Play Ball: Announcing The Next Inning In Coupa’s Brand Journey

The first pitch of the #World Series is always a truly special moment, with tens of thousands of flashbulbs lighting up at once as the crowd focuses its attention on the sixty feet and six inches between the pitcher’s mound and home plate.

At this week’s Fall Classic between the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves, Coupa is planning a “flashbulb moment” of our own. Not only are we launching a nationwide ad campaign, with 11 spots appearing during the first four games, we’ll also be featured during the actual broadcasts of Games 1 and 3.

It’s not uncommon for a company at our stage to make a big push during a major sporting event. After all, the whole world will be watching. But this is a different kind of campaign. And before the umpire yells, Play ball!, I wanted to take a moment to tell you how—and why—we’re using this moment to take the next step in our brand journey.

Why our campaign is different

?Creating “brand awareness” is reasonably straightforward: Just plaster your logo on a golfer’s hat or an F1 race car or pay to have your product named the Official product of some widely seen event, and people will remember your name.

But smart companies don’t settle for just “getting their name out there.” They want to be top of mind at the moment in a buyer’s decision cycle when it really matters, and, most importantly, they want that buyer to remember not just who they are, but what they do, and why it matters.

That’s why they look for opportunities to create contextual brand moments that are aligned with the core “essence” of their brand.

?Amazon Web Services wants buyers to associate their brand with innovation, so it created the Next Gen Stats brand moment during NFL games. Allstate wants buyers to associate its brand with security and reliability, so it created a brand moment called the Good Hands Catch of the Game.

Now it’s our turn.

At Coupa, we can sum up our core essence in three words: delivering measurable value.

Our CEO Rob Bernshteyn, recalling earlier experiences with software companies where the parameters of success were poorly defined, built Coupa by working with customers to create clear and accountable benchmarks for success and measuring the success of our platform by how well we helped meet them.?

He called this approach (and his first book), “Value As A Service.” It was the focus of our company from the early days, and it remains our focus today as we serve thousands of customers in our BSM community.

That’s why the idea of ‘delivering measurable value’ has always been centered in our brand communications.

And it’s why, when we partnered with FOX Sports to create a unique brand moment of our own at the World Series, we made sure to align it with that core essence, creating the Coupa Maximum Value Play of the Game.

Changing the narrative

?There’s one more important difference in this campaign—one more way we’re zigging where others might zag.

We’re not just making a statement. We’re changing a narrative.

?For most people, “managing” spend usually means cutting it. But as the Coupa community knows, the value of spend management doesn’t just come in the form of savings. It comes in the form of opportunity: the opportunity to improve your supply chain, the opportunity to accelerate growth by leveraging the efficiency provided by our comprehensive platform, and the opportunity to unlock the collective intelligence of our community.

?That’s why our ad campaign is intended not just to drive what us marketing nerds call company awareness, but to establish something called category awareness. We’re not just telling businesses why they should join our platform. We’re sparking a broader conversation about how business spend management can drive the transformation of a company.

?That conversation is more relevant now than it’s ever been. As companies scramble to transform themselves for a Covid-era landscape, back-office operations have come to the forefront—and to the front pages. When was the last time a mainstream audience heard the words “supply chain” so often? When was the last time those words carried such significance for the entire business community?

?Now more than ever, Business Spend Management is a necessary component of the digital transformation that companies must achieve to succeed—or even survive.?

That’s why now is the right moment to broaden the conversation about Business Spend Management beyond the C-suite. Starting with the World Series and continuing with our engagements at F1 and the Premier League, we’re stepping up to the plate and taking the biggest swing yet in our evolution from a great company to a great brand—by inviting a global audience to Behold the Power of Spend.

Please check out our new commercial below and let us know what you think.

https://videos.coupa.com/watch/Divr7C8LviLuVtMw7XzYkT

#BSM #WorldSeries #Formula1?#brandmarketing