The Art of Simplicity: AI, Brand Perception, and CX

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Gabrielle Boko: Customers are looking for simplicity. They're looking for simplicity and engagement. I think digital has already elevated that. Adding AI on top of digital allows us to take simplicity to a new level, which is reduction of costs or how to think about content in a really personal way.

Kailey Raymond: Hello and welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing. I'm your host, Kailey Raymond, and today we're diving into brand perception and AI sustainability. In the fast evolving world of marketing technology, keeping the customer at the center while navigating through the constant drumbeat of new technologies is paramount. While AI is revolutionizing marketing, these advancements mean nothing if ethical practices are sidelined. By championing data security, bias reduction, and sustainability, marketers can act responsibly and use AI to enhance human touch, not replace it. With this in mind, AI has the potential to be a catalyst to your goals without compromising your business outcomes or sustainability practices. Joining me today is Gabie Boko, CMO of NetApp. We discuss AI as a competitive differentiator, NetApp's brand refresh, and the sustainability of AI.

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Kailey Raymond: Today I am joined by Gabrielle Boko, the CMO of NetApp. Gabie has over 22 years of experience in technology marketing and she really connects customer success to innovative experiences in software applications and cloud services, digital strategy and marketing, customer storytelling, customer experience, and AI and big data. Prior to NetApp, she led organizational transformations and built high impact teams at companies like HPE, Sage, SAP, Cognos. Gabie, welcome to the show.

Gabrielle Boko: Thank you. I really am glad I'm here with you.

Kailey Raymond: I know you have quite an exciting career history in the technology space, and so I wanna hear in your own words, I mentioned a few of the companies that you work for, but how did you get to where you are today.

Gabrielle Boko: It's very long and circuitous journey. When you look back, when I look back two decades, of experience in tech, I really think that it's always been around the evolution of customers, the evolution of digital, and really even from the beginning, just that foundational belief that data and innovation come together to drive message, to drive brands, to drive sales. And that's really one of the reasons I'm passionate about working here at NetApp because my role at NetApp is really central to how storage is going to help rapid technology advancement, utilizing AI, utilizing machine learning, really taking advantage of the power of the cloud. It really is a very exciting time to be at the center of all of it, not just enabling that advancement, which is what's something I've been experiencing over my two decades, but shaping it. It's really cool.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you about that. You've already let the cat out of the bag and said the word AI, so I think we're just gonna go there, Gabie. What do you think?

Gabrielle Boko: That works for me.

Kailey Raymond: So, you have been in this industry for quite a while. You've seen some enormous shifts, I am sure, on-prem to the cloud. And really making sure that AI is part of the conversation now might be the biggest moment in your career, especially working in the data industry. And you're really at the center of this conversation. So I wanna get your take on a lot of this, but I wanna start out and learn a little bit more from you about how NetApp is using AI, in particular, machine learning, predictive analytics. What are some of the ways that your team is building and working with this new technology?

Gabrielle Boko: Yeah, honestly, what a competitive differentiator AI is. I say that at a lot of points in my career. What I love about being in the technology space is that there's always some innovation that is a doubler, a tripler effect, and AI is definitely one of those. And we've definitely embedded AI. I think we've been one of the leaders in this, but we've also been a leader in it internally from a marketing department. Because when you think about the advance of digital and the advance of everything that we have to do to generate demand, to land message, to really engage locally, then AI becomes one of those amazing tools to help you do that. Honestly, I think what we've done is we've got four big quadrants in marketing that we are building out use cases or are in actual production. I think the easiest one was probably metrics and reporting. How do you create better variations and determine that effectiveness? How do you analyze that on the fly?

Gabrielle Boko: The second one is video and content, second and third. How do you develop videos that are smart and that are meeting audience need, but do it in a cost productive? You're trying to develop content efficiently and trying to ensure that that content connects both in terms of either print or video. I think the new one that we're experimenting with, quite frankly, is localization. And this is a really, this is a hard one. Because I think that you wanna do better for your customers, you wanna do better internally for your own team. Translation is something that we can use machine learning to say, hey, listen, can we get 80-90% there? And then have our local teams really make sure that we've said it the right way. The other great thing about AI is that it's a fast learner. It's learns faster than we do. So, all four of those areas are ones that we are using or trialing today, and we're really excited about being that team for NetApp.

