✍️ forget the big reveal. think flywheel.

A major rebrand isn’t a one-and-done announcement. To be successful, it requires multiple marketing channels that work together in concert. 

Think symphony, not soloist. 

Better yet, think flywheel. 

When Hope Weatherford, the newly minted Head of Marketing at Fountain, needed to re-introduce the brand to the world, she knew the task was bigger than her mighty—but tiny—team could handle. 

So she called in reinforcements. 

In just a few weeks, Fountain created a content ecosystem across web, email, and social that fed into itself. Web content became social posts; newsletters directed readers to social pages and the website; and social posts drove newsletter signups and web traffic. 

The result was a content system whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. 

…and a 4X increase in form fills to leads, coverage by Forbes and Gartner, and industry peers parroting Fountain’s messaging as part of their own talk track. 

Imitation: The sincerest form of marketing success.

So you’re leading a rebrand. 

You know the scope (large) and the speed (fast). Now comes the big question: Do you handle it all in-house, bring in freelancers, or call in an agency? 

That’s exactly what Hope faced as her team stared down a full messaging, design, and product overhaul.

Luckily, as former Head of People, Hope had two secret weapons:

1. Deep empathy for the Fountain’s audience of employers and job seekers.

2. A strong sense of how to staff smartly.

Before Hope made any moves, she mapped out what her rebrand really required in terms of capacity, scope, speed, and complexity. 

We share how she answered each of these questions in our rebrand staffing playbook—along with 4 tools you can use to evaluate each area for your own team.

Campaigns that got us talking:

Hinge (yes, the dating app) turned real user love stories into an anthology, penned by contemporary authors like Roxane Gay and R.O. Kwon—and published it as a gorgeous hardcover book. Modern love is messy, but this campaign is clean. 

I finally built an AI agent (and you can too): Lindy just added the ability to build an AI agent by describing what you want it to do. Want an agent that collects insights from your customer calls to update your positioning doc? Just ask. Seriously, this is the first time we’ve seen the promise of agents becoming reality.

Stuff that made us scroll back up: The difference between B2B and B2C marketing, in a single image.

We’ve been getting some really bad cold outreach emails.

And we hate them. We all hate them.

But we get it. They’re hard to write. You don’t have time to give every sales email the TLC it deserves. And a bad email isn’t the same thing as a bad company.

And we’re dying to help.

So we’re having a contest: Extreme Makeover: Sales Drip Edition.

The rules are simple. Send us your worst-ever sales email—the most confusing, jargony, or delete-worthy—and we’ll give it a full (free!) content makeover. Copy, design, everything.

So you can start getting 👀 and 🤩 from your prospects, instead of…well, 🙄 ❌

Who do you prefer to lean on when you have a major marketing project to undertake? Vote here.

• In-house marketers

• In-house, but cross-functional

• Select freelancers 

• Full service agencies
  

We also recently asked readers what they thought the toughest part of pulling off a rebrand was. You responded:

When it comes to major marketing projects, staffing decisions can make or break your timeline, budget, and results. (They can also break your marketing team’s brains.) There are pros and cons to in-house vs. external support—and it’s up to you to thread the needle. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… We all know people use ghostwriters for LinkedIn posts and company announcements. But did you know there are also ghostwriters for finding love and waging (customer service) war?