Christmas sweater. We’ve got a lot of really juicy topics to dig into, guys, around a rebrand, around content and audience segmentation, around category evolution, but it would be silly of me not to start with the story of the heavy metal sweater.

Because I just think our listeners deserve, you know, a little something with such a cool guest. So would you do us the honors of just starting us off with a story of the heavy metal sweater, and then we’re going to get to all the, you know, nosy questions for you around digging into the brand. Take it away.

JulieAnne: I love it, Holly. Well, this is a great place to start because I think this is such a beautiful representation of what SiriusXM means to its listeners and its fans – meeting them where they are, meeting them with their passion points. But also what happens when you enable your team who knows their content area, and has a passion, and you let them run and execute something.

So I take it back a few years, SiriusXM is just coming off of announcing and rolling out a brand refresh, and we are going into the holiday season. Holiday season is a massive, amazing time for listening on the SiriusXM platform.

It is not just about traditional Christmas music, but it is about holiday music across the spectrum of holidays and cultures. It is about what matters to you in this time. And that might be, “I need non-holiday music to tune out my family.” It might mean, “I need those holiday carols to push me through and get me in the mood.” But it is about, like everything on this brand platform, bringing our listeners and our fans closer to the things that they love.

When we look at our audiences, and we look at how we segment audiences, we are always trying to identify what are those highest passion point audiences because they drive such fandom and engagement, and they have such strong relationships with our hosts and our content. And one of those very strong communities is our heavy metal community. And we said, you know, holidays are so often shown in glitter and smiles and snowmen and happiness and that is a really important part of the holiday, but there’s this metal community that needs to be represented too.

Holly: Hell yeah.

JulieAnne: We had a series of team members who are really dedicated to this genre. They worked with our amazing creative agency and said, “We have just a banger of an idea. We want to make and film the production of the most heavy metal holiday sweater. That is made of the angriest wool that is knitted with the bones of the angriest sheep found in Scotland, and it will have spikes and everything that our heavy metal fans need. It will be soaked and saturated in the highest decibel heavy metal music. And not only will we make this and share with our fans how it was made, but we will raffle one off. We will make two of them, and we will raffle one off to our fans and subscribers.” And so we did that for the holiday season.

What was amazing is the team brought this idea. They said, “There’s an underserved community here. We have an idea. It’s a little out there, but we know that it hits the right notes. It hits the right notes for our content. It hits the right notes for our brand. It hits the right notes for our fans. And this is a crazy earned media opportunity that we need to jump on.” And they got it done, and we still celebrate it every year.

Holly: That’s so awesome.

Gabriel: What did it do for the brand? How did you look at outcomes and results from that?

JulieAnne: We looked at that two ways.

One, in our earned media shares, social media, positive sentiment. We spent very little, if any money on paid media. A little bit to get our sweepstakes out. But it really drove this massive earned media moment for us and such positive social sentiment.

It also was this beautiful model inside the business that… one of the things, Holly and Gabe, I think we talk about is, where is marketing the culture carrier and driving the organization and where are we kind of the garbage can for, “I need something done. I don’t really know what to do. You’re technically free. So figure it out for me”? Right? We’ve heard this, “I don’t have to pay for it. So you figure it out.”

Holly: Yeah.

JulieAnne: And this was a model that helped demonstrate that shift between a service organization and a business driver. What we had was other parts of the business line up and say, “What you did for them, I want you to do that for us too.”

And so that’s true – lead by creating it. And then you are creating not only this political capital and the social capital with your fans, but with your internal stakeholders and partners.

Holly: Well, I think it’s such a neat example of the fact that your brand is teaming with content creativity. I mean, you are a whole… almost sort of a… what do I want to call it? Like a clearing house for killer content, right? You’re curating it, you’re putting it out there, you’re receiving it back in from your fans and your creators.

What I love is that your marketing team, instead of piggybacking on someone else’s creation, came up with your own. And that must have been sort of an interesting line to walk a lot of the time because you could be creative in your own right or you could leverage the creativity of the myriad creators, hosts, personalities, genres, events, so forth that were going on.

Tell us a little bit… as we kind of segue maybe into some really interesting brand architecture conversation around the parent and the subs… help us first understand how you walk that line of your own creativity, kind of bespoke within the brand of SiriusXM, versus leveraging the creativity that was kind of coming in and out through the creators.

JulieAnne: Absolutely. This one is absolutely a partnership, sort of led and driven by the brand and marketing team. But we need to partner with those content experts and content leaders. And you’ll see in the piece that we then incorporate and bring in our hosts for Heavy Metal. They participate. We bring them in. We enroll them early in the process, get them on board and excited. But then they are participating. They are distribution creators. They are actually running the sweepstakes and telling their fans about it.

In this example, they were early on partners and distributors, but it changes on a case-by-case basis when you have so much rich content across the organization. And our job is to enable that, distribute that, but drive fandom. And sometimes that means we are running a concept and pulling them in. Sometimes our partners may have an initiative that they need us on board and promoting. And so it’s truly that sense of partnership at the get-go.

We’ll talk about the geeky elements of the parent and the sub and how do we artistically manage that balance, but at the end of the day we know the content is the reason to subscribe. So it’s the age-old feature versus benefit, and let’s focus on the benefit, which is the content and that connection, and make sure that shines through.

