The Qualtrics Brand: Breakthroughs & Beyond
Several years ago when I was at Prophet, I worked with Qualtrics Chief Marketing Officer Kylan Lundeen and his team to divine and articulate the Qualtrics brand. Even though the company had been enjoying tremendous growth and had a ton of clarity around its values, there was a sense that it was the right time to take stock of what Qualtrics believed and why it existed.
It was a case where the magnitude of energy around the brand was not in question, but the direction of its focus was not well understood. Why was Qualtrics truly different from competitors? What kind of customers and partners did we want to serve? Whom were we building for? These were questions that had no wrong answers, but also no agreed-upon conclusions.
The company had spent the prior few quarters defining and establishing the category they wanted to play in and lead, and had landed on the idea of “Experience Management,” or XM. Qualtrics believed then (and believes now) that XM is a tremendous market opportunity. But, from my vantage point now on the inside of the company owning our brand strategy, Experience Management is what we do - it’s not how or why. Going deeper and really articulating our reason for being - and expressing it in our brand - would be necessary to attract the kinds of customers, capital, and talent that would be necessary for Qualtrics to grow and thrive.
That exercise - and our continuous questioning of how to improve and refine it - led to what you can read today in our brand manifesto, positioning statement, brand pillars, and personality. There are many elements to the brand that are both dear to us and distinctive in our sector (and across sectors), but the three that stand out the most to us are:
We’re for breakthroughs. We’re always proud of any customer that wants to use Qualtrics to close experience gaps, but when we look at some of our best customers - Airbnb, Amazon, American Express, BMW, JetBlue, Under Armour, USAA - they’re using us for so much more than closing gaps. They’re partnering with us to build product, brand, and experience breakthroughs. Our core reason for being is to enable breakthrough builders to understand and act on the voices of customers and employees to put amazing things into the world. No other brand we know in or adjacent to our sector can authentically lay claim to this ambition.
Hear every voice. We believe that every voice holds value. As a company that got its start as a research and survey platform, we were built from the very beginning to be an instrument for listening at scale. Our product pays off this pillar of our brand, but of course, we mean it in a much more inclusive, higher-order way. We literally believe that every human’s voice matters, and we believe that a better world is one in which products, brands, and experiences are designed with people’s input, feedback, opinions, wishes, and sentiment in mind. We also believe that our company is only going to get stronger over time as we increase representation of people of all genders, backgrounds, creeds, beliefs, and abilities.
Develop uncommon sense. In the end, people and teams make better decisions about what product to launch, what brand to build, and what experience to design when they use Qualtrics. We believe that achieving uncommon results requires uncommon sense, and that the human ability to sense gaps and discover opportunities is heightened with the use of the right human-factor data.
The beauty, brains, and brawn of our brand is evident in its elasticity across all we do as a company. From our signature X4 conference to the Work Different event series to our Breakthrough Artist and the Breakthrough Builders platform, to name a few, our brand DNA is in play. We don’t believe any other brand in or near our sector can say that it celebrates its customers, partners, employees, and other community members the way we do.
The Qualtrics brand gives our employees a common cause to rally around. Being part of a company that’s for breakthroughs is an incredibly captivating, compelling value proposition - it’s about growth, transformation, creation, boldness, audacity, risk, and excitement. Yet because our product is fundamentally grounded in the discovery of human truth, the brand is also practical, accessible, simple, and memorable. We love that our product, brand, and people are all interrelated - we hire breakthrough builders to continue to design and build Qualtrics, which in turn empowers our customers to build breakthroughs, which in turn reflects, celebrates, and amplifies our brand and the reason we exist. It’s a flywheel we’re incredibly proud of as a team.
Still, we have a long way to go to rid the world of bad experiences. And we have a long way to go in articulating our brand with even more clarity. There’s more opportunity to romance our incredible product, celebrate breakthroughs, engage new audiences on social, and modernize even more of our brand experience. As we move forward, the brand will remain at the center of our growth efforts, and we believe it will be a source of differentiation, relevance, and energy for all our audiences for years to come.
What’s your take on our brand? Hit me up if you have any perspectives. You can send me and my team a note here.