Acoustic’s plan to make a loud noise in the market

In April, the private equity house Centerbridge Partners announced it had acquired IBM Watson’s marketing cloud and commerce platforms, which was to be spun out into a new company. In July, we learned that company has been named Acoustic, said to represent the organisation’s commitment to listening, understanding and solving complex challenges with technology. We asked CEO Mark Simpson about the process of detaching from Big Blue and setting off into the crowded martech space on its own.

How did the decision to separate IBM Marketing Cloud from IBM come about?

Mark: The best thing for the Marketing Cloud – for its clients and growth – was to see some significant investment and rejuvenation. I spoke with IBM and there were two options; we could do that within IBM or outside of it. I then got the green light to go out and pitch the business to private equity companies.
We spoke to about a dozen or so companies, with more than half giving  offers. We landed with Centerbridge, as they have the ethos we wanted. They don’t have a playbook, they invest to create value for the business and its shareholders. They invest for the longer-term, and are dedicated to growing the business.

You had to let go of the IBM brand. Where did the process of developing the new identity begin?

We wanted a new start after coming out of IBM. The name ‘Acoustic’ embraces what we’re focused on bringing to the market. It symbolises us listening to our clients, and those clients listening to their customers. We sat down as an executive team to understand the type of business we wanted to build going forward, over the next three, five, seven to 10 years. We looked at what we stand for as a business – our purpose and rationale.

We used the agency Landor, which went through a process of interviewing about 650 people within the organisation, getting input on where our teams want to go. It was a very inclusive process. They then created the company’s name and values. They came up with a number of options and we talked through which ones resonated more than others.

Has it been difficult to shake off traditional perceptions internally?

A lot of people within the business, the majority I would say, have come from acquisitions – smaller companies bought by IBM, even though the products are very different now. We still have people who were originally in Silverpop, Coremetrics and Tealeaf. They know the world outside of IBM, and this is why we wanted the teams to be included in building the culture, the brand and what we stand for. We know we need to change to better service our clients, and to better serve our employees. We want the teams to feel part of that change and feel they’re driving it, hence their inclusion in the process.

Martech is an increasingly crowded marketplace, so what is Acoustic’s point of differentiation?

We’re filling a huge void in the industry in that we are the only marketing cloud company that’s focused on the marketer. Salesforce grew from sales and CRM, Adobe grew from focusing on creative, Oracle from ERP and data. Our entire being is focused on making the marketer a success and that drives a very different behaviour. Everything we do now, everything we develop, every area of focus on R&D, services, support, processes is focused on making the marketer successful.

We are still a large organisation, on the same scale as Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle. But we also now have that agility in not having to satisfy any other job title. This tees us up for big success because I don’t see anyone focusing on the CMO or marketer as we do.

How will you roll out the brand?

It’s not complete yet, but the natural market appetite has really come to the fore. We’re seeing a number of CMOs proactively coming to us to find out what we’re about, because they’re desperate to be served better.

The reaction we’ve had from analysts has been wonderful, and they’re saying great things about what we’re doing and where our focus is. I think that’s because of the investment people are starting to see us put into the product and business as a whole. We’re really at a very early stage of the launch, but in 12 months’ time people in our industry won’t know a world without the Acoustic brand. You’ll see a lot more from us in the coming months.

How do you communicate a launch such as this to your existing customers?

We spent a lot of time making sure there’s a very clear vision and strategy for our teams – we then spent a lot of time communicating that to our customers. We’re being very honest about why we’re doing this, where we are, where we expect to be in the future and the investment we’re putting in it.
There are two areas of major focus for us. One is to create a great place to work and the other is to create a much better platform of solutions – otherwise there’s no point in us even getting up in the morning. 

The feedback from customer has been really exciting. They’re getting to continue to use the products they use today, but will see massively accelerated roadmaps because of the investment we’re putting in.

Did anything surprise you during the rebranding process?

The thing that surprised me most was the scale of positivity. You never quite know how the market will receive you going into these events. I was very British in my approach, but have been overwhelmed by the way we’ve been received.

What’s the plan for the business in the next 12 months?

We’re investing a huge amount of money in carving out the business from IBM and making sure it lands right. We need to make sure all our teams are enabled to do brilliant jobs, we’re looking at improving all the processes we run internally. We have 70-plus consultants working with us in various different workstreams to make sure we’re reinventing and reimagining what we do to make us better than we were yesterday.

We’re investing a lot in products over the next 12 months to improve the position of where they are now. We want to be one platform for the rest of the market, connecting that very disjointed vendor landscape. We’re putting a lot of investment into AI, because it has a great power to enable marketers to do better jobs.  We’re also investing in usability – reworking a lot of the tech debt we have and making the solutions modern and applicable for the next five years.

It only took you around nine months from looking for external investment to launching the brand. How were you able to do it so quickly?

We have a very exciting proposition we were keen to get on with, and stretching it out is probably not something anyone wanted. We’re operating at a speed that is significantly faster than before – both in terms of the progress we’re making and the way in which we’re responding to clients and sales processes. Taking a business from a very large company to one with a bit of an entrepreneurial mentality injects a lot of speed into the process.

While we as a leadership team are looking to move as fast as we can, we can’t do it without the buy-in from our teams. I think that’s where adapting the culture a little bit, and having a clear vision and strategy, enables the teams to do the work.  Having them lead is fundamental to the speed of the business going forward.

Do you have any advice for readers looking to launch a brand?

Have a very clear vision as to what you’re trying to do, the void you’re trying to fill and how you’re solving the problems within that gap.
We also had a very strong vision in terms of where we wanted to take the culture, and having the team’s input into that culture was part of it. Bringing amazing people along this journey has enabled us to run quickly. There are always lots of little surprises, but as long as you have the overall vision and the right team you can overcome any of them. We feel we have 1100 people marching in the same direction, rather than just a few people at the top of the organisation.