Kailey Raymond: That is super cool. As somebody, I used to run 12 markets across the globe, and translation was something that was certainly on the top of my mind all the time.

Gabrielle Boko: All the time.

Kailey Raymond: And making sure that you really have those nuances as well for all of those local markets is extremely important. And not making those faux pas, of course, and language AI is certainly a catalyst in making it so much easier to be able to speak to your audiences in way that they deserve.

Gabrielle Boko: 100%.

Kailey Raymond: That's great. One of the things that... I think AI has a lot of great possibilities. I also think that there's probably some things that we need to be on the lookout for. So, what do you think the negative impacts AI might cause to our... The human population might be? How can we combat some of these things that we might be hearing in the media about some of the negative implications of AI?

Gabrielle Boko: Yeah, Kailey, that's great. Listen, there are dramatic headlines out there. I'm scared when I read some of those headlines.

Kailey Raymond: Totally.

Gabrielle Boko: Like, it's an existential threat. But with technology you have to be very, very aware that advancement in technology can feel very scary, and it's a lot about change management and that the technology itself isn't the menace. It's a transformative tool. I think what we're trying to do here at NetApp is really to make that conversation about AI accessible and beneficial. I think that's part of that change management motion, integrating it carefully. We're not trying to, like just go off and do whatever you want. I think, it needs some management, it needs some rails because it needs to support not just technology simplification, but you have to make sure it adds value with, as with all tech. If it doesn't add value, then why are you doing it? I think, when you talk about responsible AI, you're really championing cutting edge AI capabilities. Things like data security, reducing bias, and all of those things are ways to use it that are not menacing and are not existential threats, but are really helping us be better humans.

Gabrielle Boko: So, honestly for us here at NetApp, outside of that idea that we're trying to be responsible around AI, we really do excel in AI data infrastructure, because our goal is to enable seamless integration and management of AI across your data being on-prem, in the cloud. You're talking about structured data and unstructured data. We work with industry leaders like Nvidia, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. And we do all that together because we're committed to what AI can bring to data infrastructure and your data. And that commitment to that technology, that commitment to what we talked about at the beginning with the responsibility is about empowering teams and getting to business value. So that's really using AI, using technology in the right way. That's the kind of, how do you get to change? How do you drive the right motion with it and not be afraid by it and prepare everybody along the way, all your stakeholders, for a future that's AI driven, that's innovative and at the same time, ethically grounded?

Kailey Raymond: I like this concept of you all being stewards of this responsible AI movement and making sure that folks are keeping in mind some of the big things that you're talking about, like the risks to privacy and PII risks being probably greater than they ever have been. We're thinking about things like reducing bias. If algorithms have bias embedded within them, it can be an exponential in effect. And so making sure you have those guardrails in place. And one of the things that I've seen some of your work around as well is the environment and energy consumption and all of that. And so, I'm wondering, if you have any thoughts as it relates to where we are today with AI and the environment and what you think was gonna happen in the future.

Gabrielle Boko: Gosh, I would love to be able to predict. That's what AI is meant to do. I think when you think about sustainability overall, what you're really leaning into is how best to use resource, how to make it so you're using a resource but you're not mitigating or diminishing another resource, which I think is really what sustainability is all about. AI as a whole is very good at predictive algorithm. It's very good at assessing or plotting out where we need to go. And so when we think about sustainability and we think about data infrastructure, the right experience that we like to lead into is, what is the way that we want our customers experience to look like? Is that need to be more or less resource heavy on certain areas and resource light in other areas? Are we able to make some of those gains without affecting some of their business challenges in other areas?