Gabriel: I’d love you to then talk about, in all the years that you spent at Sirius, how did brand and marketing evolve? And sometimes it’s not evolution, right? Sometimes it’s the pendulum shift. How did you think about structure? What did you learn? What drove some of those shifts? And maybe, as part of telling that story, talk about it in the context of how the category and the company has evolved.

JulieAnne: You are spot on with this question. Since the creation and the launch of satellite radio 25 years ago, this category has evolved and shifted, and that has changed both our needs in marketing, but also consumers’ expectations.

So at its outset, this was about category creation. This was announcing this technology breakthrough of satellite radio and how that brought consistent, crystal clear, high quality, high range of selection, variety, and no commercials. So the benefits were very clear. The enabling technology was very clear. But we operated like a telco at that time because it was a technology breakthrough that required a hardware purchase and then a recurring subscription. And so it was very… it was such a telco model – Buy the device, get the subscription.

The category definitely required brand marketing then to create the category, create that demand. Initially, that audience started as a real audiophile who spent a lot of their weekends in Best Buy, right? This audience was… if you think about what was hot in technology in those early 2000s, it was consumer electronics, right? This was really a consumer electronics sort of model.

So then ultimately Sirius and XM merged, and Sirius XM continued to be embedded in more and more vehicles. And this use case of driving, and this primary use case of radio in the car, became such a logical placement. And the pre-install in the car – Great, now we have removed this massive barrier to purchase. You don’t have to consider hardware, buy hardware, get the subscription, just to try it out.

So this massive barrier to purchase has been removed. And that really had to change how we thought about marketing. This is no longer creating the demand. Now it is converting a set of hot leads. You have purchased a car, you’re excited, you’ve got that “Just off the parking lot, my hair’s back, the windows are down, I’m blasting the radio” euphoric experience. And how do we capitalize on that awesome euphoric experience to convert you?

Gabriel: It’s almost like the app model – it’s like the free trial conversion.

JulieAnne: Absolutely. So that is such a shift from the consumer electronics mindset to now this is a direct response conversion engine.

Holly: Was that almost like a salesperson’s dream? Like every salesperson dreams of having that kind of pipeline.

JulieAnne: Absolutely.

Holly: They just had to look at the number of vehicles that were sold off of lots that quarter and think “That’s how many, you know…” or is that how it worked? I mean, did you look at all of them?

Gabriel: I mean they have hard data.

Holly: Yeah. Those were all your hot leads. That’s a pretty sweet pipeline.

JulieAnne: It’s a very sweet pipeline. And so that really changed how we thought about it. And I would say that over time, brands can get a little bit neglected in that, especially in a finance-driven organization.

Gabriel: It’s what you said, it’s direct response. So it’s performance marketing. So put all the dollars there. ROI conversion. And no, why are you going to invest in brand?

JulieAnne: And then the category starts to shift again. So the iPod comes out and all of a sudden people are traveling with their own set of music. And that was a really existential moment for the organization of, “Hmm, is the iPod going to replace what SiriusXM does in your vehicle?” And the answer was, resoundingly, “Absolutely not.” It was too much work. A superior product still won out in that it’s a lot of hassle to change these songs while I’m in the car. While the iPod served a lot of functions, that was not the core mass application for it.

Then next, enter streaming. So now we’re starting to see, okay, direct responses is moving, it’s going really well. There’s less need for brand. High need for direct response. A lot of need for precision marketing, pricing, and conversion marketing/performance marketing. As we enter into the world of streaming, we need another set of evolution.

Consumers are again rethinking how they’re accessing their audio and one of the beautiful things that SiriusXM brings in your car is this range of options. Holly, as you led with, I can be 10 different people. It’s the morning. I need my news. I need to know what’s going on. I need the sports scores and maybe a couple of songs to get me through the morning commute. On the way home, I need to commiserate my bad day or I need to celebrate my day or I need to find out what happened during the day. But I have everything on the dial to solve all of those different needs.

Now streaming is bringing that music variety to you, but it still isn’t solving that, “What happened with my sports team? How do I get the latest news?” and that talk radio component. So there still is this really strong lane for SiriusXM.

And early on in streaming, the data on the cell wasn’t very strong. So it was also, “I don’t know if I want to burn all my data just using the streaming platform in my car.” That again has continued to evolve.

But as we see the adoption of that, then in 2019, SiriusXM acquired Pandora and said, “Hmm, this is another use case in the set.” And it turned out there are different use cases. When I want to be streaming just music and I want a beautiful algorithmic solution that allows me to have more control, say what I want to listen to right now, or create my own lists, there’s a solution for that. But when I want to toggle between Howard Stern, get my news, get the Taylor Swift pop-up channel coming up for her new album, and have kids pop for when my kids get in the car and then switch to Andy Cohen when my kids get out of the car – we have that full suite.

Part of the evolution is, as consumers behaviors change, expanding your product portfolio to meet that.

Holly: What’s interesting about that is that in some ways you became the editors.

That’s very interesting about the streaming experience – it’s very personal. So it’s curation. It’s a very personal curation. But in a way, you almost played the role of a magazine editor in deciding what to put out there for people, and introducing them, and leading them to new loves and new passions.

You might discover XM because you love hip hop. And then, before you know it, you’re listening to two or three other genres that you’re being exposed to in real time. You don’t have to wait for that to come around on your TV or through a friend.

