The Moment We Discovered We Weren’t Event Planners but Experiential Marketers (part 2)
When you work at a startup, you end up wearing many hats because there are not enough people for all the work that needs to get done. Even as HashiCorp has grown to over 250 employees, the Marketing group continues to operate with a small team and on a lean budget. We always joked that we were the #getshitdone crew and that hashtag eventually became one of the guiding principles that define us. The Experiential team at HashiCorp is responsible for global brand experiences (HashiConf, HashiDays, more to come), internal vibe + culture events, experiential + spatial design, webinar program, social media, parts of community building (ex. HUGs), HashiSwag, regional marketing, trade shows, and anything else the company needs help with.
Due to the lean nature of the HashiCorp Marketing group, our team has never had much assistance or large budgets, so we try to figure things out for ourselves, and we seek to do them differently. This is how the next three guiding principles of On Brand, “Yes” Attitude, and Desire to Learn evolved. The projects we get the privilege of working on and the teams we collaborate with gives us a deep understanding of the HashiCorp brand, the HashiCorp voice, and our community. Here are some examples that led to the discovery that we aren’t event planners; instead we are experiential marketers focused on the HashiCorp brand experience.
* My goals with this blog post and future blog posts I publish are to give the reader inspiration and ideas they can take back to their teams. If you ever want to brainstorm, DM me on Twitter at @janaboruta.
HashiCorp Brand
Before Cris Dobbins started working with the Experiential team in early 2016, HashiCorp had one insanely talented designer, Jonathan Thomas who managed design for all of our OSS tools. That’s absolutely crazy to think back on. Event design was low on the totem pole compared to product design and making sure we had a well designed highly-optimized corporate site and OSS sites. We never had much design support, but we had stringent deadlines for launching conference sites, launching new pages tied to promotional plans, designing booths and collateral for trade shows, sending design files to the printers six weeks in advance of an event, so we hired our own designers to support our team. We spent years studying the HashiCorp brand guide until it became second nature to us.
Over the years, our team has proven that we have a deep understanding of the HashiCorp brand. Due to the trust we built, the HashiCorp founders and head of marketing have given us the freedom to play and to continue pushing the brand forward. Our team has become responsible for all print, spatial, and experiential design. This year, we launched a couple of highly visible campaigns that resonated well with the community including Core Contributors Care Packs, Pride campaign, HashiDays Live, and HashiDays Amsterdam. Let me dive into those brand experiences and our thought process behind them.
Core Contributors Care Packs
At HashiCorp, we are cautious about the things we spend money on. You will never see us giving out a million shirts or random swag items. When we decide to do something, it’s because we have carefully thought it through and believe it’s the right thing to do for the company and the community.
We were discussing the need to give thanks to all the folks that have graciously contributed to our OSS tools over the years. We wanted to send them something to show our appreciation, so we enlisted the help of our engineering organization to identify our most significant OSS core contributors.
We came up with the idea of sending what we called care packs. We designed a high-quality box with the core contributor logo on the cover and a simple note of “Thank you.” on the inside of the lid. Inside the box was a personalized thank you note written by our founders, a golden ticket (gold paper) that had a complimentary code to both of our conferences, and a limited edition t-shirt. The shirts highlighted the product logo they are a contributor for.
We sent 42 core contributor care packs worldwide. People seemed genuinely happy to receive them. We ended up seeing six of our OSS contributors wearing these shirts at HashiDays Amsterdam last month. People started to perceive these shirts as collector items, and they want to collect all of them, which means contributing to our OSS tools. We are planning to send these care packs out annually.
Pride Campaign
Last January, Paddy Carver, HashiCorp Terraform engineer reached out to my team about designing a Pride logo. This wasn’t going to be considered official HashiSwag, and he was going to print them himself as a one-time thing.
One challenge with designing a Pride logo using HashiCorp icon was we aren’t technically allowed to modify it. “Our corporate color palette consists of black, white and colors representing each of our products. The HashiCorp logo should be white when using product colors as the background” (Brand Guide). Pride colors aren’t approved colors we are allowed to use in our designs. The first design we presented to Paddy was a design that didn’t stray too far from the brand guide, but Paddy pushed back saying the gradient-edges of each color is supposed to be a clean, solid line.
“The top one looks _amazing_, and I really appreciate the super quick turnaround.” Paddy said. “I also hate to be a pain, but the only issue it has is it left out “sunlight” (yellow) and added “magic/art” (light blue) back, which hasn’t really been used since 1979. That’s literally the only edit I would make.”
According to Paddy, we were close but not quite there yet. What do you do in a situation like this? Do you say no because it doesn’t fit the brand guide? Or do you design it because it’s the right thing to do and it fits the company’s principles and core values?
After doing a lot of research, we discovered that companies are moving towards being more flexible with their brands. They are doing this so they can respond and adapt quickly to their communities and be culturally relevant. We are seeing this happen across all different sized companies even big corporations like Apple, Coca-Cola, and Nike that have immensely defined brands. This is what we are trying to do at HashiCorp.
“The old model of branding could “lock and load” the brand, assuming full control over what it was and the risks it represented. The new brand has to take on risk and the marketer must surrender control. This looks a horrifying until one realizing there is no place of safety. Sticking with the old branding is the path to irrelevance and tedium…and the effective death of the brand.” -McCracken, Grant. (August 30, 2012). “The Logic Breathing Life into Oreo’s New Branding”
In the spirit of love, we sent Paddy the Pride logo the way he wanted it designed.
