Episode 45: Rebranding Complexities & Marketing Strategies | Rowan Tonkin

In this episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve Goldhaber talks with Rowan Tonkin, CMO at Planful. With his international experience, Rowan shares the complexities of executing a company rebrand within a tight timeline, focusing on the necessity of a customer-centric approach and external collaboration. The conversation further explores the strategy behind marketing a data technology platform, highlighting the benefits of account tiering, hyper-personalization, and intent data.

Rowan traces his career journey, emphasizing the advantage of having diverse experience in understanding various business functions. He offers a comparison of marketing in different countries, Australia, the UK, and the US, and advocates for transparency in the marketing sector akin to that in sales teams.

Connect with Rowan Tonkin and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn!

Transcript

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Steve Goldhaber: Everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26 and the interesting B2B Marketers podcast. Today I am joined by Rowan. Rowan, welcome to the show.

Rowan Tonkin: Thanks, Steve. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. 

Steve Goldhaber: Thanks. All right, so let's do this. We'll do a quick 60-second overview of who you are before we jump into the first case study, so go ahead.

Rowan Tonkin: Sure. Well, I'll start. I'm the C M O of a company called Planful, and I am an Australian that has been in the US for about seven years. Prior to that, I lived in London for 10. I'm the father of three kids and they are five, six, and seven, which means my life at home is chaos. And funnily enough, they were born in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, and 2018.

So Irish triplets, I think 

Steve Goldhaber: there, yeah, that's, that's adventuresome. I could not be that aggressive in my approach. I've got two boys and I needed a three year break between the first and the second to come up for air. 

Rowan Tonkin: Yeah. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it was intentional, but uh, here we are. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right. So case number one.

Probably one of my favorite things to talk about as a marketer is, is a rebrand. It's an opportunity to figure out where a company is going, where they've been in the past, how do you bridge the gap? So I'm excited to talk about this case. Go ahead. Take it away. 

Rowan Tonkin: Sure. So I arrived at this company and as part of the whole interviewing and you know, joining on process, I knew that we were going to rebrand the company.

And that's an interesting place to be. Like, as you think about you kind of. You know, four or five weeks before you join, it's like, all right, I'm trying to figure out names. But, you know, your team have no, no concept that this is about to be unloaded upon them. Yes. And so let me kind of step back and explain, you know, why rebrand a company in the first place?

I think that's the first question. It's not something that we as marketers should take lightly. It's not trivial, and it's a really important change. And, and so the original name of this company was the appropriate name when the company was founded back in 2001. It had connotations around what the product did at the time, but unfortunately for the company, those two, the two terms changed distinctly over time, and they became less about the audience that the company served, which was finance, you know, offers of the C F O teams.

And actually became about IT teams. And so as teams were talking and, you know, both in, in sales, marketing, everyone was talking about the company name, people would say, uh, hang on, how does this relate to what we do? Right? Like, it, it just didn't serve its purpose to identify with the audience that, that we primarily sold to.

And so as we thought about accelerating the growth of the company, we realized that we needed a different name because there was cognitive dissonance for, for an audience member when they first heard it. They're like, hang on, you shouldn't be speaking to me. You should be speaking to my IT team, or my tech ops team, or someone else, right?

Because the market had shifted those two terms. And so that was the primary reason for changing. And, and so as we then looked at, at new names, it was very much, okay, well who do we serve? So you have to go through that whole exercise of who do we serve and where could we go in the future so that we don't have to do this again?

And then as you think about. A right now you want the do to be available, so that limits your choices. Be.

And finally, you want the name to really either easily identify with your customers or be something that they can get on board quickly with. And so this rebrand took place in late 2019 and was kind of delivered in in 12 weeks. So that's a whole other podcast, I think. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's a separate, separate case study on why, why that happened.

My god, the madness. 

Rowan Tonkin: Uh, yeah, it was pretty chaotic, but it, it worked. Then the challenge is how do you get that new name and, and transition what brand equity you did have from one name to another name, and all the, the tactics and changes that go along with that. It's not a sort of trivial effort, as I said at the start, and especially with a company that has a, you know, a long history, right?

We had huge amounts of content. Huge amounts of, you know, third party assets out there, partners that you need to enable. So it was a really big transformation. 

Steve Goldhaber: So I'm gonna jump into the 12 weeks, right? That's probably gotta come from the c e O down. Someone just said, Hey, this is what it, when it's gotta happen.