So tell us a little bit about how you start to kind of think of each of these genres and each of these hosts and channels as their own brands, and these almost kind of children that you had to tend to. You know, how far did you have to go? Or did you just kind of let the curators and the hosts rip? How did you brand manage that?

JulieAnne: Well, we absolutely let the curators and the hosts just go with what works for them. But our job was to make sure that we were getting their message to the right audience.

So SiriusXM has always been a platform for uncensored voices. And that’s one of the things that we love, as one of the original platforms for creators, whether they are our hosts or someone who is creating music and artists who are coming in as guests. It is absolutely about giving them that full creative liberty. But I think one of the things that became apparent to us as we look at these shifts over time is, when we are only looking at the leads that are coming in to convert, you’re really not developing your own audience segmentation because the audience is brought to you.

And once we get into an app world, where we are prospecting audiences again, that’s when it became really apparent to us that we needed to do a whole consumer segmentation study and understand – Who’s our core audience? Who do we have? And they are loyal and they continue to drive the business. Are we on the right trajectory to maintain and continue to build that audience? But who’s our growth audience? Who is more of a reach?

And then, Holly, to your question, that’s where we are really mapping content to whether they are in our growth category, whether they are in our core category. And developing our marketing campaigns around – What’s our retention play? What’s our acquisition play? What is the right talent around that that supports these audiences?

And that is also where these passion studies come in of – you can be all things to all people, but you’re a little vanilla. Sure, we have everything. Yes, they’re the table stakes. But when you get into these high passion audiences like heavy metal, for example, and you have the best product for that audience, then you partner with the creators there, and you go after that fan base, and you create just unbelievable stickiness and joy and fun.

Gabriel: Julianne, I love this topic of segmentation. I can’t think of many more important topics as foundational, fundamental to marketing and brand management. Take us under the hood. What’s really important in doing segmentation well? What are the learnings? Tell us about any mistakes that you made. What do you see as the common pitfalls?

JulieAnne: Oh, this is such a fun topic and near and dear to my heart.

So any organization that is prospecting, I highly advise doing segmentation work. We had the luxury of developing an entirely custom panel of 10,000 audio listeners and understood their personas, their listening habits, what was table stakes to them, what was nice to have, what is a “I’ll never subscribe.” And we broke up this audience of 10,000, within the competitive landscape of premium audio listening, into 10 different personality profiles. And then we scored each of these for their likelihood to subscribe to SiriusXM.

Of those 10 profiles, we ultimately identified two profiles that fell into what we ultimately called our core audience. So these are our existing subscribers. We had strategically agreed as an organization that we are looking at evolving our audience, not a revolution. So protecting this core and made and ensuring that we are continuing to serve this core was one of our critical requirements. Understand the core, protect the core, continue to serve the core, super serve the core.

But then identifying, again, of the 10, what are the next two audiences that is our growth territory? Where do we have an opportunity to win? So this means we had six other audiences that were either “We could get them, it would be too expensive”, “We could get them, there’s not enough of them, it’s not worth the effort,” right? There’s zone of irrelevant, there’s too hard to attain, there’s never convert, there’s not big enough that we sat aside, but we took these other two audiences and said, “These are the next best consumers that we need to go after. But this audience, have work we need to do in consideration. And so this is where we are going to invest in our upper funnel marketing.” This is the audience we need to move down into the funnel and move them from awareness, SiriusXM being a high awareness brand, but not always high in the consideration set. Again, depending on the consumer.

It’s both a luxury and a detriment with a high awareness brand because you bring so much consumer perception around your brand that we as marketers, who live and breathe it and often navel gaze, as I say, may not feel is accurate, but that is what they are bringing with it. So we need to specifically target our brand marketing to those audiences to drive them into consideration.

So we really moved into almost what I would call a targeted brand approach. We said we are going to invest in brand. And this is where this partnership between the brand and the content comes in of how do we invest in targeted brand against these audiences so that we can move them into conversion, but then the conversion is going to happen on the content. But it is too confusing and too hard to lead with a piece of content – say “This is on SiriusXM, buy it now, this is how much it costs, this is your free trial,” that’s too much.

So we need to do that softening layer so then the content can come in with this amazing hook, and then it’s: “Oh, powered by SiriusXM. Yeah, all right. They’re pretty okay. Sure, I’ll purchase.”

Gabriel: Can you give us an example of how you executed with one of the segments, just an example of a strategy?

JulieAnne: Yes, absolutely. So one strategy was as we were looking at… by definition, our audience was a little bit older, a little bit affluent because they were buying cars, they were buying new cars. That’s how they were getting exposed to SiriusXM. So we were looking to move into a slightly younger segment in audience.

So one of the things we did in that case is we developed a partnership with Howard University. We said, “How do we meet these students and this younger audience where they are? But it’s not just through showing up at a job fair and giving away tchotchkes. It is truly about meeting them with content and engaging in areas that they find relevant.” So Howard University was just developing its first hip hop minor – it’s a curriculum around hip hop music at the school. So we were able to bring then our hip hop experts, our hosts, the team to come in, teach classes, develop seminars, bring students into our studios to develop their podcasts and their listening experiences. So they are having a true experience with the brand, not just engaging in brand swag.

Gabriel: I love that! You used your own assets as a differentiator, as a way to execute. That’s so, so good.

