Building a Business Brand with a Collective Soul

An Interview with Google Cloud's John Zissimos, VP of Creative, Brand, Media and Customer Programs

This is Part 5 of a blog series on B2B tech branding. Part 1 Building a Tech Brand for Business; Part 2 Elements of a Tech Brand Story, Part 3 Creating an Authentic Brand Story, and Part 4 Brand Stories & Hero's Journey

Recently, Google Cloud launched the Solving Campaign. John “JZ” Zissimos and I spoke about this campaign and how to build great B2B brands.

Anurag: JZ, I came to know you at Google Cloud as the master of branding. Beyond that, however, one of the things I've admired about you is your ability to make really complex stuff simple and to do that with humor. How do you think that ability helps with good brand building?

John: Thanks for saying that. I appreciate it. One, it's my defense system, right? And when I get into any kind of stressful situation, where there's a lot of money and pressure, and there’s a lot of reputation involved, I go back to humor. I try to have the team understand that the only way to get to great work is to have an enjoyable time doing it. And that’s all stuff I learned as a film director on sets, where you have limited time to get something done.

As a director on a set, 50-60 people you have not met before are looking at you for every move. And you have to have levity. You have to have humor. You have to inspire them, and you have to actually create an environment that's open and safe because you want all these experts, whose jobs you're nowhere near as good at as they are, you want them to come to you with ideas of how your film could be better. And you need it—the cinematographer, the lighting, the actors, they all have better ideas about what their particular craft is, and so you have to create an environment for them to be able to see and hear that you’re open to hearing them. And then you have to to leverage all those ideas and weave them into one big master plan. So that's the approach that I've learned to take over 30 years of just working through and making a series of catastrophic mistakes that led me to be able to work like that.

Especially what we do at Google Cloud, and in B2B, and in technology, is extraordinarily complex—the systems, the processes, all the things that connect to it. Many things could go wrong, it's so complex. Being able to simplify that process to tell a story is paramount. And so that is my ultimate goal: to be able to go in, listen to the complexity, simplify and get it down to the moments that really matter.

It usually is about stripping away everything to do with technology, and making it about outcomes, the simplicity of the outcomes, and what the ultimate state is. What will be the outcome if this all goes well? Or what was the outcome because it didn't go well—and what led to it?

Those are the stories that people care about because someone is always in one of those situations and can relate to it. The moment I can relate to that story is the moment you've got me. And when you have me listening, now you can tell me everything it is that I need to know to succeed. And great B2B advertising does that. It tantalizes, it educates, and then motivates you to do something. 

Anurag: So, what do you think is the main difference between good versus great B2B advertising?

John: I think all good B2B advertising comes from storytelling. And the difference between good and great is the level of storytelling. Everyone has customer logos and testimonials on their websites. It all seems on the surface like everyone's kind of doing the same thing. So, the difference is the level of storytelling. And it is the absolute structure of storytelling with compassion, empathy, and doing it in an authentic way. It's not scripted. You've got to take the risk, you have to speak to the customers and get to the heart of what really happened, and people have to tell you the truth.

A brand is a promise, and that is like the most fundamental thing that I believe in—and that promise has to be real and true. It can't be a marketing story.

It has to be the truth about who your customers are, what your product does, the evidence of what it has done for other people, and you can't script that. The more you can get someone on camera to reveal that with emotional impact, and the more authentic and real it is, now you've got something.

Usually stories at a B2B startup are like “something was good, then it got better.” That's not a great story. Nobody cares that something was good and that it got better. Who's gonna watch Romeo and Juliet if both families loved Romeo and Juliet getting together, and they bought them a house, and when they got married the families supported them? That's not a story you got to the movies for. A great story is no one wanted them together. Everyone was fighting to keep them apart. But their unwavering love was so strong that they fought heaven and earth to get together. And they both died because to live without each other was the ultimate disaster. 

So when a B2B marketer is sitting with a business customer who has risked everything on your technology or solution, and they tell you about the time when their business was about to go under, but then they chose your company.

And that was their hope—that by partnering with you, customers would get somewhere. And they're telling you about that time when they almost went under, and they’re emotional about it. That's the story someone wants to hear.

Because that is the moment of truth. And those are the great stories when someone reveals how desperate they were, how they put their faith in something—your company or solution—and made it work. And that's the difference between good and great B2B marketing.

Anurag: Fantastic. I love it! I love the discipline you bring from directing, and following the hero’s journey, where you have to empathize with the struggle of the hero. If you don't do that, then just getting to the climax of a movie is not fun, right? 

John: No way! Nothing there. 

Anurag: What is the biggest mistake you see tech companies make when it comes to building a brand? 