What was driving the timing of it? Was it a decision that just was put off forever and you said, Hey, it's gotta get done. Tell, tell me more about the 12 weeks. 

Rowan Tonkin: It was definitely c e o and joint, right? One of the things that. I've certainly learned in my career is the longer that you allow something to take the even longer it's gonna take.

And so one of the, the marketing tactics that I use with a lot of projects is to set a really aggressive timeline. You'll be amazed at how much you can get done with your team, through your partners with an aggressive timeline. And often that leads to, okay, we find all the stress points in the project really quickly and can solve them really quickly and then actually get down to the higher value work.

So I'm not saying a rebrand is, is low value, but that could be something that just. Lingers on in the company for 9, 12, 18 months. I've seen it happen at plenty of other organizations. When I hear companies rebrand, I, I say, how long did that take? And the answer is generally in terms of, okay, nine months, 12 months, 18 months.

And that's a huge burden for a team to be carrying for a long period of time. Right? When you think about, oh, well we're gonna rebrand, everyone just feels like they're in limbo. And the goal was a aggressive to get it. Also, we didn't want the team to feel like they were in limbo for long periods of time.

Yeah. And, uh, there was a, a kind of forcing function, a compelling reason to do that, which was our annual company kickoff. The first time everyone had actually been together at the company and. As they walked in, they saw the old brand on all the banners and everything like that. And then as they left the keynote, they saw new banners and Oh, that's great, that's great.

New swag and things like that. So it was, it was representative, a wider transformation. 

Steve Goldhaber: That's a, that's a nice little idea too, to, to. So often a rebrand. You sell internally first, and then you go externally. All right, so now I'm curious about rebranding. I've done a bunch of these and I'm always intrigued because every company has a different approach.

Some are so brand design centric, others are more messaging centric. Some are just customer obsessed centric, like they just want to talk to customers all the time. So what was the, mm-hmm. What was kind of the muse for you to, to do the rebrand? 

Rowan Tonkin: Yeah. I think it was probably more so customer-centric in the name, customer-centric in the way that underpinned a, a reposition, so brand narrative on underpinning that.

So very, very customer-centric, with the exception of we weren't guided by customers into the design, into the look and feel and, you know, color schemes and all of those things that go along with. The brand was built around and centered around customers and what we deliver for them and, and kind of how they want to think, feel, do, but we didn't use them as the, like, the pillars of.

Hey, do you like this or not? Right? Yeah. We were going too fast to even do that. So at the late stages when we did have brand designs, and I'd say almost final concepts, it was more informing some early stage customers about not early stage customers, but early in in the process it was informing some select customers that this is what we were doing, got their feedback.

We weren't really taking that into, okay, we're going to now really change what we've done. We're very confident in our approach, our design methodologies, and so the design changed very distinctly. Brand change, very distinctly. Obviously a brand new name, customer driven in terms of. That was the lens that which we looked everything through.

So whether that was typography, fonts, you know, color palette, voice and tone, all of that completely customer centric. But the actual visual design elements were built around where we wanted to go with the brand, not where customers thought we should go. Yeah. 

Steve Goldhaber: Okay. Did you guys do this in-house? Did you have external help at all?

How did it happen? 

Rowan Tonkin: Yeah, we definitely had external help. I don't think you can do this type of thing in-house in 12 weeks. So we worked with an agency out of Austin that I'd worked with prior to help do that and, and meet those aggressive timelines and. They really facilitated a lot of the conversation around, you know, where do, where should our voice and tone be?

Where should our palette sit? Why? And very much a great facilitation process, but all the decisions were made internally. 

Steve Goldhaber: Okay. I'm kind of amazed that sounds like it happened in the timeframe. I think a lot of companies I've either worked at or with approach it with, yep, we're doing a big sprint, we're gonna be nimble.

Agile and uh, all of a sudden our 12 weeks turns into 30 weeks because decisions weren't made. Or, ooh, maybe we should talk to some key customers and ooh, now we have to listen to that feedback. So how were you able to stay on track? Was it just a clear vision by a couple of people or, or what happened?

Rowan Tonkin: Yeah, we didn't get lost in consensus, I think is one of the big aspects of that, making that timeline work. What we wouldn't get done early on. For example, product URLs can take a long time to change inside of a release path and, and things like that. Product documentation, there was a, a very, very like distinct meeting around what's in scope, what's out of scope, and what are we okay to have as kind of phase two, phase three.