Gabrielle Boko: So I think AI really helps us do that. It helps us highlight the opportunity in the customer's lens to refine those interactions, especially when it comes to sustainability, to make realistic goals and then work back towards how we achieve those goals. So I think, it's not gonna be a tomorrow thing. I think, we've spent decades, millennials trying to not kill our world. I don't think AI is gonna solve that in a tomorrow motion, but I think as with anything, if you put the customer at the center of it, then a tool like AI can really help us advance items like sustainability far faster than we would just on our own. And that's, again, back to that data infrastructure. We wanna do things ethically. We wanna do things the most sustainable that we can do without sacrificing something in some other area that we really need to go achieve and be successful. So, that's how I think about it.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, no, it definitely makes sense. And I was reading something recently that was saying that, I think it was from Gartner, that was saying that by 2030, AI might take up like 3% or 5% of the energy consumption of the world, which is a terrifying stat if you think about it in just that way. But they also said that AI can actually help reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 5%- 15% at the same time. So you're thinking about, when you're thinking about these trade-offs of like the prioritizations, we're really thinking about, I do think that the way that you can manage data and the way that you can think about putting the customer at the center of this problem and making sure you're really solving it for them is really gonna be the catalyst behind making good decisions in ethical AI. So I appreciate your perspective there.

Gabrielle Boko: Yeah, I really do think though that ethical AI and that foundational role we talked about up at the beginning of what I think is intelligent data infrastructure. AI, we just did a study on this by the way. We did a study in with our partner IDC to really bring some of this out. And some of those, everybody has ambitious goals. I think we all have ambitious sustainability and AI goals, but what's gonna hold us back? I think those are the more interesting items that when we really talk about these things, what's holding us back from being successful? Is it budget? Is it data access? Is it business restrictions? Is it government restrictions? That's, I think, something that's really, I'd love to see us all as a collective community really dig into that. That's part of the change management and possibility.

Kailey Raymond: Gabie, what is holding us back?

Gabrielle Boko: Oh, I'd love to know. I would love to know. I wish I knew. I think government is hard. I think business is hard. I think, you know what, I'd love us all to share a common language, but I remain hopeful. How about that? I remain hopeful that we can get out of our own way.

Kailey Raymond: Next time we're gonna be speaking Esperanto on this podcast. Do you have any thoughts on, I know we've touched on this like a little bit so far, but if you can paint a more vivid picture, about what the future of AI and customer experience in general might look like? Any things that you're excited about?

Gabrielle Boko: I think, especially with customer experience, it's, we've talked about this just briefly, putting the customer at the center, I think that is the key to really successful AI in both for us and for our customers. Customers appreciate accuracy and relevance. They don't appreciate intrusive actions and predictions. So I think it's really important for us, as we think about our own customer experience, to use AI to refine those interactions, to think about what those targeted use cases or pricing or maybe workload customization. So that's how I like to think about it. How are we listening to the customer and then using AI to go build what they need versus jamming something that we pre-built? Oh, I built this in an AI. Go jam it down your throat. It's important, I think, to leverage AI to meet their expectations, but you can't meet them if you don't know what they are.

Kailey Raymond: Exactly. Like listen to your customer. It's funny. It's like the simplest things often come back. Just need to ground yourself, and oh yes, the center of everything that we do is the customer, and then it gets easier from there. Not saying it's easy and...

Gabrielle Boko: It's not. I think we all put it at, we all say that. I think it's a push. Oh, we have the customer at the center. Well, what does that really mean for you? And how willing are you to commit to that? That's a value here at NetApp that we try to really hone in on. Make it a 10 pole moment for us every day. I just said that to my team actually yesterday. If we don't put the customer at the center of how we're trying to do things, then we might have lost the plot.

Kailey Raymond: Totally. And you used the word intrusive before, which I think is such an accurate feeling as somebody that's receiving some of this messaging from companies that are trying to sell to me. And that is the antithesis of personalization, which is really, I do think what a lot of what we're trying to do is achieve, is that one-to-one feeling of, oh, you understand who I am and my problems uniquely. That's really, really challenging to do. So what do you think is the biggest challenge on our way to building that journey towards a really best in class customer experience?