John: Many tech companies think of brand as a marketing-only endeavor. They think you hire somebody with a camera to do something, that they shall need a logo, that they shall have to come up with a tagline. This doesn’t just go for tech companies. They fundamentally do not understand that the core of their existence hinges on creating the brand. Their mission, values, promise - everything that means anything to their company - is wrapped up in their brand. And when they put the brand in a marketing department and just toss it as if it's something that anybody can do, that is the critical error of all time. 

People who think this way really can't get branding. On the other hand, when you think about the best business executives in living memory, marketing was their love, brand was their love, but they didn't think of it as brand or marketing. They thought of it as the pure existence and the promise of their company that they expressed through the brand, through marketing, through their messaging. That little simple thing I just said, that’s massive stuff.

Anurag: Absolutely. That goes to the heart of the issue. You've had the benefit of working on two of the biggest tech brands: Salesforce and Google. What did you find common in building the two brands?

John: When I entered, they both had the same mentality that product came first. That product was everything, that it was all about an executive on stage with the product, and the thing they built. It was all about selling this thing we are making. The voice of the customer wasn't there. They were both very customer-centric companies that weren't expressing the value of the benefit to the customer in the brand. It took me a little while to even convince our CEO at Salesforce, over a period of about a year and a half, that there was a great story to tell that he wasn't telling. And I did that in going out and having built my first customer film and showing it to him, which blew his mind. He didn't think that they could even speak that way, that Salesforce could ever talk that way or have that in their lexicon. Verbally, I couldn't talk him into it. I had to go out and take that risk. I had to show it to him. Once he saw it, it opened the door to build the team and the stories that would shape the brand moving forward. It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s a whole other workstream to sell it through and bring it to life.  

And I found the same thing at Google Cloud when I came in, and even more intense in many ways, because by now Google as a company has built consumer products with massive success where they didn't really need to advertise. And so it took me a while to convince execs. I think our new Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian came in knowing customer stories mattered greatly, which made it much easier. But it was still a heavy hill to climb at Google Cloud to switch from product first to customer first. 

Anurag: So let me switch to the recent Google Cloud’s Solving Campaign. The brand promise behind the campaign is simple: “We help accelerate your progress every day.”

How did you come to that for Google Cloud, particularly as a number-three player in the cloud market?

John: Cloud is the B2B world, and at Google, you've got the number-one consumer brand in the world that sunsets many of their products that aren't working out. To businesses, that seemed like they were not going to stick with anything. It didn't seem like a serious endeavor. Even inside, there were a lot of people who were like “Is this real? Are we going to stick with this?” So this perception was the reality, and the challenge was how we change that. 

To do that we had to tell the right story. But also there wasn't a story there yet. We just had a collection of products, with different org charts and leaders trying to sell different things with no collective soul around this. The search for this collective soul—or insight—took about a year and a half. We had to put the customer voice first and do the research. At its heart, we had to find out what was true about Google as a company, that was also true about Google Cloud as an entity, that was also true about all the products, that was true for their customers. 

The insight came down to the 21-year philosophy of Google engineering at its very best. This is when Googlers say, “What are we solving for? What are we doing here?”

When Google puts their mind to something, they achieve absolute miracles. That was also when we were at our best with our cloud customers. When we talked to Google Cloud customers they were like, “the Googlers came in, they listened, they really cared, they figured out what we needed to solve, and they were relentless in offering us a selection of tools and solutions to solve that particular problem. They were unbelievable and laser focused on that.” When we were great, that's what we did consistently. But when we weren't we became arrogant thinking, “We're Google. We're the best. We can do anything.” And that's when we lost business. 

So, we took all of those things that had a 21-year history, and weaved them into the story that was organic and made sense. We didn't make anything up. It was true and authentic. And I think that's why it resonated in my initial pitch. In fact, when I was pitching it to our execs, our CTO was in the room. He said something like “When you said we're going to be personifying 21 years of our engineering DNA, I thought this was going to be super boring. But wow. You brought this to life in a way I never thought of us before.” And that's when I knew we really had something that was going to resonate. And it went through the whole company internally, and everybody fell in love with it. But most of all the customers really resonated with the idea and wanted to be part of it. That's what you really want. That's when, you know you have got something.

Anurag: JZ, that's excellent. What you just laid out is the hardest part of any branding—finding a core insight that is true and authentic and speaks to both what the company does as well as what the customer wants. In the Solving Campaign, this insight of helping the customer accelerate their progress is tied to the genetic code of the Google company. Such an insight is not something easy that falls from a tree. 

John: No.

Anurag: So if you were advising somebody who gets the importance of a brand but needs to figure out an authentic insight, what would be your suggestion? 