So end of phase one was all the external brand change, internal brand change, things like. Swag, all the other stuff, right? But what was in phase two and phase three was things like long tail assets that we knew that we needed to rebrand, but it was okay actually. Like you've gotta be comfortable with that type of scope to say it's going to be okay.

If people see, still see us as this old name, like we weren't completely trying to ditch the old name and say That company's you know, no longer here. We wanted to build upon. It's okay to have some assets that are, you know, not in the new brand per se. So that's number one was scope, really defining the scope and then ultimately removing the consensus.

So it was a very clear decision making process. I. Daily standups working directly. So it was myself and the c e o that were really making the decisions and very clear about which decisions he was making and which decisions I was making. And that really helped, it has helped that we'd worked together in the past.

So that also accelerated some of the decision making. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. So every rebrand I've worked on, there's at least, I don't know, 10 dramatic elements of the project. So share, share one or two of those things where. Where you thought things were going pretty smooth and then all of a sudden whack you just get hit by something.

Rowan Tonkin: Yeah. It's specifically logo, I would say. And we had finalized effectively the core elements of, of the logo. And we have a logo market, a word mark, locked up together. The logo mark was solidified and the word mark was solidified. But putting the two together went through some very last minute changes at the point where you need to start printing things, right?

Like, you know, as I said, we were doing, we were doing things for an, an onsite company event and we're up against some printing deadlines and just the getting the visual balance right, like, You know, alignment, center, alignment of things. You're like, oh, it's perfectly center aligned, but optically it wasn't.

Yes. Right. And so going through that kind of final little process took two to three days longer and meant, you know, delays on printing and things like that. And you know, you start rushing the job and. But it was worth it in the end because as you look back now, you're like, actually we made the right decision to slow down for those two to three days.

The logo, as you like, look at it now, compared, I've still got some of the old, you know, concept art still around the office. And you're like, ah, yeah, we made the right call. Yeah. But it's hard to think about at the time. You're like, it's just alignment. It's center alignment mathematically. I know it looks fine.

Yeah. But you know, there's just that visual indicator that something doesn't sit quite right. 

Steve Goldhaber: It's amazing when you always desire. I worked with a long tab ago talk. She showed me the exercise of. Mathematically even aligned, but then visually off. Yeah. And it's, it's been a great lesson because you think it's as simple as just, oh, well just set it up the right way and we're good.

It has nothing to do with it. It's, it's about the other elements around in the, in the palette that you're working with. Absolutely. Yeah. It's always fascinating 

Rowan Tonkin: and our eyes place tricks on us. They, they don't know mathematical alignment, like, you know, a screen does. Yep. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. True. And that there's, you know, I feel like we've, we've gotten to a place finally where, Logos are being designed for screens first.

Mm-hmm. Screen was always an afterthought and you, I think one of the really interesting logos I had seen, maybe this is 10 years ago, I forget the name of the brand, but it was a, it was a sound oriented company, so it was either a speaker or, or some type of online music platform, and they designed their logo so that when you scrolled on the screen, There were little pulses that came out of the logo.

Mm-hmm. Little sound waves, and I was like, A great execution of a logo for a digital company. Yeah. But that wasn't always the case. People kind of looked at digital as the afterthought once the people who used to do print or TV would, would be done with the rebrand. So, 

Rowan Tonkin: well, yeah. I think it's the, the advent of the digital designer first, and then, you know, so then you think about things like color, right?

You know, you can pick whatever color you want, but how does that look on a color swatch? Printed on printed, you know, a, a quarter zip, or you know, all of those different elements. And I don't sit here and say we got everything right. There's plenty of times where the color doesn't sit right on a particular design and, and because we did it in 12 weeks, we have to live with that.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Let's jump into case study number two. This is also a rebrand. This is more of kind of a platform story. So let's jump into case study number two. 

Rowan Tonkin: Yeah, so this company, it has rebranded that's kind of independent of this story, I think. So, This is a, a technology technology platform that that serves developers, business analysts, and ultimately folks that want to query and interrogate huge volumes of data in milliseconds.

And when I say huge volumes, I'm talking about billions of rows of data. And when you think about that problem, there's. Can be used, whether that be telecoms companies looking at streaming data coming off cell phone towers. Or whether that be, you know, capital management or hedge funds looking at lots of data coming off, you know, Bloomberg and things like that.

