Kim Storin has one of the rarer jobs in marketing: She’s responsible for promoting and evolving a brand that’s also become a verb, like Xerox, Google or Uber.
As chief marketing and communications officer at Zoom, it’s her remit to stretch people’s perception of a brand that many now treat not unlike basic infrastructure.
Zoom is still synonymous with video calls – who among us doesn’t Zoom at least once if not multiple times a day? – but that’s now where most of the growth is coming from, Storin says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“As you think about what Zoom has become over the years, it’s so much more than a video conferencing platform,” Storin says, pointing to its webinars offering, its customer support platform and its suite of AI tools.
“But we still fight this legacy view that Zoom is a video conferencing company only,” Storin says, “that we’re kind of a one-trick pony.”
Changing that perception is the main KPI for Zoom’s new “Zoom Ahead” brand campaign, which launched last year with a TV spot featuring SNL alum Bowen Yang. The work leans into Zoom’s cultural status, rather than shying away from it, in an effort to bring some “swagger” back to a brand people now take for granted, Storin says.
There’s no way to measure swagger directly, of course. But Storin and her team are tracking shifts in brand health, monitoring changes in web and platform engagement and keeping tabs on whether Zoom is being considered for a wider range of use cases than hosting meetings.
“We’re still in the vanity metrics phase,” Storin says.
It’s about a lot more than looking good on a dashboard, though. Perceptions shape business decisions that can have big consequences at the enterprise level.
“A B2B decision is a highly emotional decision,” Storin says, “and therefore requires great marketing.”
Yet marketers still tend to lavish more attention and creativity on B2C marketing, even though the stakes are often higher in B2B.
“At the end of the day, if you go buy a new pair of shoes and you end up not liking it, what’s the worst case scenario?” Storin says. “But when you think about a bad choice as a B2B decision … your reputation is on the line, and your job is on the line.”
Also in this episode: Why Zoom combines its marketing and comms roles into one, how AI is reshaping earned media and measurement, and don’t hold your breath on a Zoom ad network. (Oh, and lawyer cat makes an appearance!)