Gabrielle Boko: I think, first and foremost, that don't try to make it be everything. It has to be the right thing. And I think that's the criticality of using technology to solve challenge. And AI is no different from anywhere else that we've ever been. It's just maybe more exciting right now. Don't make it everything. Make it be the right thing. I go back to how I shop or how I buy or how I engage with everybody else. I don't like perfunctory assumption about who I am or what I'm looking for. I am looking for interactions that are straightforward, that I can see and sense the value, not ones that are presumptive in my next step. So I think customers keeping that is the right thing. It's not in everything.

Gabrielle Boko: And I think also, if you think about that, customers are looking for simplicity. They're looking for simplicity and engagement. I think digital has already elevated that. Adding AI on top of digital allows us to take simplicity to a new level, which is reduction of costs or how to think about content in a really personal way. But that's really the core of what I think a brand's approach, what our NetApp brand, what we're trying to get to. When I think about the heart of our brand message around intelligent data infrastructure, we are empowering our employees to deploy AI, not as a broad spectrum tool to answer everything that our customers are asking, but, again, back to that listening. What do you need to do and how do we then hear you? And then how do we evolve our offerings?

Gabrielle Boko: I was having a conversation with a customer just last week, and one of the things this customer asked me is like, what makes you different? And I said, what makes me different right now is that I'm willing to have a conversation with you about what you need, and before anything else happens, if I don't understand that, then there's no way to to sell you, to solve, to build if we don't understand that. And the conversation went very well because he really opened up and he was like, I have this, I have this. Have you thought about this? I'd love to work on that together. They wanna be heard. Customers want to be heard. Customer experience is the essence of a customer being heard. So, sorry, that was a soapbox, right? But it's got to be the right thing.

Kailey Raymond: It was a beautiful soapbox, though, because I think that the message of it can't be everything, it has to be the right thing is so beautifully said and succinct. And exactly what I think a lot of people get wrong is they try to do everything at once or make sure that they're doing every channel. And they're getting their databases firing off so many emails every week, and the engagement rates are dropping and all this stuff. And it's like, let's take a breath. What do these folks care about? Can we build meaningful segmentations to deliver that right message to the right people at the right time? And if you sit down and you say, I'm listening to you, it all becomes easier.

Gabrielle Boko: Well, and we hope it does, right? At least the effort to listen is there.

Kailey Raymond: Absolutely. And listening can take a lot of different forms, right? So listening can take the form of being in a one-to-one conversation with a customer. And it can also just be listening to those signals that your data is telling you. So you've been in this business for quite a while. I wanna bring us to the namesake of the show, which is, do you have a definition of what good data means to you?

Gabrielle Boko: Oh, yeah. Technically, I would like to say there is no bad data. However, I think that when you really anchor on good data, you're really saying that this is fundamentally good data, but fundamentally understanding having a clear view of what your data is going to be used for, what your goal is. For us at NetApp, it's how to reduce our customers' costs and how to reduce the complexity that they experience. I think that that is how we define it, because that is relevant to what we can provide by listening to them, what's important. I think AI, back to AI, we grapple, a lot of customers grapple with structured and unstructured data. And when you are grappling with that enormity of data, you're not grappling with the data, you're grappling with the use of it 'cause there's so much of it. You can either seek patterns within all of it, or you can really define your objectives and say, I wanna shape the analysis. So no bad data, but there are bad data strategies. So I believe good data is about knowing what you want to accomplish and then aligning that to what you go and do with it.

Kailey Raymond: This is exactly it, which is, you have to define your use case first. If you're just collecting and storing so, so, so much data, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like you don't know what to do with it. It can feel like it can give you any answer that you want it to give you. But if you define it based off of a set of use cases, probably also not too many, by the way, like don't bite off more than you can chew to begin with, then it's going to feel a little bit more clear about what this data can do to you and how you can actually activate it for the outcomes that you're looking for.

Gabrielle Boko: So true. So true.

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Kailey Raymond: I understand that NetApp launched a full brand refresh late last year, and I wanted to just hear from you about what that all entailed and how heavily or not you relied on data as you went through that entire process.