You know, external market data, market data that they have access to. And the challenge with that company was how do you message at a kind of broad positioning level as a brand, but also then say, Hey, Mr. Or Mrs. Developer at this telco, we have a solution for you. And there's only, you know, a certain number of telcos in here in the US and even  internationally that have that amount of data or have the capacity to do that.

So the marketing challenge was very much about. How do you go to market at an industry level and an account-based indu industry level? So very hyper-targeted whilst you're messaging both to the business side, uh, the people who want to access all that information or need that, that information to do real-time decisions and also to the developers and, and the engineers that are building those.

Interfaces to the business analysts. So that was ultimately the challenge that that we had at the time. The solution, again, working with an agency was very campaign themed and very much a account based marketing effort at the time. I, uh, had the fortune of, of running revenue, operations, product marketing and demand gen, like a weird kind of grouping of, of three different functions.

And what that ultimately led to was probably to this day, the best account targeting that I've ever delivered at an organization. Right? And why that was, was because I owned, and my functions owned the account targeting list with each sales rep, right? So, Each rep had a set a hundred accounts prioritized, a, B, and C, A accounts.

They had five, you know, B accounts. They had 25 and C accounts were 70. Then marketing went through an exercise of. Doing all the scoring and the segmentation of those accounts, and then identifying, okay, well, where's the most likely and highest propensity to buy? And then we went and built our campaigns off the data of exactly who we were targeting.

And that clarity allows you to really be hyper targeted. So building specific landing pages for a specific telco, building a generic one for when folks just come to the website. All the outbound collateral that, you know, SDRs or BDRs were leveraging, the account executives were leveraging, were very specific to that company.

And all of it was underpinned by a brand theme that we had running across all of those industries. And that was probably something very unique that I've done in my career. Um, you know, we were talking just se really selling to just the Fortune 500 and leveraging some case studies that. 

Steve Goldhaber: It's always interesting.

I, I definitely like the, I kind of call it proactive reactive marketing, and it's just two different ways of doing it. Uh, and there's nothing more powerful than to get into a vertical or, you know, in this case a specific company when you can just say, Hey, this is all about you, and we're gonna show you headlines and pictures that resonate with your specific company.

Mm-hmm. It's pretty powerful. You know, I, I've. I've been doing marketing almost 25 years now. I feel like, you know, I initially thought that the role of marketing was, it's all about great storytelling and clever headlines, and now I've kind of landed in this spot of great marketing is just when the audience says, oh my God, this is for me.

Mm-hmm. This is just, there's speaking my language. They get me, they understand my pain. And who knows, maybe it took me 25 years to get there, but I, I just feel like that's when it's done well. Right. When, when the customer just, you've got their attention because you're speaking their language. 

Rowan Tonkin: Yeah. And, and it's a hard thing to do as you think about it because the marketing challenge is, Hey, I actually really want to get to a broad base of folks, right?

Like, Hey, marketing can do the scale and sales can do the personalization, right? I've heard that plenty of times in my career to be bold enough to then say, actually, no, we're just going to be hyper-personalized, single, you know, single company targeting. In many instances, you really gotta swing that, that bad and make sure you gonna get the hit right.

I'm not a, I'm not a baseball, so I'm using a weird analogy for myself, but you can't strike out on that one because you put so much resources behind it. So much individual's time and your sales rep is sitting there expecting that to happen in order for them to hit their quota, like there was no opportunity for them to really go out and, and kind of chip away at their quota.

They needed the big hits. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I like too, like the, I like the tiering, the a, b, c of the different target accounts. So how does it, how does someone in business development approach that they've got their five main accounts? I mean, is it just heavy? Networking, relationships, introductions, how much of that is like kind of traditional sales tactics versus, no, it's the marketing team driving demand and.

The salesperson picks it up once that customer has raised their hand. 

Rowan Tonkin: Yeah, so as we thought about it, you know, we were a small startup early stage, so you know, series B, so again, the bold move of going all in on that type of approach, very tough. We had, I think it was five or six reps at the time. So when we looked at their A accounts, you've got 25 to 30 at a company level that are the top priority accounts.

So the sales rep would be doing whatever they could to get into that account, whether that's through investors networking, you know, being very multi-threaded on the, um, on their outreach with those accounts. We said the account executive owns all the outreach to the A accounts. Their Ss d R or b d R can't help them.

Like, and honestly some of the account executives are like, I don't want them to touch it. Right? Like, I want that brand to realize there's only one person at this company and. That's where we would do the hyper-personalization in a company level. Right? So for the B and C accounts, that was where we did more broad-based industry type marketing, industry type demos, industry type content.

