You're listening to The CyberWire Network, powered by N2K. Welcome to the Breaking Through and Cybersecurity Marketing Podcast, where we explore the hottest topics in cyber marketing, interview experts, and help you become a better cybersecurity marketer. We have Alicia D. Victoria. She is head of brand and corporate marketing at Silverport, Alicia. Thank you so much for being on. Thank you, Gianna. I'm happy to be here. Let's talk marketing with you. Should be fun. I love it. Yeah, we're going to have a good time. And I have to point out for anyone who's not watching on YouTube, Alicia has the most beautiful microphone, iridescent shade, halogen, gaming mic in the world. Well, the ironic thing is I do not game. I don't even know how to. And somehow this was the mic that was recommended to me and a little shame and a little embarrassed, but I'm rocking it. Like, who cares? Right. It is like the lava, groovy lava lamp of microphones. Yeah. And I think I bet you could probably turn it off, but then I'd have to like use my eyeballs and they're slowly going away, like the ability to see. Yeah. I don't know if you've noticed that in your process. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Process of it of aging. Yes, that one. Okay. I've also noticed that. I do need to go to the eye doctor. This is actually a good reminder. So Alicia, this is going to be a bit of an unhinged episode. I feel. What do you do as head of brand and corporate marketing at Silverford? What is that? What's the job role? It's the before I want corporate marketing, which is everything from basically like the thought leadership brand perception of the business and the brand awareness that we want to portray out in the market. So everything from AR PR, thought leadership, content marketing, brand design all kind of falls under that lovely little bucket. What does it mean to run these units? Do you have a big team under you? What do you spend your time on? I spend my time both leading and doing. I've always been kind of like a combo strategist and executor, like especially when you go in the startup world, if you can't do both your lump on a log type thing, that's even a saying, a total log, whatever. I mean, I'm down. I'm down. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a combination of planning and strategy, but also working with the team. So we have, we have a person who helps with the AR and the PR overseeing how we interact with the analyst and managing our PR agency and making sure that we're getting all our announcements out there before this podcast. Before this recording, I was writing a press release, that sort of thing. But then the other thing is like working with my brand team on, if we have a product launch coming up, which we do, what's going to be the sizzle reel? What's going to be the storyboard for that sizzle reel? And then copy editing and working with my advisors on their presentations. So everything in that kind of scope of the world, if that makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. So in terms of your team, like size, right, we mentioned like it's like brand, it's like creative, it's like comms, there's like PR, there's like AR, there's so many things involved in this. How big is the team that you manage right now? We are five, I think what that's small for what you're just saying. I know, trust me. I know. But we have an agency that helps be extend our PR piece, a couple designers and we have contractors to help with design. We're actually, this is something where at some point I'm like curious to, I would love a podcast on how you scale design because that's truly like my biggest pain right now is like we are in this constant barrage of production. And we can't get creative because we are the services team to everyone in the organization on, on design. And it's like how do we have time to actually really build a beautiful storyboard or brand video or campaign? So freeing up that time to be creative and not just do production is honest, honestly like my 2025 Q4 goal, I know that's kind of boring, but it's Q4, it's Q4, isn't it in October? It is right? Yeah. How's your goal going? I'm just kidding. We are working on it every day. Well, no, but it's also team up for 2026, right? It's like, okay, how do we tee up to really sure and then you know, how do we weave an AI? Like, do we want to start making those like crazy V03 Google AI videos? I don't know, maybe, but that means someone has to learn how to use the system. And do I hire someone? Do we have a contractor? Those are all the sorts of questions we're always thinking about. I love it. For any listener who's listening, who has scaled design and who has worked on this sort of, let's figure out how to move from production to creative in a very, very busy startup with potentially less team members than you would like in order to get to where you want to go. Feel free to send us an email at
[email protected]. I would love to have you on the show on the topic of creative and we're literally talking about graphics right now. Let's talk about something that's related, a rebrand and re-fasting. So we had on our scoping call come up, I mean, I have notes. And the first thing at the top of the note says rebrand suck. So tell us a little bit. That's bullet number one. Tell us about the story of the recent rebrand or Jija that y'all did that you led over at Silverport. Where to start? So I think we'll start with this is that rebounds sound like the coolest, most fun thing to do. And frankly, they are. They're super fun and they're exciting and you get to be creative and talk to all the stakeholders and do all this cool stuff. Man, they are hard and they take a lot of grit and they take a lot of, frankly, like patience and hard conversations because everyone has an opinion. And truly, there's very few people whose opinions matter. It's typically like your designer, your CEO and the exact team, like the few select people on the exact team, but everyone else has to be okay with giving the input, but not necessarily seeing it in the actual product, right? Right. That's