I have one more question on segmentation. I’m sorry. We could do the whole episode on this topic.

Holly: We sure could. It’s so good.

Gabriel: Can you talk about how you educated and socialized the segmentation internally across the rest of the C-suite or the other like business units or whatever? What did you do? What were some learnings? What’s really important to consider for anyone who’s doing segmentation socialization so it becomes a language that the organization uses when we think about the customer.

Holly: It’s also not cheap to do segmentation the right way. When you’re really digging into those insights, that research is expensive. So in addition to what Gabe’s asking, how did you convince… how did you even sort of get the resources to do that right? And then, yeah, to Gabe’s point, how did you get everyone to care once you had the segments?

JulieAnne: This is a perfect question, so thank you for it. This is an opportunity for your segmentation to sink or swim in your organization. It is so critical that your business units are aligned on a common goal and on the need for segmentation. I think the biggest pitfall that it can be – that it can come out as a think piece from marketing. If you don’t have a common goal and a reason that other parts of the organization would need it, then it’s a think piece.

So what we were able to do is, as the segmentation was going on, we had representatives from all of the major drivers across the business. And in this case, the key stakeholders are obviously marketing, but product, right? How does this impact how the product is built and displayed? But very importantly, of course, then content. Our content team who is deciding what content do we have on air and do we have any gaps?

So having them involved at the very get go, so that every time we are getting a report and a readout, that the team is there hearing it along the way, it’s not just one big two-hour meeting at the end where someone presents and “Okay, got it.” It is really having a team who is embedded and a part of the process every step of the way.

The other thing I would say that is critical is just consistent communication about “Why are we doing this and what are the expected outcomes?” What are we going to do based on this information as an organization? And that is somewhere that I think in every organization, it’s hard. It’s hard to set that, on the upfront. But it is how we were ultimately able to get the investment approved, by getting three different groups lined up to say, “Tthis will be useful for us.”

The other element that was very critical for us is we have a very talented analytics team that was able to ingest and own this study and allow it to live and maintain. So that we could come back with a question and say, “Hmm, we want to hit this audience with this content. Does this make sense?”

So they actually built this engine for us where we would either take a persona or we could take an artist or a genre and mix it in – throw it in the engine and say, “What audience does this support? Is this an underserved audience? Is this an opportunity? Does this hit core?”

So if we said, “Hey, we want to partner with this artist. Is this useful? Do we have a meaningful opportunity here?” That would be a major pitfall – thank goodness we had that!

If you don’t have the ability to ingest this data and for it to continue to live and serve the organization, then it’s one and done. And it’s dead on arrival.

Gabriel: It cannot just be the PowerPoint. Like if it’s the PowerPoint, it’s gonna just become a doorstop. Do you say it’s gonna be like… I love the way you said it earlier, you said it’s like it just becomes marketing…

JulieAnne: Navel gazing.

Gabriel: Yeah, it’s marketing navel gazing. I love that example then of how it’s actually then serving the business. Any other little kind of tips or tricks, dos and don’ts of how you brought

those really important principles to life in the segmentation?

JulieAnne: You know, they became really useful tools for us then over time to communicate, either with our internal partners or external partners, of here’s the audience we’re going after. And this wasn’t one marketing manager writing a brief about their ideal consumer. We had a really consistent voice around here’s a target customer, this whole rich set of data that we know about them. And we could speak to that really consistently both internally and externally. That was another benefit that we had of this rich profile.

Holly: Did you give the profiles names? Did you have… like P &G has, I don’t want to share trade secrets from back in the day. It’ll age me. But I’m sure they’re not using that same model anymore… but yeah, how did you get people kind of put their arms around these customers and care about them as people and not just as data sets?

JulieAnne: Yes, so we did have segment names for them. One was called “The open roadie,” so they were a more car centric customer. Versus… one was called “A seamless spender” and this is someone who engages in multiple different sets of technology, would use the app and the car. So we had our own custom names for them, but we had personas and profiles and pictures. So that really helped personify it.

That, Holly, also brings me up to – because these were totally custom segments, one of the other things that we did is, working with our media partners, say, “Well, how do we translate this to something that’s very actionable in our media buying?” And again, we partnered with our data analytics team to map our questionnaire to a set of MRI data sets so that we could translate them into, “Okay, this is the equivalent of this MRI audience.”

So that allowed us to say, okay, we are looking for media that over indexes in these audiences. And it again made it a really great communication tool to be really crystal clear about who that audience was.

Holly: So now you’ve got… let’s say you convert someone. You’ve brought them in, you’ve done that hard work.

Did I hear correctly, Julianne, that what maybe got them over the line at that lowest end of the funnel was probably content? There was a specific piece like, “Okay, I decided I don’t want to live without this.” And then they probably questioned price. Price was not an insurmountable barrier, and so you’ve got them.

Now you’ve got a customer. How do you continue to grow the relationship with that customer? And are you growing them through more content so that they’re falling in love with more “sub-brands” or are you trying to get them to fall in love with the parent brand, SiriusXM?

JulieAnne: This is a great question.

Gabriel: Maybe it’s an and.

