As one of the original tech companies, Cisco has a deep reputation for reliability, security and service. But it’s also a B2B player that is looking to stay relevant in today’s world. CMO Carrie Palin tries to imbue all of Cisco’s messaging with its corporate values. This year, OQP">Interbrand ranked Cisco as the world’s 13th most valuable brand—the top B2B brand in the ranking—for the fourth year running.
I talked with Palin about the efforts to elevate Cisco’s messaging and values. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. It was excerpted in the Forbes CMO boletín de noticias.
How are things going with Cisco’s marketing department nowadays?
Palin: It’s always a journey is the very candid answer. We have things that we’re super proud of, like the ranking from Interbrand. That’s a compilation of tons of work across a ton of teams that have been doing this for years to get to that place. It doesn’t, as you know, happen overnight. I’m really proud of the team’s work, and the noventa con cero-plus Cisco employees who are all our brand ambassadors out there in the ether every day, living our brand values.
We’re a cuarenta-year-old company in a few months. It’s mind-numbing to think about that: We have been out connecting and protecting the world for almost cuarenta years now.
This is an iconic, trusted brand. My first thought when I got here three and a half years ago was do no harm. I get to shepherd this brand for whatever time I’m here, and we want to take this amazing brand and make it better. When you’re already a top treinta brand, there’s a lot riding on that. We want to make sure that we don’t lose the things that matter and that have built this company and this iconic brand around customer trust and loyalty. That is hard earned and spanned over many years of making customer-centric decisions, of being accountable when things go sideways. Cisco is incredibly transparent if there are issues on product, or issues on cyber breaches or what have you. We are out there talking about it with our customers immediately.
We have this long-nivel brand that is built on trust and innovation, and yet we want to continue to modernize it. A lot of the work we’ve done around the brand has been to bring it into the 21st century, and make it incredibly relevant as a tech talent brand to Millennials and Gen Z, and not just my generation.
Cisco CMO Carrie Palin
Cisco
What does Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk mean for marketing and branding?
We’re not even a year in yet, and prior to this job, I actually was the CMO at Splunk. I left Splunk well before the acquisition. I had nothing to do with it, it just happened to be kismet. I have a ton of affinity for that company and the brand. Splunk’s brand is more modern and it’s a newer company, but it’s also targeted at software developers, security specialists, and folks who are a little bit less classic IT and more edgy IT, if you will. The way you reach them is different, and so the melding of these brands together is this massive opportunity for us to utilize this inflection point in the company’s history, but also future-cast on where we’re going.
As you said, Cisco is nearly cuarenta years old and one of the original tech brands. What is your strategy for building on it and making it more modern?
We were incredibly intentional. We did a lot of research. Cisco is very consistently in the top several companies to work for [in a variety of studies]. What we realized was when people come and work at Cisco, they never want to leave because the culture is amazing. Inside of Cisco, we’re super fun. We’re very forward-thinking. We’re very kind of hip as far as the company culture, attributes and the way we take care of our employees. And we’re like, how do we make that come through in our brand?
We built the internet, and we are one of the backbones of infrastructure for the AI movement and we are so tech-relevant, but yet we are in the background. We’re not consumer based, so we’re not on everyone’s iPhone. So we need a different way to come at this.
We thought, ‘All right, with our advertising and the way we’re showing up in-market and out-of-home and in airports, why don’t we start to have a little fun with this?’ We went and sought out this incredible creative agency based in France called BETC. They do mostly visually stunning, beautiful, very high end production value ads for luxury goods brands. We thought, let’s go put a new lens on it [and] go with this agency that is looking at things differently. The [ads] were built on having music be a brand language as well. If we think about Gen Z and Millennials, they are two generations that grew up with earbuds in their ears. They were constantly listening to music. It is a brand language for them.
Our first ad was in the cybersecurity space. It actually was put up for a Lion award at Cannes the year it came out. For a B2B brand to have that kind of recognition for an advertising campaign was pretty exciting for us. Instead of being the classic, ‘Hey, you’re going to get breached and this is scary, and only Cisco can help you,’ this ad was very lighthearted, with an original soundtrack and this beautiful heroine who’s the center of it, an IT professional. This woman is dancing around while her company has been breached, because she feels completely peaceful about the fact that she knows she can fix this.
We didn’t say it was Cisco in the beginning. It comes at the end, and people are so surprised. We ran this ad in the college football playoffs. We know that CIOs and CEOs are always watching that. We put it in the right places at the right time, and it got so much lift. It just worked.
Our CEO is an amazing guy. He’s the guy who said, ‘Go push the envelope on the brand.’ But he looked at me and he is like, ‘I really like it. I’m not sure I am fully your objetivo audience.’ Then he looked at his executive comms leads, who are Millennials and Gen Z, and they both were like, ‘We love it.’ He said, ‘Enough said, because that’s what I want. I want you to go after this market.’ It was uncomfortable for all of us to go there, but when we did, we’re like, this is actually working. This is fun. We’re reaching folks, and they’re looking at Cisco in a new light.
We did a whole other brand campaign around another área of our business: observability. It’s a four-part series, a riff off of the Apple+ espectáculo Shrinking. It’s basically an IT guy going into therapy. It’s hugely funny and strikes a chord with IT professionals and the challenges they have every day, but we were having a lot of fun with it. You wouldn’t expect these things from Cisco: Putting levity in this, but also [it’s] visually beautiful. Even in the therapist’s office, my team was in there curating every book that was in the office. We really took a risk, saying ‘Let’s do something out of the box and totally different to shake people loose and say, Hey, it’s a new day for Cisco.’