something that we're trying to figure out too. It's like, all right, we want your input. We'd actually honestly and earnestly want input from others, but how do you then, after getting that input, respectfully and gracefully not apply any of it to the end product, right? Like that is an actual, I think, I don't want to say political challenge. That's like a challenge, like an organizational challenge that you have to navigate as the leader of the team that is doing this rebrand. Yeah. Yeah. There's like two dimensions to it, right? You have all these people who are stakeholders, but then also kind of a tangent, but related, we're fortunate to be a growing organization. So then you're going through a lot of change management at the same time. So how do you retain like that core ethos, culturally, like who you were when you were like a 50 person company in that beautiful start-up energy, but then also scale it and accommodate what you need to grow and be an enterprise-grade company that can speak and move at the pace you need to serve the enterprise, right? So it's like, and you have to weave that into your brand because you have to demonstrate gravitas to your enterprise buyer, but not in a boring way, right? You know, like, you can't-- Sorry. I'm making faces. No, I like the face. You have to-- The gravitas was fun. Exactly like that. That's probably, I should probably write that down in my voice and tone right now. I think it's a jiff. I'm sorry. We could totally do that. So you guys are growing, it's a start-up. Hey, we're growing. You can trust us enterprise companies to buy from us is what, for me, it boils down to is that what you're saying when you're adding this gravitas, but you still need that fun, that element of interestingness to cut through the noise of cybersecurity. Yeah, you need to know-- you have to create an emotional connection, right? So you're not just saying what you do, but how you say it in an emotionally interesting and intelligent way, and what I think what happens in rebrands is that people kind of conflate the kind of strategy and the messaging and positioning with, like, the emotional execution of how it actually looks. So, and that's one thing I would say is, like, before you start talking about the brand and the way you're going to talk about it and the way you're going to feel, you need to align on your business strategy and the position you are in the market first. And then you go to the visual and the, like, verbal voice and tone, but without that first piece kind of nailed and identified and locked in with your exec suite. You're going to be literally spinning in cycles, toggling between your position and where you want to be in the market with how you want to convey it, if that makes sense. So I know it wasn't really a brand refresh, it was a really big overall of a rebrand. Before you've been getting into, like, how you did it, like, why did SilverFort want to move forward with this as a project? That's a great question. Like, what were why do we do it? I think it was, well, we didn't really have, to be honest, like, not soulless, but we didn't really have, like, any personality. We needed to align, like, where we were going and the, like, find our why and use that as an anchor to then carry through to where we want to go as a business. Like, our CEO knows exactly what he wants, like, we know our vision. We know what we want to build. We know we have great product, but like, how do we make sure that we're communicating that in a way that, again, is emotionally resonating with our buyer? In prior to that, like, we'd had such success with our product, we didn't really have to be selling one to many because the product was so good. It is so good, I should say. But then it's like, oh, wow, everyone's entering this market. Oh, there's some competition. Ooh, we need to actually stand out now. And so it's like, how do we really transition from being resting on this amazing product and actually being able to stand out amongst a huge market that's kind of exploding right now, right? That's exciting. What is SilverFort's product? What do you guys do? So we do identity security. So everything you think about in every kind of industry, in cyber, basically, you have your endpoints. And then you had your endpoint security layer, CrouchDrike, in Cloud, you had your Cloud infrastructure, AWS, GCP, now we have Whiz, your Cloud security network. Hell out to networks is kind of like the flagship network security company. We aim to be that same thing for identity security. The one who kind of like is the security layer for your identity infrastructure. So you were talking also a little bit about feedback and getting feedback and stuff. How does you structure the process of how you would then execute a rebrand? So I think the first thing is kind of like what I was saying is like agreeing and aligning on that kind of like a rational position in the market, where you want to be what your strategy, kind of writing down that pretty generic like corporate messaging framework, like, why do we exist and why are we different? What's our positioning statement, kind of like bits and bytes of a basic verbal identity. And then at that point, we kind of knew the general gist of where we were. We were like, can we do this in-house? Are we going to do it ourselves? Do we want to have an external agency help us? What do we do? And we decided I was like, look, we don't have an internal design resource to take us where we want to go. At that point, we now have an amazing director of branch. She's like, amazing, but at the time, we didn't. And so it's like, who's going to match this beautiful position that we have with a beautifully designed brand? No one in-house had the skill set. And not only that, like even the verbal identity, you sometimes still need to have that external like amazing copywriting to really take a pretty basic positioning statement and really come to life, right? Right. So we went with an agency. We kind of delivered the initial strategy brief with like who we were and why we existed and