Transcript
Mike Matchett: Hi Mike Matchett wirh Small World Big Data and we are here today talking about the power of brand and staying on brand and the value of of being able to go to your organization and keep them on track. There's both profit and compliance issues at risk. We have er here today. Just hold on a second. We'll dive right into it. Hey James, welcome to our show. James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Mike Matchett: All right, so this is a topic that, you know, when I first hear about, like, oh, it's about brand email signatures. Just it just doesn't vibe that much. But every time I look at it, every time I dig into it, I get really excited. There's just so much going on here. Once you once, you take a minute and say, like, how? How is this going to help my organization stay on brand? How does it enforce brand consistency? Uh, how do you find disclaimer when you when you start to talk to people. James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: So it's really interesting I think we talked to so many people, and I think there's a varying level of, uh, understanding here about what brand truly means to the organization. But I think the shared understanding is that showing up, looking professional, showing up, looking credible is important, and thus being able to control how the brand appears in communications. And these communications matter a whole deal. These are the emails that you send, the video meetings that you attend, making sure that brand shows up, uh, in the right way consistently is how you are presenting yourself to the world and how you're how you're kind of, uh, received by that world as well, whether you're in, you know, a particular market or you're just talking to consumers, it doesn't really matter. That level of consistency is is really vital. Mike Matchett: Right? Brand. Brand actually matters. It turns out right. This is this is the thing that that people, you know, sort of lose sight of is like we picked a PowerPoint with we distributed to everybody with a color in it and a logo and font and say, use this. But that doesn't really happen in practice, right? What? That's it. James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: That's it. I think when we we think about brand, we might our minds might first go to marketing. Who are the ones that, uh, create that brand and want to control that brand, the exercise of controlling it to enforcing it across the organization, which we would perhaps call brand governance. That's the really tricky part. Once you've created something that you're really proud of, that you feel can really represent you in the right ways, getting all of the employees within your organization to follow suit and, uh, do their due diligence to putting that brand in the right places. That's really, really tricky. And that's where disclaimer kind of steps in. And we become the the layer of governance for that brand and other things, too, things like legal compliance, other things that really matter when you're communicating. And we're there basically to help organizations enforce those things so that they can be protected. Mike Matchett: Yeah. Let's just let's just go over those things in a little more detail. Uh, or at least the benefits. So when you when you enforce a brand, there's definitely brand power. Let's call it that. Like the brand efficiency, the brand power, the brand reach, the brand impact. Right. That goes way up because you've got everybody now staying in step. You've got that that drum leader holding the things on. James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: Um, exactly. Yeah. So every time we're presenting ourselves with the right branding, we are strengthening the impact of our brand in our market. We're increasing recognition. We're building affinity with our brand, what it stands for. And every time that brand isn't present, we're diluting the brand. Or if it's inconsistent, we're actually harming the brand. We're missing out on opportunity. And what we're actually doing is, uh, perhaps reducing the amount of credibility and trust that people associate with that brand as well. That all has some really significant impact on your reputation, and every email or every bit of communication that doesn't have your brand properly in place. In place is actually this this surface for reputational risk? Mike Matchett: So yeah, the idea of reputational risk, that trust and credibility that that non variance part, you know where people just make stuff up and you start to look and say wait wait wait. What did our software sales engineer just say. What what did they put in that just. I mean I've seen it happen even in very small companies. So what what what size organization is this really intended for? James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: So it's really intended for for organizations of every size. Every organization needs to be mindful of how their brand is perceived in their market and beyond the brand. As we start to think about, uh, legal compliance as well, maybe regulatory compliance. We need to be mindful about how, uh, legal texts, legal disclaimers enter into our considerations to when we marry up the brand with the right legal text, we're protecting ourselves not only from the reputational risks of diluted branding, but of the reputational and perhaps even fines and penalties that we associate with, uh, noncompliance to. Mike Matchett: All right. So you had the compliance risk, the reputational risk, uh, in addition to that brand, uh, multiplier, the brand leverage on top of that. So you've got you've got a couple carrots and sticks here in the bag, which start to add up to a really big impact even in a small company. I just want to even tell you, like, I am a small company and I've got one person here with some contract employees. Uh, and uh, I could see using this because even even myself, a company of one signing emails, things tend to go sideways when I get creative, right? We just we just that. And in these days of AI and things, I can't even imagine how someone is going to keep control of communications, right? James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: And that's the thing is that we we we live in a time where communication is fragmenting and that's that fragmentation is actually accelerating. Now we're all operating across a sprawling landscape of communication channels. And if an organization lacks the, uh, unified governance of their brand and those, those, uh, uh, compliance pieces, they're going to be exposing themselves, their organization to a number of different risks. Um, and that's that's really what we're trying to protect ourselves against. The problem that, uh, I imagine is only going to become more and more challenging with, uh, AI assisted communication. Mike Matchett: Right, right. And that goes deep and deep and deep, but it just gets, uh, it gets scary a little bit to look and say, what are people actually communicating and how do I control that? So tell me, tell me. Let's, let's, let's look a little bit little more practically. What does this look like when I implement a disclaimer? What what things am I putting into there to have er, you know, provide the master for, if you will, uh, on the brand control? And where does it apply going outbound. James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: So we've recently released a really powerful piece of functionality inside our product that we call Brand kits. Brand kits is meant to be the central source of truth for your brand inside our product. So you can, uh, start your life with a disclaimer simply by adding in the assets that are really meaningful to