JulieAnne: It’s an and. Once you are subscribed, it really is about your continued love and relationship with those content brands. So it is making sure that you have… it takes at least three and ideally five channels, pieces of content, hooks. Right? No surprise. You know, most radio presets when we still had the old school buttons for your radio is five. That five is sort of… but most people it really only takes three of, “I’m listening to something, I switch, these three things are enough to keep me engaged and to fulfill my needs.” But we also want to… you have such a broad set of content and needs… we want to meet all of them. We want to hit your music needs, your sports needs, your talk needs, your politics needs – that whole gamut.

Then we are also enriching that with what are the important subscriber perks for you? So how do we make sure you know first about upcoming content? We do a series of teeny, teeny but exclusive very cool events and saying, “Our subscribers have exclusive access to attend this. These are tickets that you can’t buy. They are just events that as a subscriber you have the opportunity to attend.” So that may be a teeny show like Lady Gaga or Drake at the Apollo, right? Only 3,000 people for people who play massive stadiums. But this is a subscriber perk and a ticket that you can’t buy.

Holly: All right. So that leads us then into a decision to invest in a rebrand. Was it 2023?

JulieAnne: Yes, it was 2023, yes.

Holly: Walk us through all of the discussions that went on there. I mean, we want to know all about the rebrand itself, but how did you get there? How did you… why was that the right time? Why was that the right strategy?

Gabriel: And what type of rebrand? Rebrand can mean 50 different things.

JulieAnne: Yes. Segmentation really brought us down the yellow brick road to tell us that we had an opportunity for a rebrand. This is where we said, “Our core audience knows and loves us. It’s really hard to get our core audience to not love us. Our growth audience, we can invest in them, but they primarily think that we are a little bit outdated and they don’t think we are relevant. And so what do we need to do to look more modern and to be relevant to that audience?”

So we took from the segmentation strategy and then we did our next study around, “What are the drivers of brand impression and brand love? What can we do?” So if we need to grow this brand love for this audience, what’s the right path in? Because there are a million paths in and there are so many great ideas. So how do we hone in on the most important ones?

What we learned is that, for particularly our growth audiences, the number one driver of that brand relationship was personal connection. Number two was price and number three was brand prominence. So we said, “Okay, easy, personal connection.” And as we talk about categories evolving and shifting and a category that has heavily evolved back sort of into technology and into streaming and into an algorithm, said, “We have an opportunity to play heavily into our personal connection that we are driven by humans that the music is human. Not only is the musically humanly curated, but it is is hosted. You get the stories, you get the interactions, but the heart of radio is talk and hosts.” So our element of sports talk and talk radio and all of those amazing hosts – it was this perfect opportunity of the number one thing we need to do is prove personal connection and that’s the thing that we are best at. This intimacy and this connection.

So that gave us the permission to say we need to do something, the opportunity, and the direction. We validate this against our core audience, say, “We’re not going to offend our core here,” and say, “No, our core is fine if we get a little more modern. That’s OK. This totally works.”

So from there, we went into a really accelerated brand evolution, not a revolution, process. But we also knew we needed to update our logo. We also knew from practical experience… we had a long horizontal logo, it did not show up well in square places. Which are things like app icons, right? That square placement turns out to be very important, and we didn’t have an ideal placement for that. And we had continued to incorporate the legacy XM waves, which were 20 years old, but over time had come to be associated with Wi-Fi. They originated meaning audio waves but they had over time had a new meaning. So that gave us the opportunity to delve into that.

We tested a number of different treatments and we were delighted to see, because we had personal favorites, but we were delighted to see that our core and our growth audiences highly resonated with what evolved into what we call our S-star.

The heart of… and it has such a beautiful brand story behind it, but it also just works as a consumer… but the heart of it is Sirius is named for the star Sirius, which is the brightest star in the night sky. And so it is ethereal, which also sort of hints to satellite and technology and aspiration, but also the stardom of content.

Holly: The power you bring.

JulieAnne: Yes, and the star power you bring. And so this intersection of the literal star, stardom, Sirius was hiding in plain sight for us. And we were really excited to just sort of scratch that off, bring it to the world. So it shows up, we think, beautifully in the wordmark, gave us practically a lovely square and a lovely icon in what is our S-star, and ultimately then supported us in our brand platform of SiriusXM brings you closer to the things that you love. And those things that you love might be those music moments, it might be the news you need, but the intimacy and the personal connection that is that driver of, “I’m bringing you closer. I’m bringing you closer because I’m informing you. I’m making you feel this relationship with this artist. Or I’m creating an environment where you’re closer with the people you are with because you are uniting over this amazing moment.”

Gabriel: I mean, there’s so many amazing things about that story where I’m like going check, check, check. Primarily because it’s growth related and it’s very, very business… clearly oriented, like there’s no fluff around that.

I’d love to understand, now that you were able to get the case to do brand evolution, were there other elements now that relate to… or I guess the way I always think about it is connected initiatives, or other transformational or catalytical events that may relate to the CEO or the business’s transformation agenda that you could tie to here as well? Like other teams that you could partner with, whether it’s employer brand or experience, product, any other element.

JulieAnne: You couldn’t set me up better for this question. So you had asked, “Why now? Why was this the right time? And how did we decide to unveil it?” And this related to a set of transformation initiatives across the organization.

So we were at the precipice also of the update of a release of a brand new revamped app, as well as a new set of technology in the car. And so we were able to bring this all together into what we called SiriusXM Next Gen. The next generation of SiriusXM, which is not only a product release, but is a suite of content updates and the unveiling of the updated brand. And we were able to announce this in a media event.

