The Episode in 60 Seconds

What happens when your industry is turned on its head? In Symphony's case, they moved from quarterly plans to weekly ones and infused their mission and values into everything they do.

On this episode of Studio CMO, we discuss with Andrew Hoerner:

• The role culture plays in marketing and branding
• The not-so-easy pivot from in-person events to digital
• When marketing and product development overlap
• How to create refined and laser focused content
• How to attract the biggest clients in your industry
  
  

Our Guest

Andrew Hoerner is the Executive Vice President for Global Marketing for Symphony, considered one of the top 50 fintech firms by Forbes. Their solution allows banks and financial markets to send messages, share files, automate trade flows, and meet in real time.

Andrew has been leading marketing teams or overall marketing functions throughout his career including companies like Blue Martini, PayOne, Securify, McAfee, and Soltra. He also spent five years leading marketing for the largest cybersecurity trade organization, FS-ISAC.

Show Notes

Symphony hosts more than 530,000 users on their collaborative platform and has seen 300+% growth during COVID.

Fast Fail is a part of their iterative culture.

Culture

If you share a sense of mission as a team, that drives a lot of behavior that you can't even always document or articulate. — Andrew Hoerner

These times are just almost sheer chaos in some ways, right? It's really easy just to go to the lowest common denominator, get the basic job done, do business as usual, and make creativity the first thing to go. I've tried to give my team the mental headspace to be creative because creativity is critical to marketing. — Andrew Hoerner

Check out Symphony's end-to-end, secure, encrypted meetings platform for the financial sector.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vD1t9x-K2XY

 

Live Events

We put all the best practices from a live event into a digital event. Plus we sought out an event producer. — Andrew Hoerner

• Build in layers of redundancy
• Build an engine to run the necessary digital production
• Be aware of how your guest's schedules and calendar maintenance have changed
• It's still about telling an amazing story
• Keep it human (leave time for guests to "take the elevator")

We also talk about digital events in this episode of Studio CMO:

 

Why are fax machines still in use?

Symphony is hosting a series of hackathons in 2020.

Andrew discusses how he is exploring the OODA Loop methodology throughout his teams. Check out this helpful guide.