Gabrielle Boko: Yeah, what a humbling process, I think. I think, number one, we decided that, for us, launching a brand had to be commensurate with what we wanted to achieve, and that was, we felt that we had lost our way a little bit. We felt that we had tried to jam too many ideas and too many concepts into something that we wanted the market to grab onto. So to start from that place of something's wrong means that you have to start with data. You have to deeply inform that process with insights from your customers, from our partners who are in this with us every single day, our employees who also were like, something's wrong. But it's also been heavily informed by people who are not our customers, people who are on the edge of knowing us or knowing parts of us and kind of saying, we don't understand either.

Gabrielle Boko: So it wasn't a campaign of sorts. We definitely threw some creative in there, but it was, at its core, a comprehensive understanding of who we were, what we were going to do to the market for our customers, and really then centering on those foundational values. What we took then out of that data, which was, again, extensive and took us quite a lot of time, we went back several times, we asked a question to a set of audiences, and then we tweaked it. And then we went back and we asked again, I think we did that three or four times. And then we liked it so much. We said, we're gonna now shape our narrative. And now we wanna go take the same narrative and test it with all those same audience and say, okay, we heard you. Did we meet something here?

Gabrielle Boko: What all of that work got to was, we needed to reframe who we were. That's where we anchored on being the intelligent data infrastructure company. And I really think that this is a concept that allows us to extend beyond what we traditionally would just call storage and into talking about broader infrastructure possibilities in the cloud, to talk about intelligence and maybe not just AI wash ourselves, but to really kind of go deep in terms of what intelligence does to innovation and to enhancing that conversation around the future. But you'll notice, at the center of that, intelligence and infrastructure, the core of those three terms is data. It is. It just has to be. We believe that data is something that we're still working towards. We have data management principles and it's how we think about it, but it's the core of everything we do because that is what we are committed to for all of our customers.

Gabrielle Boko: So, I think what this has given us is a landing zone that feels authentic for us, not just from the past, but also for the future. It gives us ways to expand and have conversations that are more relevant. And we're really excited by how people are reacting to it and how they're saying, I need more, tell me more, and how many other stories we're able to kind of tap into it and execute in motion. So, it's very exciting. I geek out on it a little bit, but it's exciting.

Kailey Raymond: One of the points you just made, which is really interesting, I think, is, well, first, you use the term AI wash, which I love because I haven't heard that yet. I know greenwashing, of course, was something that is still very big, but certainly came into trend in the past five or so years. But AI wash is such a specific and spot-on term for what's happening in the industry. So the choice to use intelligent to be more expansive and to feel more authentic, which is another thing that really resonated with me about your approach to this and building authenticity with your customers and your partners and making sure it really resonates back to them, is just so interesting.

Kailey Raymond: And one of the things I wanted to learn from you is like, this takes a lot of investment as well. And you probably need to like sway some people who might not have the same opinion or might be founded in a little bit of a different era than you and might like the direction of their current messaging or brand. And so, I'm wondering how you use a lot of the data that you were collecting over time to influence that leadership and probably the board, I would imagine, is somebody who might need to go through an entire brand refresh to make that significant investment to make sure that you are having this resonate with people.

Gabrielle Boko: I am extremely lucky. I think by the time I got into this chair, everybody was ready. They're like, yes. We're ready. From the board to the C level, to the next level down, to our partners, everybody was like, I asked, I did a poll of everybody. I was like, what do you want me to focus on? Brand was like the very first thing. So I was extremely lucky that mentally, everybody was there. And I think what we've... That's why I said, we spent a lot of time just saying, this is what we're seeing. This is what we're seeing. This is what we're building. And so what we constantly shared, and we did this over the course of nine months, and we're still doing it. I'm still talking to partners and listening and taking feedback and saying, how do we build this? Talking to analysts, what do we adjust?

Gabrielle Boko: Every time we go into something, we say, here's what we've decided, we think. Here's what the data is telling us. What do you all, tell me how these two things connect? So I think we're still using it. That's how we're even talking about how we name our products now. We're talking about what's the articulation of some of our core portfolio values? What's the articulation of some of our core HR values? So we're continuing to use that base of information and data to just have everybody link into it. And it's really, it's very exciting. I won't say that cost-wise this was... This is a choice, for sure. But I think the harder choice is to say, how do we manage change? And how do we get everybody on board? And the only way to do that is by sharing what we found, sharing the work, and then having people feedback on both.