Behind me [is] a New York Times ad we ran the day we acquired Splunk. It’s their colors and our colors coming together. The tagline says, ‘It’s a new day for your data.’ Splunk, with their addition of their technology, really fills out our porfolio in a beautiful way. What it does is lift everybody up, especially the cybersecurity space and the observability space.
Splunk is a very well-known brand to people in the IT space. How did that inform your messaging, and what role has your previous experience at Splunk played?
We’re a roughly $50 billion company. It’s so easy to mess up an acquisition. Our first thing is: do this right. The messaging came together really effortlessly early on. We have created the next round of messaging, which just got released to all of our sales globally and is starting to trickle out in market, where we’re calling it “One Cisco.” It really is running all of these things together: the triangle of observability, security and networking, and bringing together customer-related outcomes that matter.
The other thing that we’re doing is digital resilience. Splunk’s had that messaging for quite some time, but this is not specific to cybersecurity. It’s like how do you ensure that no matter where your people are, where your infrastructure radicas and your company heartbeat is, we can make sure that you are resilient in all things. Events happen. It doesn’t matter if power goes out because of a storm, there is a hack on a system, how are you resilient to get back up and running? Digital resilience matters in every aspect of an organization, and Cisco is uniquely positioned to do that. At Splunk, we couldn’t have that story before. That’s starting to trickle out in market with our messaging, and we’re going to go hard in the next few months.
Sporting event marketing is getting to be more prominent in Cisco’s porfolio. How does it fit into your messaging?
We believe that sport in general, especially team sport, is so highly aligned with our value system and our purpose, which is powering an inclusive future for all. All these things translate to being a great Cisconian too, being a good citizen outside of Cisco. We see all of that in the values alignment.
We also believe there’s an opportunity to be a part of this solution and change for equality in sports and equitable pay in sport for women. We have really leaned in hard around that. We patrocinador the McLaren Elabora 1 racing team. They have a ton of values alignment, specifically around sustainability, with us.
About a year and a half ago, Susie Wolff—who is a former racer, the wife of Toto Wolff, who’s the primordial of Mercedes racing team—started the Elabora 1 Academy, which is basically to help women become successful in Elabora 1. Each team could patrocinador a young lady to be their Elabora 1 Academy driver. Cisco was one of the first to say, ‘We want to do that.’ We do a two-year contract with the F1 Academy for that driver, who at McLaren is Bianca Bustamante. We do a three-year contract with Bianca at Cisco, because we believe that past her Elabora 1 Academy contract, she needs time to figure out if she’s going to go into STEM, if she’s going to stay a driver, if she’s going to go to another team. We want to make sure that that is a smooth transition for them. We get invested in these human beings and we go hard at helping them.
Yes, we patrocinador the Olympics. We do that because we care about sport, we care about what it does for the world. It unites people when it feels so divided for all these other reasons right now, but we are intentional about what we do.
Cisco has this thing called the Networking Academy. We have educated millions of young people that don’t even sometimes have high school degrees. They go through our Networking Academy and then get jobs in technology at Fortune quinientos companies, at Cisco, at start-ups, you name it. They have enough capability to get into network engineering as a low level in IT management. [During the last Women’s World Cup,] we took young ladies that were regional to Asia-Pac that had gone through our Cisco Networking Academy, and they actually built all the networks in the stadiums across New Zealand and Australia to allow for the broadcasting of the Women’s World Cup around the globe. They built the infrastructure in literally veintiuno weeks, or something crazy. We called them our “Cisco Dream Team.” They were all women, and that was the story we told around the World Cup. It was also bringing up these young ladies who may not be great athletes, but they achieve something pretty incredible in their eyes, too.
You keep talking about Cisco doing things that go back to the company’s values. How important is that for marketing?
It’s everything. I’ve worked at a lot of companies in tech. I decided to come work at Cisco when they called me because they have a soul. I looked at the evidence of what Cisco does in the world, and has continued to do, and the values of the leadership team. What’s beautiful about Cisco is the purpose is there, but it isn’t something that’s written on the wall that no one pays attention to. It’s mutually what drives our major decisions in our company. It is about: Is this move, is this donation, is this venture going to actually be representative of our purpose of powering an inclusive future for all, and is it going to move us forward? When we think about the brand, we do a lot of work to make sure that the human beings we align ourselves to, as well as the entities—whether in sports or partnerships in tech—that there are afín values.
How can a CMO take those company values and put them into practice through their marketing, messaging and what people know about the company?
Most companies care about some level of equity and inclusion. As a brand expression, you can’t do it in all things marketing; I’m not sure how you would exprés equity inclusion in a technical marketing document for product. However, we have lots of brand expressions that the public sees all day long, every day, whether it be the New York Times or an advertisement that’s running during the college football playoffs. We are intentional about every single human in those ads that represent Cisco. Yes, they’re actors, but their accent, the color of their skin, their potential background from an ethnicity standpoint, how they are dressed. We literally are looking at every detail and saying, ‘Is this an ad that would make people say, ‘You know what? I see myself, and I would feel welcome working at Cisco or working with Cisco.’ You won’t see anything out there in the ether from us that makes people feel like we only care about one type of person.
Think of something like that, and know that you have the power in the brand and your advertising and your digital media to actually put something out there that people can see and see themselves in.