About working with ”unicorns” and creatives from across the world with Cuneyt Büyükbezci, Board Member Heraldist
The love story between us and Cuneyt Büyükbezci started simple and, you could say, almost trivial: having a coffee. But a simple coffee can take you far. In this case, from Palo-Alto to Cluj.
Experienced in marketing and product management, Cuneyt Büyükbezci is a guy who can proudly say that he is living and working with and around the “unicorns” from San Francisco Bay Area.
San Francisco and Silicon Valley are the epicenters of entrepreneurship, home to 13.5% of all global startups. And the “unicorns” we are mentioning are not imaginary, but as real as they can get. They activate in the tech industry and are startups evaluated at over 1 milliard dollars. That being said, maybe you will ask yourself: how come a guy like him gets to work with a creative team from across the world?
The more skeptical ones would call this luck. We call it a match. We are “The Startup Agency” and we work, without discrimination, with startups in seed stages and up to “unicorns”, regardless of the geography or industry. After a long discussion about marketing and advertising in the tech world, Cuneyt was impressed by our approach: the Perception Engineering™.
To put it shortly, Perception Engineering™ is a methodology that lets you manage a tech company’s reputation, marketing & growth, all in one place. The method was successfully tested on over 50 tech companies from Silicon Valley and Europe, including Heal and Ligl, projects on which we collaborated with Cuneyt. But let’s see what he has to say about his experience with us and not only.
What makes Heraldist interesting to a startup from Silicon Valley? Why would you work with an agency from across the world? Was there something in the process that surprised you vs. the "ad agency paradigm"?
Heraldist brings the best practices from consumer business into B2C and B2B software. There is a common misperception in technology startups that technology brands should be descriptive of technology and this often creates hard to remember brands that are non inspiring.
Heraldist changes this paradigm. Working across the world is essential for any company that aspires to be global. This not only brings new ideas and perspectives but helps creating brands that are international relevant. The process allows outside in view and often challenges the status quo. This constructive tension is essential to take startups to next levels. Heraldist also works with product marketing experts from Silicon Valley to do the product and market strategy which makes the process very helpful for startups which often don’t have marketing strategists.
What do startups need from an advertising and marketing point of view?
Demand generation is a general need for all startups and then creating awareness and bringing qualified leads early. For ALM businesses and especially startups is important that all actions create a positive cash flow.
How did Heraldist help Heal Software be more visible in a crowded IT monitoring category?
Monitoring software market is crowded with many well established incumbent players and also new entrants. Appnomic needed an edge to become visible in this crowded market and rebranding did that.
Heal had a positioning that was really hard to understand: “Cognitive Operations for Hybrid Digital Services”. We rethought it and came up with one that was easy to understand even for potential non tech clients: ”The Self Healing Enterprise Solution”. The ideea was grounded in the main product benefit: to detect small anomalies before becoming big problems. The positioning was brought to life by a complete rebranding from naming, to slogan and to a new visual identity, much more human and easy to remember.
Ligl is the second start-up on which we worked together. What Heralidst was able to bring to the table that other agency couldn't?
The creative process for technology companies is challenging. It becomes more challenging when technology is about a profession like the legal sector which may not be open for trying new ideas in branding. Heraldist pushed limits with an open thinking and the outcome was Ligl. A cool short memorable brand for a disruptive legal tech startup.
Ligl offers digital litigal solutions for big enterprises. We made the legal world accesible by talking about it in human terms, while still making sure that we convey the product’s complexity through both language and visual identity. We worked on everything from positioning, to naming, rebranding and website.
What are the changes that an ad agency needs to make to work with a startup instead of a big corporation? Do the big startups become corporate and change the expectations from agencies?
The key stakeholder in a startup is often a founder who is a technologist. Therefore, the process may be longer with additional steps necessary for educating key stakeholders about the creative process. In corporations the engagement is with career marketers who don’t need to learn the basics of marketing. However, in big corporations the challenge is in the decision making because decisions in big corporations are complex with multiple stakeholders.
What do founders and CMOs want from communication specialists?
Clear concise messaging without altering the positioning is what founders and CMOs expect. Most critical constraint in messaging is to convey the product’s value proposition. It is also the foundation for successful messaging. It is very easy to make mistakes in messaging if the value proposition is not outlined well. This often leads to ineffective comunication and this is what founders don’t want to happen.
Cuneyt Büyükbezci is a Heraldist Board Member along with Peter Barta, Will Awdry, Antoneta Galeș and Corina Murafa.