Kailey Raymond: And to be able to say, this is what we think it's gonna be and give that suggestion, I think is a really key part of this process that we should talk about for a second, because decision by committee is probably one of the killers of great creative and great brand.

Gabrielle Boko: It's so true. It's so true. I will say that there was a point in time, I think it was like June of last year, my CEO called me and he's like, "Enough." He's like, "We've heard. Can you and I just sit here and just work this?" And we spent like four or five hours on the phone over the next couple of days and we workshopped it together because it was, we were having a hard time just kind of taking all the feedback in. That is why I said, I'm so lucky, right? When you have a boss and an executive team was like willing to just say, nope, enough, let's get rid of everything. Let's focus. Let's make decisions. After we were done, he brought in key leaders inside our company and said, this is what we're deciding. Let's argue it out right here. But once we decide, it's done. So it's hard. You're right. Decision by committee is hard, but when you all kind of get on board and you have somebody to help you make people get on board, it's really easy. It's shocking how easy it is. But what comes out of is everybody knows you're committed to hearing them and everybody knows you're committed to making a decision. And if you get those two things right, then it, knock on wood, it works.

Kailey Raymond: It's shocking how easy it is, says the woman who spent nine months doing and preparing it.

Gabrielle Boko: I know. I know. But it was. I've relived these conversations in my head and I've done this at a couple of other companies, and in both of those companies, the buy-in is the hugest part. And it may take a long time, but I think it's great because it brings everybody along. That's really the conversation. And honestly, I mean, I've been in a spot too, where I've gone off and I've put things out there and it's like completely bombed or people didn't buy into it. I wanted to do it the right way this time. I think NetApp deserved it. And I think that that's what made this not revolutionary, but it was more about precision and clarity and simplicity. And that's what we needed, and I was committed to doing that.

Kailey Raymond: That's great. I really do like the through line of this conversation being simplicity. It's something that I've heard from you time and time again, and I think is really important to just continue to remind yourself of, is like great ideas, great customer experience can and very likely should be or at least feel simple to the customer. And so trying to do that to the best of your ability is really just something to take away, a little nugget. I'm wondering, you mentioned you're still talking to partners, you're still talking to customers. What data are you still capturing now today that you're kind of continuing with this awareness campaign, this trust, like this brand? Are there any things that you're still just continuing to capture and monitor? And what are those things?

Gabrielle Boko: Yeah. Well, what we've noticed is that since we've launched it, we've seen a 20% increase in just consideration, which if you think about the brand funnel, there's familiarity, awareness and consideration. What we love about that is that what that's meaning is that people are internalizing it. So what we wanted to build around there is, don't just drop all the debt all the money in the familiarity bucket, even though we're doing that as well. But how do we build on that consideration? Well, you do that by saying, what other messages are gonna align with our portfolio? What is aligning to those customer interests that can change our portfolio? Are there buying patterns that we need to take in? So we really see those top elements of what we offer in our portfolio as matching really the top considerations for our customers and then matching back to how the evolution of this brand architecture evolves.

Gabrielle Boko: Data infrastructure has at least three or four consistencies across a variety of companies in our space, and actually most companies, and what we're really excited about is that we're seeing awareness of those ideas. Like we want a cloud connectivity here. We want someone who's thinking about intelligence. We want somebody who thinks about integration of data across a landscape and data infrastructure. Those align with what we're doing, but we're also taking those and say, okay, tell me a little bit more so we can go one step deeper and really kind of authentically, again, say, all right, how do we grow consideration? How does that change how we are building or making offerings? How does that change maybe how we're pricing, how we're naming? So we're really taking it, I would say, to the next second and third level to be able to really go deeper and understand that.

Kailey Raymond: That's interesting. And one of the things that I think you're making the distinction between right now is a lot of companies, I think, spend a whole lot of time in this space of demand capture. Fill out this form. Do you want a demo? That kind of thing. But what you're doing right now is demand creation, making sure that you're really having folks invest in the thought leadership, the idea of intelligence, of making sure that you're telling the story that resonates back to them. And a really in the weeds question, if you will, but when you're saying you're seeing a 20% increase in consideration, did you develop like an account funnel for this as well, of like account intent and an ABM kind of style approach to this?