We were able to preview the logo. We also were able to bring back… another set of data told us that we were allowed to bring back… the Sirius dog had such brand love and equity, but it had been kept… we’d kept it in the closet for a little bit and the dog was ready to come out. So she was beautifully named Stella and brought in as a brand mascot. So not as a logo, but as a mascot for some personality, where we need a guide and content. But we were able to do that as well as announce new content at this event.

We invited about 200 of our great creators and journalists to share in this unveiling. And it was a beautiful morning of content. Kelly Clarkson was just launching a channel and doing some singing for us. Kevin Hart walking us through some of his favorite content. And it was just a beautiful morning celebrating both the content and the technology. We rolled in some vehicles and we’re doing satellite demonstrations. It was really product, marketing, technology, content, all in one. It was a great celebration across the organization, driven by some transformation initiatives.

Gabriel: You know, just to interject on one topic, the beauty of these conversations is like we’re in the clouds and then we can go and pick something specific and zoom back down. Like go dig in the dirt, if you pardon my pun related to the dog.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently, trying to find research on just the topic of distinctive brand assets. Which you might think of as like the core codes that work together that drive that kind of instant recognition, memorability, because really it’s about having those, you know, in addition to the logo. What are those kind of three or four other pieces that, especially when you use together, drive recognition, memorability?

Some of the most recent research, when you think about the memorability of specific types of distinctive brand assets… Do you know what the two are that drive the most instant recognition based on research? One is sonic – audio. Which is especially important in a second screen world because the one thing is like, okay, you might not be watching the ad – you might go to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee or you might be on your phone – but if you hear something.

JulieAnne: Yes.

Gabriel: Right? Like my kids at the age of five are like, “Da, da, da, da, da,” and they know. Or you know, he’s six, he’s going, “Liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty.” He’s six, he’s not an insurance buyer.

Holly: God help us. He’s ready for insurance.

Gabriel: But guess what will happen when he’s like 21. Like subliminally it’s going to be there. Anyway, but the other one this is characters/mascots.

JulieAnne: Yes, yes.

Gabriel: I think what’s really interesting about sonic is the way that it’s evolved as a sub discipline as it goes beyond just that single sonic logo. It’s really about thinking more about what’s the entire sonic DNA. And when you look at it through the lens of all the different potential customer touch points in the experience: what shows up in hold, what shows up if you’re an app in a ping, what happens if you need a longer form introduction melody before the CEO comes on to deliver a presentation at a conference. That’s what’s really interesting. You think about all those moments experience where sonic plays a role and you can create a DNA that works for all those different environments. So you have that flexibility.

JulieAnne: Yes, absolutely. And we think a lot about… as a business, we don’t do a lot of sponsorships, but where we do sponsorships… how can they relate to a sonic experience?

So a deal we worked on really hard is with the MLB. How do we be the sponsor of your walk up song? Or something that we did with the NBA was an integration during NBA games… sure, you can listen on SiriusXM radio… but it would be, “Here’s where you get this player’s playlist on Pandora.” How do we bring it back to the core product and honor that experience?

Gabriel: It’s really interesting. Like I saw McDonald’s present at a conference a few weeks ago to talk about the biggest campaign, and what they’ve done on brand to bring back this cultural relevance was the… I’m going to butcher the name of the campaign even though I just saw it… but the orders that then you could go and order where they had all these famous people. Kendrick Lamar probably wasn’t, but you could then go and order Kendrick Lamar’s… and there were lines around McDonald’s. Like that’s exactly what you were doing when you think about parallels.

JulieAnne: Yes. So sonic, and this, and having a mascot. And explaining to the organization the difference between a logo and a mascot – that your mascot is a rallying cry, is fun, is personality, it doesn’t replace your logo.

It is so great to see the enthusiasm around a mascot. Especially one that we’ve brought back, and how much brand love there still is and the permission and excitement around that. She went to the groomer and got a couple of little things smoothed out.

Holly: A little glow up.

Gabriel: That’s so good. That’s so good.

JulieAnne: But that was such an exciting internal motivator. The teams were so happy to have access and it did unleash this other set of creativity of, “Now if I have a guide, what does this guide help me do? And what are the helpful actions of this guide?” One of the things, again, when we talk about the parent-child relationship, think about what is our role as a brand? It’s a little bit like a late night host – we are here to help give you a suite of options. To say, “Here’s what’s on the menu. How do we get you to the right thing? Everything’s in our house and in our family but, ultimately, you need to make a room that suits you. And how do we bring you the right offering that makes that exciting and personal to you?”

Holly: And I imagine that the employee audience was a really critical one to win with, JulieAnne, because as the company evolved and as you mentioned, it was now in the same conversation as all of these really… well, content was exploding so you had streaming services, and you had everything really at our fingertips, and podcasts.

With so much competition, how did you attract and retain talent that said, “No, I want to stay here at Sirius XM,” versus hopping over to any number of content or hyper web scalers that were dealing in content. So how did you think about that employee audience as part of your… one of the mouths to feed, so to speak, in terms of brand?

JulieAnne: We saw them both as one of the mouths to feed but also as a core set of creators for us, and as constituents. Here’s an audience that is so ready and excited for a rally cry that we just need to bring them the tools and they are there for it. So we turned it into things like Merchandise Fridays, Wear Your Favorite T-Shirt on Friday, we did merchandise contests where you could design sets of merchandise and then we would create different ones that the employee base submitted.