then they helped us identify a couple different directions. And from there, we chose a direction and then you kind of launch your process from there. Would you do that again if you were going to do another rebrand? I think so. Yeah. I think even now, especially now, since like our brand team, like the people who actually do the design are only two and like a half or two and three, depending on if you how much you add the contractors in, yes, because I feel like when you're trying to really force yourself outside yourself, you kind of need that external people to remind you like to not get so in your head. You start believing yourself and drinking your cool aid and thinking, this makes sense to everyone. And then you show it to a bunch of buyers and they're like, well, what? You need that external reminder that you can't keep using the same words or whatever it is. You know, the idea is may not be resonating if that makes sense. Yeah. You need someone to say, I don't know what identity security win me, you know, blah, blah, blah, me. Or I don't know what this mark conveys or like whatever else or, you know, what nobody does like that color. Nobody likes brown as a logo like for a security company. I'm sorry. It's just not going to work. So that's sort of just like a chocolate brown, just like a brown tea chocolate, yeah, that's what I didn't say it. I said it though. Yeah. But it does have to be blue. I don't know. I think silver for it is silver. Right? If I had to look. No, we aren't. We're actually we went or we went like a gradient orange with black because we wanted gold. And we actually there was, but that was, that's interesting. You say that we had a brand direction that we looked at that was very, they had a lot of silver. It was very futuristic looking. The brand ethos was more like futuristic versus we kind of landed on an archetype of like explorer, like taking you further, kind of like pushing boundaries versus a brand archetype of like futuristic cutting edge. That's where the one with then they showed us that brand direction. It just felt a little flatter, even though it was cool, it didn't have the depth that we saw with our current one that we have. I love it. Okay. So you got alignment on the message you worked with the agency to come up with some like stuff that wasn't so generic after running the messaging through a committee and then the agency was like, Hey, let's have some personality. I will say that was a lesson learned. We could have been better on the positioning and messaging because what ended up happening is we spent a little bit more cycles than one would have liked on refining that, even though we had like the bones of it, sometimes the actual nitty gritty got a little bit more challenging. So I would say, yeah, you got to work with your execs to align on that verbal identity. Number one, before you go into the fun visual design piece, truly like everyone wants to do that. Should we be blue and green? Well, no, like what are we trying to convey? Right. We really have to get there first before you go do the visual execution. So on the topic of having to go through the cycles was the cycles around aligning the message or was the cycles coming later in that because you didn't align the message, there was challenges further down the path, bingo ladder. So it's like because we'd had like, I would say like a three force baked message and kind of rational line of where we wanted to go that quarter that we kind of were still like noodling on, got a stock, frankly, we were stock for a little while and we would like go back and forth and have these like deep conversations around this word versus that word, whereas that had we really kept it the 10,000 foot feel and we could have probably gone through that a little bit faster. So yeah, I think it's like really forcing people to do the hard work before you do the fun work. It's kind of what I would say. What were some of the words that you fought over? Is more like conceptual, like for example, do we want to be conceptual and use, like so identity security? We would contest. Has there's many dimensions to securing identity? And that was an idea actually that came from our agency was like, oh, we're always trying to say that we can secure all these different types of people in the different places and all these different things. And so they're like the word dimension conveys multiple angles. And so we ended up using that word, but there was a lot of discussion around like how much we use that word. Is it going to be our flagship, like secure every dimension of identity? Is that going to become our tagline? Or is it like a way we convey what we do and like how much emphasis do we want to put on that concept was a big discussion, I would say like even earlier stages, this was a line before we got to the rebrand, like, are we going to be identity security or are we identity protection? Truly, like we debated that. It was a good debate. It was a very healthy debates. It's the type of debate you need to have. I like that you're saying that nobody like punch someone else, like you're just clarifying. This is a very healthy debate as nearly as those are important, but those are important debates to have because you're talking about where the future of the industry is going to go, where do you want to sit? How is the competition positioning themselves? Let me think. There's all sorts of stuff. Oh, the other thing I'd say is like there's so much emphasis on finding a tagline and I'm like, guys, we're not going to find a tagline until we align on all this other stuff first. And then we'll get to this one beautiful tagline, but you can't put so much emphasis on this one for sentence phrase or whatever it is that you're forgetting the bigger picture of all the overall messaging and positioning and anchoring there. So my background is not my background because I never actually did it. I just like got a degree in it and then immediately went and detect my background is advertising. So copywriting everyone wants to come up with a cool phrase and then back into the