Gabrielle Boko: I think we started really high and just did a basic brand funnel. But what we discovered, and that's really coming in our next six months, is there is so much continuity between that element and into our product and our buying model that we wanted to go deeper there. That's what we ended up doing. It's also funny. You mentioned that we're going into demand. Coming out of the first set of data that we got back on this, I reframed part of my team to not be just brand, but to think about brand as strategic demand, and what that really allows us to do strategically with good ideas around data infrastructure, with strong ideas around thought leadership, or with what those ideas coming from, let's say, AI or cloud or even just pure data infrastructure is telling us about our own demand funnel.

Gabrielle Boko: So strategic demand is how we are really leaning into our brand is going to be big. Our brand is going to influence how we do strategic demand. We need to think about those things as one in the same so that we can influence the rest of the funnel and say, how do we, as we talked about, the ABM funnel, the targeting funnel, the product funnel, the pipeline, how do we start to influence that more in a more connected way versus this is the brand and then this is demand? So those were kind of some of the thought things that in the first round, we said, there's goodness here if we connect them and if we think about them as a single motion. And the only way to do that is by a single funnel, quite frankly.

Kailey Raymond: This is really interesting. I really like this approach because they are really connected. Oftentimes they have incredibly different metrics that you're assessing them by, but they really all are in service of the same outcome, which is more revenue, accelerating sales, all those things that we like to measure from a B2B perspective. And one of the things that we're thinking about in the way that we kind of articulate this to leadership, who is so familiar with MQL to QL conversion and all the kind of things that we typically talk about. But when we talk about awareness, when we talk about impressions and views and all these things, it's a little bit fuzzier, but the halo effect, that air cover, that something like this would be able to produce is more of an effect on conversion. And it's more of an effect on sales confidence even, you know?

Gabrielle Boko: Absolutely is, and that's why we reframed it as strategic demand. Market perception is the hallmark of determining strategic demand. If you don't understand who you are in the market, as perceived by your customers and partners, then there's no amount of demand gen that can be connected to that to fix it. So that market perception is a strategic demand moment for sure.

Kailey Raymond: Say that, love that. Yes, that's great. I'm wondering if there's anything that surprised you when you were looking at all of this information and data you were collecting around this refresh. There's 20% increase in the consideration phase. Are there any other differences or changes in the way that you're hearing NetApp being perceived that you wanted to shout out?

Gabrielle Boko: I think the only one, and this is like the bane of a marketer, the marketer's existence. It's like, how come I have such strong consideration? How come my brand is consistently outperforming my competitors in certain parts of our customer selection, but nobody is recognizing who I am up at the top? So, I think what we've really leaned into is, again, is how important is familiarity to us? It's got to be important in terms of acquiring new customers, or we would call in the business net new logos. But how are we thinking about that helping us, that familiarity helping us? That's that market perception motion. That's why we wanted to connect it to strategic demand. Again, not trying to solve the whole familiarity problem, but trying to solve one thing, one component of it that says, what's that contrast that I'm seen by somebody who wants to consider me and somebody who has a perception that I need to fix.

Gabrielle Boko: So that's a big gap for us. But it's also, I would say, it's not a negative. I mean, I think when I talk to my team, we say, this is an opportunity, and it's an opportunity to solve really, really specifically something that can really roll down through the funnel and make us even more successful. So, I'm excited for what that looks like. I'm not saying I have an answer for it yet, but it's frustrating and it's exciting. And it's like, oh, that's one thing I really would like to solve, but the data showed us and it's, yeah, it's work to do, right?

Kailey Raymond: It's always, right? I mean, I think that's one of the exciting things about the industry that we work in, is, this year is different than last, it's different than next. And the things that worked are no longer gonna work. And you got vice versa. Like sometimes things that were 10 years ago will work today again. And so, you just constantly have to refresh, repeat, test, try, and have that culture of being able to test stuff out, see if it works.