So it was really this built-in set of creators that we turned to and said, “What should we do next? What do you want to see next?” It’s really fun to see them get around it.

Holly: That is so smart and I think more companies need to do that. A lot of times they actually use employees as… you know that phrase, dog fooding… but in a way you were almost reverse engineering that. Which is to say, we actually need to learn from them. Instead of sort of foisting our product upon them and getting their opinions, we need to observe them in their natural habitat and have them tell us how they’re absorbing this product and let them, you know, sort of be almost that… a mini microcosm of that 10,000 person panel that you had, so to speak. So I think that’s brilliant.

I’m curious, before we lose you, and I know we’re coming up on time… Since we love to get into the messy business of building brands, and we know that every massive rebrand has so many challenges along the way, tell us one thing that you wish you’d done. Either that you didn’t do that you would have done, or that you would do differently when you take on the next big rebrand.

JulieAnne: One thing that I think we did right and that was really important, and this goes back to motivating the employee base, was when we did our big media release… so we have studios all across the country, we have multiple offices and locations… we have this amazing team that spent those two hours physically rebranding space. We had big S-stars rolled into locations. We were in studios taking backdrops down, putting backdrops up, step repeats… the teams were in conference rooms and then they come out of the conference room and their physical space has changed.

That was also critical for the internal adoption of, “Okay, this isn’t like optional, like I’ll get to it when I get to it, like we’ll update my materials later.” This was the, “Okay, this is who we are.” And everyone went back and changed their Zoom backgrounds and changed their signatures and sent out their letters to their partners on, here’s what we’re doing.

That was hard, but I think that was really important for that critical momentum. If we don’t respect it as a moment, honor it and switch over, then our teams won’t either.

Gabriel: Yeah, we like to say, “It’s not just a change of sign, it’s a sign of change.”

JulieAnne: Yes, I love that. And what would we do differently? Oh, gosh. This is a tough one.

Holly: What was the biggest struggle? Something that was just like, “Man, that was a tough one.” Maybe it was convincing someone on the C-suite. Maybe it was a budget issue.

JulieAnne: Yes, the internal buy-in on, “We are doing this and we are making the investment.” De-risking the change, I think was the hardest part of how do we make it an evolution enough that it matters, but bring a data set that de-risks it sufficiently that there is enough confidence in what we’re doing. Is it enough so that it is necessary and that it is meaningful, but that it doesn’t feel disproportionately risky?

For a company that hadn’t done something like this in 15 years, that was the difficult data set. Because you also don’t want this to leak too much, right? And this is a challenge we see Apple has all the time, right? They are appropriately so secretive and don’t want their creative to get out, but it means they can’t bring a set of eyes when they need it. So making sure we had a big enough data set around what we were doing and that that brought both the vote of confidence and the de-risking. Because we were just, “100 %, go, go, go, go, go.”

Gabriel: What was most important for that? Because I’d argue that I can’t think of a topic that’s more important right now. When you look at the Cracker Barrel story – these things are going way beyond.

JulieAnne: Yes.

Holly: That’s it, for real.

Gabriel: What were the most important things that you did for that, to walk that balance?

JulieAnne: This goes back to making sure that the executive team has alignment across our business goals, right? And this is something, whether it’s in a campaign or it is something like a rebrand, at these most executive levels it is really about, “Do our business objectives align?” And that was the critical question because I think we know, as marketers, “Okay, got it. We got the assignment.” We are running full steam ahead. So we come back and, “Look, here’s our shiny answer. Aren’t you proud?” And like, “Well, of course it’s shiny. Of course you did great work. But how do we know that it’s going to work? How do we know that this isn’t the wrong thing for us?”

And we get so caught up in our own press that… taking that step back. So we actually did a series of focus groups around it so that we could get some feedback to de-risk it and say, “You know, first, are we doing harm? Are we doing harm? And then does this accomplish what we expect it to accomplish?” And we got enough signal feedback that told us that.

But I think that would be the thing that’s hardest is, you know, you are so invested in making this work that you forget that part of your job is disproving the pessimist.

Holly: Yeah, I think one of the smartest things that you did, and I think it’s a huge takeaway for anyone listening today, whether you’re doing a large scale rebrand or something that’s more subtle, is that you want to have more than just that to announce. And the fact, that you aligned with product updates and announcements that the company was making, I think also could have been, you tell us, part of de-risking. Because rather than just going to market with a vanity exercise that was rooted in that navel gazing or “This is a brand moment”, the company was trying to signal and share a larger change in its evolution.

I think that almost shares the risk across the organization, because the brand is one piece of that. You’re delivering the story through that brand lens. But the product team now has skin in the game. The sales team has skin in the game because this wasn’t solely a brand exercise, right? The brand was there to bring the company through this evolutionary moment.

I think that’s brilliant, the way you described that, I didn’t want people to miss that.

Gabriel: I want to ask just one last… just to put a bow around this. So then you launch the rebrand and now you have all these expectations. So one month later, two, three months later, you’re walking into CFOs, or whoever it is, and the question now is, “What is this doing for us?” It’s like, how do you continue? How do you then show this is working? And how do you then continually do that? Cause those are the things that then you’re probably challenged or being asked that on a weekly basis. What measures or metrics are you using? How are you communicating that lessons learned?