The HashiCorp Pride sticker has become our most popular sticker. It’s the first sticker we run out of at events. People have even asked us to add it to our official brand guide.
Through moments like this, we discover that it’s ok for our brand to be flexible and adaptable for certain situations. We can’t say no when an organic experience presents itself. It’s absolutely essential for us to be self-aware so we can continue to connect and grow with our community. If what we put out to the community is authentic and genuine people will feel that.
This year, for Pride month we launched the campaign “For Everyone, Everywhere” because we (HashiCorp) genuinely believe we are a company and community for everyone, everywhere. This message was well received by our community and got a lot of praise on Twitter. Again, because the message was authentic to our brand, it resonated with people.
Right now our Pride shirts are only available to HashiCorp employees, but we are working on a plan to make these shirts available to our community. Fingers crossed that we will be able to relaunch the HashiCorp Shop this year.
HashiDays Live
HashiDays Live evolved from a need to figure out how to extend the reach of our upcoming European event. HashiDays Amsterdam sold out two weeks before the event. The venue allowed us to have enough seating for 350 people and we had already sold 400 tickets. Yikes! We reluctantly closed registration, which resulted in an ever-growing waitlist.
How do you deny your community access to an event they want to attend? You can’t! My team quickly jumped on a Zoom call to figure out a solution. Someone suggested the idea of live streaming all of the talks, which was a great solution. Our primary concern with announcing a free live stream so close to the actual event was it would upset folks that already bought tickets. The idea of a paid live stream was thrown around. A paid live stream would solve the issue of letting people watch the talks live in real-time, but the idea was still missing the community aspect.
There are a couple of main reasons why people attend HashiCorp events. They go to learn from the presenters, to connect with other attendees who are trying to solve similar technical challenges and get access to HashiCorp’s technical staff. The next morning, halfway through my hip hop yoga class, a light bulb went off. What if we offered some type of chat feature for conference attendees and virtual attendees to communicate through. This would enable folks watching the live stream from home to ask questions and feel like they are a part of the event. That was the missing piece! From there the idea of HashiDays Live came to fruition. The whole process from idea to publicly launching the program took our team 12 hours to execute on.
We had over 300 views of our live stream over two days. The HashiDays Slack organization was full of chatter and energy. We saw in real-time people connecting, asking questions, and helping each other. Due to this experience, we are going to offer one-week duration (temporary) event-specific Slack organizations for all of our events moving forward.
HashiDays Amsterdam
I believe HashiDays Amsterdam was our most successful brand experience that my team has organized. I know that’s a bold statement because we have organized some really incredible experiences like HashiConf 2016 in Napa, CA, but there are a couple of key elements that made this one stand out. I’m already working on a retrospective that I will publish next week.
HashiCorp Voice
The HashiCorp writing style and voice were defined early on by the HashiCorp founders and some of our early employees Seth Vargo, Kevin Fishner, and Jack Pearkes. We believed that if we were consistent across the company in our communication style, it would make our brand strong and vibrant. Seth wrote a HashiCorp Engineering Writing Style Guide that is still referenced today by most teams.
My team never had the privilege of being able to leverage a copywriter, social media manager, or an email marketer, so we had to very quickly master the HashiCorp voice along with how our community wanted to be communicated with. The team learned how to use the different communication tools like Intercom, Sendgrid, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Buffer. We write our own website copy, draft promotional email campaigns, send follow-up emails, communicate freely on our social media accounts, and continue to assist/edit every email the Marketing team sends out. This isn’t an ideal situation, but this type of work continues to strength our understanding of the HashiCorp brand.
One day, over a glass of champagne, I will tell you about my deep disdain for marketing jargon, mindless sentences that no one in the real world would say, and communication that forgets an actual human will have to read it. Don’t even get me started on countdown timers, leaderboards, intrusive pop-up windows, flashy websites, and other traditional marketing tactics! While writing that last sentence, my blood began to boil. The cause could have be the third cup of coffee I just finished at Café Lounge, a cute coffee shop with decent WiFi in Prague, Czech Republic.
HashiCorp Community
My team along with our Developer Advocates have the opportunity to interact most with the HashiCorp community. We attend every conference, training, workshop, meetup, customer dinner/reception, and any other type of experience we organize. We watch, listen, and gauge how our community responds to the things we create. My team will admit that the favorite part of our jobs is seeing how people feel and interact with our brand experiences. Over the years, this close connection has helped us craft and deliver on experiences that the community responds well to and finds value in.
We believe as experiential marketers that it’s our job to create a closer emotional connection between HashiCorp and our community through various brand experiences like the ones I covered above. We want our community to form strong relationships with our brand and the products we build. This connection fosters brand advocates, increases customer loyalty, establishes trust and credibility, and opens up channels for valuable feedback. We try to do this in an authentic and genuine way.
We may have stumbled upon the discovery that we are experiential marketers, but it’s now clear to us what our path is moving forward. Using the knowledge we have gained about the HashiCorp Brand, the voice, and our community, we will continue delivering memorable brand experiences that deepen HashiCorp’s relationship with its community.