We weren't doing the absolute kind of nth degree of, of A B M for the the B and C accounts. 'cause we just didn't, you couldn't scale that. So very much a joint effort. What we were able to do was use, you know, the data that intent data that marketing has all of the, you know, kind of contact technographic infographic data that marketing can procure to help the account executive land into that account, get conversations going, find the relevant people to send the relevant content to.

And ultimately after that, then it became kind of more the, the salesperson, you know, networking inside of that account. And that was, you know, as aggressive of seeing that someone in that space. Was speaking at a conference and just flying the account executive to the conference rather than, you know, just trying to email them.

It was like, well, you know, they're gonna be there. Let me go and personally introduce myself. Right? And so that was the kinda level of detail that it took. And you know, as you think about that, selecting those 30 accounts was really tough, right? Because of the level of effort that we're gonna be putting into.

Steve Goldhaber: Alright, thanks for sharing case study number two. Let's jump into q a. Tell us about your first marketing gig. 

Rowan Tonkin: Sure. So I was, prior to joining a marketing team, I was actually in, uh, customer support for a technology company that sold to marketers, and then I joined the implementation team helping marketers streamline their, their processes and operational processes internally.

Once you're doing implementation, sometimes you get this little gold rush and you look over at the solution consulting team and you think, Hey, I know how to use the product. I can show people how to do it and not have to deal with all of the implementation stuff on the side. Lemme go over and do that.

And so I. I then moved into solution consulting. I, I carried actually a sales bag for a little while where I was in a territory and we didn't have sales reps, so I was doing both my own demos and then helping close the transactions. And I didn't necessarily have a quota, but the regional target was my target.

Yeah. And then at that time that company got acquired. I, I went into various value engineering roles and solution consulting roles, and then someone offered me a role in, in product marketing. I'd kind of been in that sales side, you know, doing individual hand-to-hand combat with every demo, every, every prospect for probably seven or eight years.

Be nice to step away from that and, uh, just talk at a broader, you know, I, I call it sales at scale. That's how I think of marketing and yeah, I, I, I jumped at the opportunity to join a product marketing team. My objective there was to launch, this was a platform company. That had the opportunity to build a kind of message for marketers.

And so I took all of that, you know, 12 years of experience in, you know, solving marketing problems to that company and, and built a kind of marketing product, marketing, all the messaging to marketing, how it fit into the, the parent narrative and, and everything like that for marketing. So, My first role in marketing was as a kind of product marketing manager, but I had the blessing of being able to launch a whole new audience, a whole new product in.

Steve Goldhaber: Your background is very interesting. It's got sales and product backgrounds. Mo Most CMOs just kind of, you know, they start as a marketing intern, work their way up through the organization and I've always thought that the closer that A C M O can get to the business, to the sales team, it's just an incredible advantage.

'cause other, other than that, you're just talking about logos and colors and headlines. You know, you don't have as much credibility. So I think it's great that you've. That you can kind of have the combat stories to really get respect to the team.

Rowan Tonkin: It certainly helps, but it takes a while now because I've been in marketing for, you know, kind of the next 10 years of my career, it takes a little while for people to realize that I have that background, right?

It's not, so yes, I have it, and yes, it's absolutely helpful. But you know, the average seller in the company isn't aware of that. Right. And so, you know, often they're not thinking of the C M O as being an exec sponsor on a deal that can actually help them, you know, move their deal along. Or, you know, someone in product isn't thinking about the, the marketing person understanding their challenges, right?

So it's something that, you know, that internal bias that we have to shift. Um, but it, it's incredibly advantageous. I would say to your point, right? As you're having these conversations, you, you understand the challenges of product and engineering and, and a sales rep. I know how they sweat their quota and I know how every demo is important and how thorough they need to be to prepare for.

Steve Goldhaber: Question I've got has to do with your international background. So, you know, you've, you've been in Australia, United Kingdom, the states, what's your perspective on kind of like American marketers for, for a lack of a better word, what are, what are they good at and what are some things that just you're like, oh my God, these guys don't get it.

Rowan Tonkin: There's not a lot I would say that we all don't get. I think market, the marketing practice in general has a few things that we all don't get, but that's more about my sales background than, than anything else. From an international perspective, I'd say the, the major nuances, and this is something that I really learned when I moved from Australia to the uk.

