Jesse Purewal is a builder who helped grow Prophet from boutique brand agency to global marketing consultancy and established the firm’s Brand Relevance Index. He led the teams that launched transformative brands like T-Mobile’s Uncarrier, Intel’s Amazing, Amazon’s Amazon Business, and The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. His leadership helped reposition Zebra Technologies as an IoT-enabled edge computing company, Quad as a marketing solutions provider, and Qualtrics as the platform for breakthrough experiences. Earlier in his career, he helped establish Starbucks’ current whole bean coffee portfolio and launched education pioneer Admissions Academy.
Jesse’s experience helping Qualtrics define its brand was so powerful that he joined the company in 2020 as SVP of Global Brand, serving incredible teams across brand strategy, insights, content, creative, and events, including the company’s signature X4 event series. He also helped launch the XM+ content platform and created and executive-produced the Breakthrough Builders podcast.
In early 2023, Jesse brought the business acumen, brand mojo, and leadership ethos he developed in his consulting and in-house roles to his next role as VP, Brand & Marketing at PagerDuty. At PagerDuty, Jesse leads and serves the teams that pull the PagerDuty business and brand forward through corporate events, executive experiences/EBCs, brand strategy, content, and creative.
Jesse is a storyteller and brand builder whose empathy, curiosity, and wit empower people to tell their own stories in inspiring and compelling ways. He has a penchant for rigorously and intuitively blending customer insights with creative ideas to build inspiring, compelling brands and experiences that make sense to the mind and resonate with the heart.
Jesse’s purpose is to help leaders lead. He has served boards, CEOs, CMOs, and the Marketing and Communications organizations of tech hyperscalers and startups alike to build relevant brands and engaging experiences that make a difference to clients’ businesses and put a dent in the world. Jesse is deep in high tech, with particular experience in SaaS, cloud platforms and services, IoT, security, collaboration, and telco. His key domain expertise areas are brand strategy, customer analytics, content strategy, brand communications, event strategy & execution, customer marketing, CX, verbal and visual identity, and marketing organization design.
Despite (or because of?) his upbringing in the shadow of Detroit in the 1980s, Jesse acquired precisely zero interest in the automotive industry. The five moments that mattered most in his early life were his parents’ divorce, the Red Cross’ Ohio Leadership Conference, the championship game of his Sophomore Little Caesars’ hockey club, his trip to visit the campus of Northwestern, and the 2002 California AIDS/LifeCycle. These events and their outcomes taught him resilience, empathy, courage, and the power of dreaming bold and working hard.
Jesse’s thinking, distilled into written expression thanks to his mother’s gifts for composition, his father’s analytical mind, and his high school teacher Leo Schulte’s adroit lessons, has been shaped, influenced, and adopted by hundreds of colleagues and clients over the years. His work has also appeared in Fast Company, Forbes, CMO by Adobe, Qualtrics X4, the American Marketing Association, Qualtrics’ Master Sessions, and Brand Quarterly. Jesse is also a regular speaker at his alma mater, the Haas School of Business.
Jesse is on the Board of Room to Read, a global nonprofit dedicated to ending illiteracy and gender inequality. He has an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School, and a BS in Math and Sociology with a Minor in German Language from Northwestern. He lives in the wonderful city of San Francisco with his amazing wife, remarkable twin daughters, and loyal labradoodle.