strategy, but that's not how it works. That's things. Oh, my gosh. Thank you. That's what I was been trying to say in a very verbose way for the best like five minutes. They're the strategy with four words and I'm like, that's just not enough. You're like, can we not talk about the four words yet? Can we figure out like why we exist first and and then let's all think about it and marinate. You got to marinate. That's the whole part of the process. You have to forget. You have to be doing something else and then you have to like, like, I have a thought about the whole about it and then you have to get back together and you have to do this huge long strategy thing. It wears on the patience of folks, I think, you know, want to get to the last launch, right? Especially at a startup. At a startup, you're like, let's like, boom, let's get stuff out the door. Let's do that. But you had to set those expectations. Well, it's that and or it's like letting perfect get in the enemy or getting great, letting great get in the enemy of good. What is the saying again? It's like, perfect. The enemy of good. Yeah. Where it's like, it's messaging and actually our brand has evolved since we launched already. Not like dramatically, like our core who we are, all still the same, messaging changes over time. The market changes and you need to evolve it and everyone's like, as soon as you make this decision, it's forever. No, no, it's important and you want to be consistent. Conceptually, we'll probably say the same thing over and over again, but the exact words might be tweaked because there's a shift in the market or we found that it doesn't land with our buyer, whatever. Feptually, it's the same, but the words may change by audience, by channel, by so many different factors, right? And so it's okay to like, not hang on one or two words that could change in a week, right? When was this launch, by the way, which I should ask for? Yeah. Let's do timelines. Okay. So we talked about it at Nazam for like months. How many months? So okay, it's interesting. I was actually a consultant for Silverfort first. I used to do comms in brand and PR consulting before I went back in house for many, many years. So I started joining it. I started helping in August of 23, but we really didn't start talking about the rebrand and like rethinking about our position and how we convey it until May or June of 24. And we kind of noodled and like thought about it and we brought the agency on probably in August or September. And then we launched in early February, which was very ambitious, because that meant redoing an entire new website as well, which is like, a lot of work. You launched the projects in February or you launched the rebrand in February? We launched the rebrand. We unveiled the website in February after basically, I think we signed the agency on in August, because I think I went to New York. We saw their first concepts in September. Yeah. I'm counting with my fingers August, September, November, December, January, February, seven months. Yeah. But really, we got the first concepts in September. We'd leaned it on a concept in October. And then from there, we started to actually execute some of the more tactical, verbal stuff and the visual identity in October and then build the website basically beyond that. And in this whole process, this is the crazy thing. We had a logo. We all agreed on. And then this is my other lesson for y'all if we show to the exact team and they all hated it. Do you have it today? Can we see it? I know. We're not allowed to see it, probably. It's probably buried in your backyard where I could find it. It's somewhere. Okay. And so we had to go back because, and this is the thing, we involved the right people, but we probably should have involved at least two or three more people in the logo discussion. Okay. And had we done that, we would have had like a logo that was basically about to be like super finalized and perfectly designed. We had to go back and do a new logo because the entire set seems like no. So everyone's aligned on the message, right? Everyone's aligned on the message. You have your internal team aligned on the logo is what it sounds like, right? Like all the marketing folks and maybe some VPs and other. Yeah. But not like C-suite or maybe some C-suite, but missing some voices and some fake eyeballs, right? So people are like, oh, that's great. We love this logo. Like how long were you working? I love, I'm getting in the nitty-gritty because this is like endlessly fascinating to me. Not from like a shot and froid perspective, but like just the whole process of the rebrand is extremely fascinating. So how long from, we have this logo we like to like, oops, we made a mistake. Was it like a month? Was it like a couple weeks or was it like four months? Oh, it's been like four months. If I could remember this correctly, my, my head of brand would, she would know this better because she basically redesigned a logo in like a week over the holidays. I think we decided to change the logo in December and we were going live with the rebrand in February. So anything that had the logo in it, yes, I'm not even kidding you. I think I came home from, I think we were, we, I think this is my trip to, I think, Costa Rica or something. I don't know where I was. I was somewhere in the world. Very unfortunate. I had a vacation. Lucky me. I took a vacation. And it was like, oh, yeah, we have to change it. And we were like, what? No. And then we did. I think that's the right timeline. I can't remember. But something like that. It was like, we had six weeks to redesign it and then put it into everything. So six weeks for the redesign and to put it into everything and putting it into everything. That's specifically that was specifically the logo component. So anything that had a logo needed to be like, we'd already had like a really, our agency had designed a really cool bumper that had shaped transition into the old logo. So like my brand had person had it like, think about how do you redo that bumper with the new logo and anything that had