your brand. Things like logos, colors, fonts, even a specific legal disclaimer you want to associate with your brand the promotional content that you want to associate with your brand. All of that marries up as your your brand kit, and you might have several brand kits if you have different brands or different variants. Once that's been created and you can do that in minutes, you can then translate that brand really quickly and efficiently into the email signatures that you want to use. The meeting themes, just like my meeting theme today, that you want your employees to be using for various different meeting themes you want to create. And then once those items are sort of built out and this again takes very little time, the the beauty of a disclaimer is that we're going to be the ones that, uh, centrally deploy that for you across your organization. Our tool will take those signatures, take those meeting themes, and automatically apply them across everybody. And that's going to do a couple of things. It's going to save the IT team who are typically tasked with this, uh, with this responsibility. Awful lot of time and effort because this is a sort of set and forget situation. We've created the brand kit. That brand is translated into these, these, uh, signatures and themes that we're using across our communications. And now that I've pressed enable. I've pressed go. Uh, everybody's getting that without me having to intervene. Nor does the end user ultimately have to intervene either. They're going to just get on with their day to day routine and, uh, know that the the emails that they send, the communications that they are responsible for are being sent with consistent branding, are being sent with legal disclaimers, and thus we're avoiding that reputational risk. We're avoiding those compliance risks, too. Mike Matchett: Right? Right. You're avoiding the risk, but you're getting that consistency. And if I were to rely upon, uh, employees to wear the right shirt or put the hat on or put the right background up, you get so many variants so quickly. Uh, there. So here, it's it's great that with the push of a button, it's just there, uh, in the company's talking about that. Um, so, uh, this this does seem like something, uh, that would help somebody stay on track and be compliant when they have an idea of what their brand is. What if the brand is changing though? What if they they've gone through an M&A? What if they've rebranded with every new marketing director out there? Uh, how does this how this might help? James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: Well, those are actually the the moments that matter the most. That's why consistency is so important and why it can be so challenging. It's events like a merger and acquisition or rebrand that are going to result in missing disclaimers and outdated job titles and inconsistent legal text. Well, again, what our platform is there to do is in those moments where you do need to make a change, you can do so quickly in one space and see that reflected across every single email signature that your employees use. That could be a matter of minutes where otherwise you would of course, confront, uh, a lengthy process of having to go around every employee and try and, uh, and make them do the, the task of updating these things themselves. Um, so when you do have to, uh, bring in a new company, or you do have to change something as even as simple as a a color. That is a simple process and disclaimer where it wouldn't be otherwise. Mike Matchett: Yeah, there's there seems to be a great agility you gain here in that marketing implementation. Whether you're changing your logo, you're acquiring someone, enforcing an adaptation and a consistency. The next day you've made the announcement. You just want that to happen. Uh, it looks like this is a way to do it. Uh, and I and I think you also touched on one other thing. I think you might have talked about this last time we talked to promotional information in there. There's actually a path to increasing revenue by doing this more directly. Right. Let me just say a few words about that. James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: Yeah. Of course. I mean, in addition to all of the protection that you're affording your organization, there is, of course, inherent opportunity. Uh, if we get this right, not only are we presenting our brand in the right way, we are also we do have the capability to put in promotional content into those signatures, into those moments. So as we are confronting, uh, our recipients with a lovely brand, a lovely email, we're making sure to put those promotional elements in front of them as well. Mike Matchett: And that could be anything from an offer, a call to action, or download this document if you're interested. Type of thing. That's that's pretty open. James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: Absolutely. We've seen people promote events. We've seen people promote new product launches. Uh, it is at that time something that organizations can really sink their teeth into. But I would I would caution that, uh, you know, the, the challenges there outside of disclaimer, are that, uh, manual governance is really difficult at scale. If you've got something like a disclaimer, you've got the ability to enforce a policy, whether that includes promotion or not, without. Mike Matchett: Yeah, yeah, keeping everybody from sounding like an ad at the same time, maybe driving people to download the CEO's latest book. You know, you've got you've got you've got a range of activities there on there. Very cool. Uh, so, James, if someone wants to learn a little bit more about, maybe dig a little deeper and says, you know, I have some brand challenges, maybe I could make use of this. What would you point them at? James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: Well, we've got a really easy onboarding ramp to, uh, product. Uh, we've got a 14 day free trial that's available to absolutely everybody. You can come in, create that brand kit, create the legal disclaimers that you might need and start playing around with, uh, deploying the various email signatures and meeting themes to, uh, anyone inside your organization. Now, if you'd like to learn more, it's also true that we offer, uh, bespoke demonstrations that are available from our website as well. Mike Matchett: Oh, thanks. I just love the fact that you've taken a functionality that everyone probably needed back then, but, you know, wasn't top of mind, which is how do I control signature blocks and have, in a short span of time, turned into something that's really about governing outbound communications and and on multiple channels and saying, this is how we make everybody march to the same drummer. Right? James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: This is it. We really want everyone to be able to communicate very confidently, knowing that those risks that would, would be there otherwise without the consistency of a signature that has the brand and the legal text in place, would actually be detracting from the experience, you'd be harming your organization, really running the risk of of doing things in the wrong way. Mike Matchett: All right. Thank you very much, James, for being here today. James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: No thank you, Mike, thank you for having me. Mike Matchett: All right. And we look forward to hearing some more good things coming out of how we master our communications and keep everyone on track. Thank you very much. James Wayne, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Exclaimer: Thank you. Mike Matchett: Take care folks.