Was the scale. And I was working as an implementation consultant for a, a telco company at the time. And, you know, they were going through a big transformation. And the software that I was implementing was, you know, part of that transformation initiative. And, you know, I stepped back one day and I, I looked at the number of customers that they had, and they had 32 million customers, you know, 10 million more than the population of Australia at the time.

Right. So I, I quickly was like, wow, the scale at which I'm dealing with and the, and the solutions to the scale problems that marketing has at some of these companies, specifically B two B, B two C, sorry, at the time, He's just way beyond where I came from. Right. And you know, the only company in Australia that could have that many customers is the government and, and they move as slow as molasses.

So that wasn't exciting for someone like me who's, you know, very much change and, and pace oriented. So that kind of led me to, hey, I'm not sure I ever wanna rush back to Australia on a personal level. Yeah. But as, as I think about that, and then, you know, moving at the time, you know, to come out to the us I did a lot of selling from the UK to the US and the, and the things I learned there was ultimately the US is just the biggest market, right?

And so, Again, like taking that UK experience and then realizing, wow, like the market is even bigger here. There are so many companies, and I think that's something that, you know, I, I don't know if American marketers take for granted or they forget to realize, is that there are so many companies in in the TAM that are available compared to places, and that's opportunity.

I. You can get complacent because there's always more opportunity, there's more customers available to you and you're not as hyperfocused. But the opportunity is there's a lot more greenfield opportunity here. Whereas if you are marketing in a different region, the TAM is so small that you have to be hyperfocused and, and you have to kind of, you know, lift your batting average.

Uh, again, using that, that baseball analogy, that's a bad one for me, but you really have to kind of make sure that you hit every time. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. What's something you wanna change? What's something in Mar in the world of marketing that you just. You wanna bang your head at that, you're just like, we gotta fix this, we gotta do a better job.

Rowan Tonkin: Transparency. I think, you know, you, you made the joke earlier, right? We, we get known as the clip art people sometimes, right? The people doing colors and logos and you know, focusing on the creative side. I don't want us to lose that. I don't think that marketing should ever lose that. 'cause it has a massive impact, but often we hide behind that as a profession.

We don't allow other folks in. That transparency, I think is something that we really need to become better at. And what I mean by that is, if I talk about sales as a profession, I can go into Salesforce and comparatively to marketing. I'm not gonna say salespeople are great at this, but you know, I can see every deal.

I can see every recording of every sales facing call. I can see all the email outreach, I can see all of that work. And you know, I. Generally know how much a sales person is getting paid. I generally know where they are to their quota. I generally know like who's performing and not performing because all of that data is very, very accessible and it's front and center to the business.

Yet, if you asked a sales person, Hey, what are marketing working on right now and how is that planning to goal? Most organizations wouldn't have a clue, and I think that's because marketing isn't as transparent as it could be to what are their core business goals. How are they performing to those goals and what does that mean for what they're doing next?

And yeah, it's a hard place to be in, but I, I, I absolutely think we need to become more transparent to really kind of prove our value, frankly. I, I think that's the, that's the message that I would say is become more transparent to create the trust. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Alright. Makes sense. Final question for you. Looking back on your career as a marketer, what are some things that you kind of would tell yourself?

In your first or second job to say, yeah, you know what, you, you didn't get this one. Right. Knowing now what you know, you would've done it differently. What are, what are some of the things that that stick out for you? 

Rowan Tonkin: It's actually doing that, that evaluation, but more frequently. Right. We're so good at convincing ourselves and, and you know me, I'm so good at convincing myself that that idea was great, that I don't stop frequently enough to say, is it actually working?

And should I be revisiting this? That's what I would tell my earlier stage self and something I still tell my current self is, Hey, just because you had the idea or the idea is good, doesn't mean it's working. Be hypercritical, step back and say, yeah, hey, is this actually working? And have the conviction to say it's not working and I need to change it as much as that hurts.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the message I would give to myself earlier in my career. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I can relate to that. I think there's so much in marketing is the excitement of the idea and the belief around it. That sometimes that just overtakes you in your attempt to sell it to other people. So I think that's really sound advice.

All right, Rowan, I really enjoyed connecting with you and discussing a lot of rebranding, a lot of balance. I, again, I, I really liked your background, how it's, it's not pure marketing, but that makes you a better marketer at the end of the day. So thank you for being on the show, and thank you everyone for listening to the podcast today.

Rowan Tonkin: Thanks, Steve.

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