John: First, you've got to go to the source and spend a lot of time with your customers. That's the most important part. What do they think of you, both positive and negative? What do they think your strengths are? They are going to guide you to what's true about you. A lot of marketers just go out with a campaign, after listening to a small set of customers, repeating “This is they want to hear from us.” Listening is step one. But if you just play back what you hear, you're going to probably fail miserably. Just because a customer wants to hear something doesn't mean that you have that right to say that to them at the current state that you are in. You have to build up to that. It’s also important to listen to the customers about the down side. They're also going to tell you what you need to fix. Where are you messing up? What aren't you stepping up into? Who are you pretending to be? And who do you need to be? 

This is the most important thing that I've learned.

I think all brands have three identities.

There's the one you have, there's the one you say you have, and there's the one you're desperately trying to create.

Most companies only acknowledge two: the one they say they have, and the one they're trying to create, which they can never get to because they're not dealing with the one they actually have. The only way you can create a great brand, tell a great brand marketing story, is to identify those three things: the brand that you actually have, the one you say you have, and the one you want to have. 

You have to acknowledge and admit the one you have, the faults that you have. Because how are you going to get to the one that you want to have if you're just in the pretend state of the one you say you have? Because all brands have a PR department that is trying to say they have this wonderful brand, but that's never really true. You've got to acknowledge where you actually are if you're going to build a great brand campaign, because a great brand campaign comes from your faults, your acknowledgment of those things in order to get to where you need to be. 

And, an inside out approach to brand is number one. If you do a brand campaign, and the first time your employees see it is when they're driving to work, or watching TV, or listening to their favorite podcast, you have failed miserably. Inside out is critical. For the Solving Campaign, we spent months inside making sure everybody got it and loved it. Because then you got your Hamburger Helper. That’s a lot less work that I have to do as brand chief, a lot less dollars. Because they love it. It's theirs. They feel like they created it. I am just an ambassador. And I've got 35,000 brand ambassadors at Google. I'm not the creator of it. I just put it out there. They're the ones that are selling it, and that's when you have magic on your hands. So when you know the brand that you're sitting with and your faults, you can get to a great place, but you've got to take the journey.  

Anurag: That's a very courageous idea. Because not everybody has the courage to say “I have these problems, but I want to be better, and I'm going to make some public commitments to get to a different place than where I am today.” 

John: Absolutely. Brand commitments are critical even when you think about just being a human being. As a leader, you get reviews, you get 360 feedback, you get a manager score at Google. Your team is telling you what they want from you and how you should be. Do you pretend like you're the leader you think you are? Or do you take that in and go to your next big team meeting your review and say, “I didn't know this about myself, that I was showing up this way. I am incredibly disappointed in these three things, and I want to tell you that I'm going to do everything I can change, and I need to hear more. I want you to break up into specific groups and chart the course together. And I want you to hold me accountable to these things on a monthly basis.” Now you can get somewhere. 

Anurag: Wonderful insight. So, one more question on the Google Cloud Solving Campaign. You have a powerful brand promise: “We help accelerate your progress every day.” Dead simple, makes sense. Your insight is why is uniquely Google qualified with its engineering history and DNA to solve customer problems. But now there's a gap between what that promise holds versus what Google Cloud, or for that matter any company making a bold promise, will be able to deliver. And you're pointing out that we have to step up and close that gap publicly. A series of commitments have to be made. So besides employee engagement, what are the kind of commitments you need to have to put teeth behind the brand? To make sure the brand is real rather than just an ad campaign. 

John: Yeah, the brand campaign was based on business strategy. So the first thing we did was take all the customer feedback, and the business strategy laid out by the business. And we layered those together. You can't do one without the other. And so the fact that we were going to become customer focused, and build the large sales teams, and the right customer service organization was critical. We had the foundation to deliver on the Solving Campaign. If we weren't investing in all the salespeople out there to service our clients, with a humble approach that we shall be listening first, we would not be able to pull this off. So everything was put in place for this to succeed. 

And then we engaged our customers to come with us on that journey, to pilot the brand with us. Those customers that have worked with us for a while were the first people to help us tell that story. We were all vulnerable together because we didn't know if it was going to work. And it wasn't that simple or easy, but we went down that road with them, and these are the stories we made with them. They were raw, and they were real. And one story begets another story to get to another story, and suddenly the momentum starts. As our teams and the customers see themselves in the stories, the brand comes to life. 

We are what we say, who we are, what we do, how we do it—then you judge us on that. A brand is those three things: who we are, what we do, and how we do. It's not just what we do, which is the products, but it's all those 35,000 people and the way that they come to work every day and that's why a brand is a promise. It's a promise because those 35,000 people hold everything accountable and personal to make it happen. And now the brand that we put out, the Solving Campaign, makes sense. 