JulieAnne: On the weekly, on the daily, for as much as we try to say, “Okay, we’ll bring you a data set in 30 days.” They say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s great.” Day two, “So how’s it going? What are our leading indicators?” And that is where, again, we partnered really closely with our analytics team to develop a scorecard in advance.

You need to say, “What are the questions we are going to need to answer in advance so that we can start to answer those on day two.” So for us that was our that our long tail is going to be our brand impression, but that takes a long time to move. So what we are going to look at in the short term is going to be things like our social sentiment. We were breaking out our brand positive impression and negative impressions. So rather than looking at net, we’re looking at positive, we’re looking at negative, and we are looking at those trends by segment to say, “Is this moving?” Maybe we’re not seeing it in the top line, but we’re seeing it in our target audiences. Which is actually interesting, where we were seeing it.

Then when we lay on top of it our targeted campaigns, you see the real pop in those relevant metrics around our sentiment, our engagement, and our positive impression around those audiences. So by pre-saying, “Here are the things we’re going to look at and we are going to have checkpoints once a month, once a quarter. We’re going to bring in at the end of every week just where we are at on our number of mentions, our total set of earned media,” and bringing a really consistent and transparent set of data.

Gabriel: But how are you able to get leaders even on board with using those metrics? Because, well, brand impressions and social sentiment doesn’t pay the bills.

JulieAnne: So that’s where we needed to do a correlation study between sentiment and our core business metrics to say, “This is the leading indicator that tells us that this is the rising tide that will lift all boats.” And so that correlation metric is what is critical. And so it may be different for other businesses, but we were able to bring that link – that was absolutely the unlocking key to say, “This is what matters for us.”

Holly: Yeah, and that attribution is one of the most elusive parts of an ROI study, no matter what strategy or tactic you used, right? It’s like, “Hey, I can see the positive numbers here, but was this driven by the action, or did this happen through other means?” And so I think that was so smart, JulieAnne, what you’re saying about getting agreement across business units and functions that this is the goal that we’re all looking… We agree on this. We agree that we are a company whose brand positivity does drive subscribership. Once you’ve made that that correlation then you’re gold. That’s fascinating.

I love it. We’ve learned so much. I’ve one more question for you and that is, what are you listening to? What is your favorite channel on SiriusXM right now? And specifically, what music or what sort of personality can you not get enough of right now?

JulieAnne: I love this. This is my favorite question and one that we had a culture of talking about regularly and on the daily. I am listening to Taylor’s Channel 13 on SiriusXM and I am listening to Smartless on SiriusXM podcasts.

Holly: God, we’re twinsies.

JulieAnne: I love it. What are you listening to?

Holly: Yeah, Taylor as well. And big Smartless fan, love the chemistry of those guys. What else am I listening to? I spend a lot of time on your hip hop channels. So there’s one called, I think, Shade or Shade 45.

JulieAnne: It is 45.

Holly: Then there’s a great throwback channel. Which… I was just listening to Ice Cube yesterday and just like jamming on that. So that felt really good. What about you, Gabe? What are you listening to?

Gabriel: I have a teenager, so I don’t really get to choose anything anymore. But I’ll tell you…

Holly: Charlie FCF.

Gabriel: No, well what she chooses and this blew my mind when I saw it for the first time… and it just, to me, showed the power of like how you think about how SiriusXM is tied in with culture and innovation… was the TikTok channel. I immediately saw that and I thought, “That is genius.”

JulieAnne: Yes, it is. The confluence of cultures and, again, meeting our fans and our listeners where they are, and bringing distribution channels for brands and content that are successful in other platforms. The cross-contamination is key to success.

Holly: You know what was so cool about that too is that it made you guys as a brand all the more relevant.

So I actively avoid TikTok. I won’t even open a TikTok video that someone sends me because I refuse to go on. You know, whatever people can have their opinions about that. However, one of my favorite channels on SiriusXM is the TikTok radio. And part of the reason for that is because it kept me up to date on what people were talking about without having to go on to TikTok. And I thought that was a feather in your your brand’s cap.

So that wasn’t just about falling in love with content. That was also paying back to the parent brand of saying, “What a cool brand, what a cool company,” as Gabe said, to create that integration. And we just have to praise you, JulieAnne, for being the mastermind, certainly, behind a lot of that and making sure that people know what a cool brand to continue to evolve into.

What a great conversation. JulieAnne, thank you so much. This has been riveting, cool, awesome, enlightening, educational. I kind of can’t wait to get back in my car, guys, because… not that that’s the only place we can encounter, but that’s my favorite place to listen to my SiriusXM. So I’m kind of like… I’m sort of ready for my next little road trip or traffic jam.

JulieAnne: Love it. Bring Stella along with you as your mental companion. Jam her up to your favorite shows and let SiriusXM bring you closer.

Such a pleasure Holly and Gabe. Anytime. Look forward to doing it again. But thank you so much for today. This has been great.

Gabriel: Thanks JulieAnne. Now we just need our own Brand Enabled channel on SiriusXM. That’s the next step for us, Holly.

JulieAnne: All right, I have a to-do action then. I love it.

Gabriel: JulieAnne, thank you so much. This was amazing.

Holly: Yeah, you are fabulous, JulieAnne. Thank you, thank you.