it on the website, which is just again, that's work. It's production. But it's work. You're clicking away from like building a new beautiful web page to re-architecting all the web existing web pages you've designed with the new logo or whatever it is. Absolutely. So tell us what that challenge was, right? It was like, everyone's good. But then some people were not all of a sudden at the late stages of we're getting ready to launch. So what was that challenge like, what was the feedback? And if you could do it again, what would you change? Like exactly. Yeah. I think what I would do is invite the most influential executive voices in earlier. That's what I would do because you're bringing them along on a journey. I often find that marketing in general, as you will know, as any one of us knows, is oftentimes an education of like what it really means. It's not just a logo, it's not just a tagline, it's not just a website. It's a process in an education oftentimes, so you really need to take people on a journey. And sometimes that includes a key component of your tech team. And everyone's exact team, the key players are going to be different, right? Whether it's product, maybe it's your head of sales, who's really influential. I don't know. But make sure those ones who have loud voices and need to be heard are in there when you're kind of making those first iterative decisions around like conceptually what direction you're going is what I would say. We actually had Orley Barlev on the show a few months ago. She is VP of Marketing over at Lasso Security. They did a rebrand. A very similar situation was the story that was told on the episode, right? We all love it. Everybody agrees. And then influential voices who rightfully sell our influential voices say, we don't like this, right? Or we spot a problem or a challenge here. All of a sudden there's a mad dash to sort of re-aligning and fixing and re-designing that just had stress. Cilla, great outcome. It sounds like, and you guys as logo is gorgeous and you have a beautiful, lovely brand, Kudos, yay. It doesn't matter what I say. But I like it. And the end result's fine, but the process to get there could have just been like slightly less challenging. Yeah. And it's like, so, and it's like, you know, and it's lame as it sounds having a solid racy model can be helpful. So what's that? You know, like a racy, like a responsible accountable contributor and input, I want to say, are the four things. And the idea, we didn't have a clear one. And or the person accountable or like, you know, the approver, a is a prover. That's what it is. If the approver is always the same person and or the CEO, that's a rough spot to be in, because they're busy. Jew, if you're in an ideal world, could go back in time and set up a racy model for an racy model for this rerun, how would you structure it? I would structure it where typically ideally you have the person who's both responsible and the approver best case scenario, that is the same person. But oftentimes that's not the case, like your CEO's going to be the probably the approver on the logo. Like it's the CEO. It's the logo like there should be a lot of heavy input from the CMO from the director or head of brand, whatever, but it might be the CEO, especially in a small business, or smaller startup. And so, so that's one rule, I would say, but in a lot of cases, I would say you'd want a lot of the decisions to be made by the CMO or the person who's actually doing most of the legwork, right? Obviously getting input from the people, but the input column is what I was talking about before. Like who gets to give input and making sure they're brought along on that journey. And so that typically could be your chief product officer or your head of product. Maybe another co-founder because again, they're feeling these, these, these are their baby, you know, they founded this business and they may not be the CEO, but even though they're like running R&D or whatever department your co-founder might be running innovation or strategy, they still feel it, right? And so they want to make sure that they love the logo or they love the new brand colors. They love the new message. You have to bring them along on the journey, even though they might not be the final decision maker. Yeah, they got to be bought in along the way, right? And for folks who wear this is not their role, but it is their thing that they've built, but they don't understand or they don't necessarily, they're not necessarily trained in marketing and brand, right? You have to teach them and bring them along. They have to feel like they're part of it because they were part of it from the beginning. And they're going to feel weird if all of a sudden everything's different and has changed and they have been here this whole time. It's been the same way and all of a sudden there's change. I think people don't like change in general. No, they don't. Because part of it is change, thankfully, in my situation, everyone knew they needed to be changed. It's just like, how do you go about the change? Right. Yeah. Yeah. How do you do it? Well, Alicia, I have had so much fun talking to you. Thank you for letting me like nitpick and like quadruple click on things and like ask you all these questions about your rebrand over at Silverport. I'm glad that we could be like hopefully a respite that or I don't even know earlier. You wouldn't even want to know the stuff I do sometimes. Like really am I really redesigning this PowerPoint because this person doesn't 100 PowerPoint. Like what the hell? It's my life. It's all of our lives, right? I think it is all of our lives. Thank you so much for being on listeners. Do you want to be on breaking through inside of your security marketing to talk about your crazy rebrand story or maybe something else send us an email at podcast at cybersecurity marketing society.com and as always, a new episode airs next Wednesday. Give us some five or six or seven stars and see you soon. Thanks Gianna, see you soon. Bye. [Music]
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