Gabrielle Boko: Isn't that wild? I'm gonna give you a squirrel moment, right? Isn't it wild that pre-COVID stuff that did work didn't work during the COVID era. And now we're coming out of the COVID era and saying some of that stuff works again. I love that kind of environment. What's old is new, but it's a new twist, right? AI makes it better. I love that about my job. I think that's so exciting. Sorry.

Kailey Raymond: 100%. It's so true. And any AI marketer or any marketer that you're interviewing over the past year or so will say, oh, what's the most challenging thing that you've been through? What works today that didn't work yesterday? It's always events. It's always talking about how something didn't work during the COVID era, that kind of thing. But what's really interesting, and I think that the thing that I'm finding is community. So community was this thing that I think was a really big hot topic. Maybe 2012, 2013, there were a ton of different community startups. And now one of the things that's happening is, media companies are basically little communities and they're all getting bought up by SaaS companies. It's basically the same concept, but it's happening now, you know?

Gabrielle Boko: It's so accurate. And you know what I think that is? That's also a tightening of what digital can be. Again, digital was like AI. Came in, everything is digital. Everything has to be this, it has to be that. Digital has now shortened, it's tightened up. And it said, how is it enabling other functions like community, right? Instead of just making it a whole big swath, it's, what are the core user experiences that make digital a smart asset to be used? So I agree with you. I think those are two really great examples of what was before has now tightened up and gotten actually better and different coming out into this and actually probably more successful.

Kailey Raymond: You know, marketing is like fashion in that way.

Gabrielle Boko: Right? Yes. 100%.

Kailey Raymond: What's old is new again, but hopefully better. I'm gonna have one last question for you. I wanna learn about what you're looking towards on the horizon. Anything that you're looking towards in customer data, in marketing, over the next six, 12 or more months, trends that you're on the lookout for as it relates to just building great customer experiences?

Gabrielle Boko: Honestly, there's two things, and they are two things that I'm pretty excited about. The first one is, we've integrated NetApp's customer experience CX team with the marketing team. I love that. Again, back to putting the customer at the center. But it's also a data alignment in terms of what are we talking about? Who are we talking to? What's their feedback? And establishing a single unified customer journey. I mean, that to me is critical to really enhancing all of these things that we've talked about, our data strategy, our AI strategy, our cloud strategy, our brand strategy. Customer touchpoints and feedback unified in one place is gonna really help.

Gabrielle Boko: I also think that what I'm also very excited about, and I alluded to at least one of those pieces, our AI study. We also do a cloud complexity story. We do a data infrastructure story. We're doing a lot more with our data because we have a lot of data, and we're doing a lot more partnership on sharing that data. I think that when you contain all of the knowledge that you know and you aren't sharing it in maybe a data forward profile, then you're missing the opportunity to share ideas industry-wide. So we're really leaning into thought leadership that is based on key surveys and data that we own, data that is shared and data that we go out and conduct with partners together. So I'm excited about those two things because they are core to what we're really trying to do, improve that brand familiarity, but also improve marketing and our contribution back to the company.

Kailey Raymond: This first one... Well, both of these. The way that I love to orient demand, integrated marketing, all of these teams is around these tentpole thought leadership moments. They're all anchored on data reports, always. I think that being able to propel yourself as a thought leader in an industry, no better way to make sure you're providing value back to your end users. But this insight around basically it not ending at the MQL, which, for me, to be marketers, I think, first of all, let's not even say MQL. Like MQL should be a four letter word at this point. It's just done. But being able to really integrate the whole customer journey and making sure that marketing doesn't stop when that funnel and that handoff happens. Because when you really think about marketing, it can be a circle and it can be this beautiful little feedback loop that you're creating between the customer and the prospect and it's feeding itself.

Gabrielle Boko: Great.

Kailey Raymond: Well, Gabie, this has been really great. You have been a wealth of information and really just an inspiration around going back to simplicity and back to the customer. So I really appreciate you being here.

Gabrielle Boko: Thank you, Kailey. I've had a good time. We should do it again.

Kailey Raymond: I'd love to.

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