Anurag: So first of all, thank you for reading my article. We didn't have the benefit of this master class before I wrote that article. I would love your thoughts and reactions and feedback to that article. 

John: I really actually loved the blog series. It really spoke to me a lot as a storyteller. And I think you go through an intellectual way of understanding B2B advertising, and it all makes sense. Then in this part The Brand Story and Hero’s Journey, you cut above the rest. You entered a new realm of what it takes to actually tell those stories. You charted out the beginning, the middle, the end, the insight, the incident, the catalyst for things. It's what you and I discussed here today, but I think that's the place people need to get to. It’s a really special, different thing that I don’t read that often. I think that’s a magical place that you landed on. 

Anurag: Thank you. How has branding and creative stuff changed in the times of COVID? The world has changed so quickly.

John: It’s one of those moments where brands can either shine or stumble. And how are you going to show up at this moment? And so for the great companies of the world that have a real cultural, empathetic, societal view at all times, it was their moment to shine. If you are a company that stands for something, the Nikes and P&Gs of the world, that have CEOs that care about the world in a profound way, and their profits go to help the world, then it was easy for such companies to take a stand and to have a meaningful impact.

Those that only dabble in it, and only do it as a moment, “Oh, we got to have our voice, we’ve got to do a COVID ad, Black Lives Matter ad,” they look much less genuine because they’re doing it in an opportunistic way. At that point just stay out of it and just do something silently inside to start to change. 

That’s why it's meaningful for your brand to have that angle. Your employees want it. And you can't be a brand today if you don't stand for what the culture of your company demands you to stand for. And when you do, and you need to be out there all the time. It's easy for Google to support something like Google for Good, because we stand for it every day. And brands today miss so much when they don't stand for something. They have to take a stand, and that has to reflect their customer base and their employee base. 

Anurag: Very well said. So last question. You have had a very interesting career in starting out on the creative side, film direction, and then moving into corporate. So if you were advising young MBAs or storytellers starting out, what skill would you tell them to acquire today to be a brand marketer?

John: I don't want to put down millennials, Gen Z, or Gen X, or anyone. You go back in the history of the world, I bet cavemen were bringing up children who were like, “How do I make cave drawings faster?” Everybody wants a shortcut. But there are no shortcuts. You've got to do the hard work. You have got to listen and to be a sponge and shadow great people that you admire. And look at all the different jobs and wonder which one calls to you. Strategy, or account management? Writer, art director, or a graphic designer? What part of this storytelling marketing process speaks to you? Because it is hard work, you have got to fall in love with the process and the hard work itself. Then when you do, you'll be able to bear all the pain that comes with it, along with getting somewhere. It's a journey, step by step, but there are no shortcuts. 

And the fundamentals matter. Understand what you're solving for, what problem you're trying to solve. Understand what the creative brief is, how to build a great one, what is it the heart of simplicity, how to make something impactful. And it's really a lot of hard work. The whole world's built on standing on the shoulders of giants. Get to people who have done it, who have sweat the details, and listen to them talk, get out and shadow them, and try new things. And being able to deal with absolute pummeling, brutal rejection is so important if you're going to be in any kind of creative field. 

And eliminate jealousy from your life. This is really tough. You are going to watch people around you succeed and do great things, that win them awards, bonuses, promotion. And you will feel like, “Wow, why did they get there?” You're going to be envious of what they've created. Be happy for them. Be happy that they were able to get there and do that, because you can learn from their journey rather than wanting to put them down and think that they don't deserve it. That is something I struggled with very early on in my life. And I'm so glad that I got over that, to the fact where I need to add some jealousy into my life now to give me a little fire in my ability to get going. 

I'm still learning. I am still pushing. I'm still fighting to do something great. I'm still in awe of those around me, and I am still waiting to be that person that I just so wish that I could become someday. And it is a lifelong journey to constantly endeavor to create something great. Once you're done creating something, you're off to the next thing, and you're starting from scratch again. And the journey of the next thing, the finding of that, the doing of that, the aligning and joining with others to build that next great idea, that's what it's about. It's the journey to the end result you have to enjoy, and you have to fall in love with that. 

Anurag: John, thank you for the wisdom of your answers. It is beyond a master class. Thank you so much for sharing so generously and candidly.

This is Part 5 of a blog series on B2B tech branding. Part 1 Building a Tech Brand for Business; Part 2 Elements of a Tech Brand Story, Part 3 Creating an Authentic Brand Story, and Part 4 Brand Stories & Hero's Journey

References

Google Cloud Solving Campaign Videos

Goldman Sachs

Spotify

Carrefour

Humana

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