#284: How to Use Cognitive Behavioral Branding to Create New Categories with Ari Yablok, Head of Brand at Island

#284 Brand | Dave sits down with Ari Yablok, Head of Brand at Island, to share his approach to creating a brand in the cybersecurity space. Ari shares his journey from agency life to leading the brand narrative at Island, where he helped build the concept of the "enterprise browser."

Dave and Ari Cover:

• The key differences between category creation and strategic positioning, and why it matters for B2B marketers
• The steps to building a brand story that resonates with both your internal team and your target audience
• How focusing on the last 20% of branding efforts can elevate your company above the competition

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro to Ari
  
• (04:33) - - Rapidly Growing Enterprise Browser Company Secures $375M in Series D Funding
  
• (08:42) - - SEO Strategy vs Branding
  
• (14:09) - - How Brand is an Art and a Science
  
• (19:24) - - Challenges in Cybersecurity Branding
  
• (21:08) - - Early Stage Marketing
  
• (29:48) - - Cognitive Behavioral Branding
  
• (34:57) - - How Ari Manages Projects with the Brand Team
  
• (37:07) - - Comfortable vs. Uncomfortable Approaches to Brand Strategy
  
• (41:25) - - What Founders Really Want to Do
  
• (46:31) - - Balancing the Day-to-Day with Visionary Goals

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:15]:
All right, before we. This is it. I'm excited to have this conversation. Talk a little bit about what you all have done over the past couple years. Building a brand in the cybersecurity space is a topic people want me to talk about more. Not always. Interview marketers selling to marketers, which they say is air quotes easy.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:32]:
So, Ari, thanks for coming on the Exit Five podcast. Introduce yourself and talk about the company real quick. Explain who you are, what you do, and we'll go from there.

Ari Yablock [00:00:40]:
Sure. So thanks for having me. I think I could call myself an OG back when it was the DGMG.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:46]:
Oh, love that OG alert. Okay.

Ari Yablock [00:00:49]:
Yeah, but really love what you built here. So my name is Ari. I'm the head of brand for a company in the enterprise security and it space called Island. I came to Island because I named Island. Before my time at Island, I was working for an agency, I believe Dave, you know, called Atreo in Tel Aviv for my good friend and mentor, Carmel. And I was the head of brand messaging there, working for the vp strategy wherever I was, building brand stories, positioning, category creation, writing scripts, end to end website copy and naming of categories and companies. And I get a text one night from Carmel at home and he's like, you're about to do the coolest job in atreo. You're about to name a company that's going to change everything.

Ari Yablock [00:01:42]:
And I'm like, okay, cool. And I meet the founders, guys named Mike Fay and Dan Amiga, who are veterans and celebrities in this space. Mike ran McAfee and Simintech and Bluecoat, just kind of the who's who of cybersecurity. And Dan was a founder of browser Isolation technology, his company acquired by Mike back in the day. And they explained to me what they're building and it freaking blew my mind. And I had done many brands up to that point and we could go into it soon and I knew I had to do right by this company. And what they were doing was building something that for the world of work, especially when it comes to security, it's all about walls and gates and blocks and then the word no and just work. You go from at home when you're on your phone and your browser and everything's kind of smooth and slick, and then you go to work and everything's like 2 seconds behind and you have to log in before you could log in.

Ari Yablock [00:02:38]:
And it's all just weighed down. And they were going to build something that undid that and set it free. And I felt like, what's the place where you can instinctively be free, where nothing's in the way, it's just you in open air. And that was Island. And it was the first idea I had pitched it. They were in and I said to myself, if you could build a brand from scratch that was going to be instantly important, this would be it. And we were off and running from there.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:06]:
That's a great intro. Okay, so Island is the company. And just to set some context, like how big is the company, relatively, you know, stage wise, the last I saw was series D, like 175 million. I think Sequoia is involved. Just give some context to the company before we dive in.

Ari Yablock [00:03:24]:
Yeah, so we're series D, but we're like two and a half years on the market. So we got there pretty fast. We came out of stealth and a month later had a series A. We got backed early by Sequoia and then Insight joined also early at the series a stage and then kept re upping and re upping and we added some major players as well, like Kotu and Cisco got involved as an investor, and Georgian, these kind of big, big players in the AI and the software space for just tons of money. I think we have 375 million in funding right now at a 3 billion valuation. And I think if you just take us to back from the numbers, it's really about the promise here. They're not betting on. I mean, they are betting on Island, but they're really betting on the idea that this thing that we're building called an enterprise browser, is going to be the de facto way that people will work to the point where it's not.

Ari Yablock [00:04:22]:
Should I use an enterprise browser, it's which one should I use? And if that applies to all businesses, then there's really no dollar amount that's too low to get in.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:33]:
Island, the first company to create this or did this concept exist before?

Ari Yablock [00:04:38]:
This concept in this form did not exist. There were other things called secure browsers and browser isolation technology like I mentioned before, and mostly virtualizing the browser, but none where the browser itself was used as the interface to secure work and enable you to access the apps you need. This concept was brand new and within a year there was already a market and including the big giants and some little startups coming up, which kind of speaks to how promising this whole thing is.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:13]:
So it makes a ton of sense. I'm a marketer, not a security and privacy guy. But I think there is this growing. Have you seen those? Salesforce is running all these ads right now and they're not even selling a benefit of the product. It's basically just a fear campaign where it's Matthew McConaughey and he's in a bar and he's basically like coming to take your data. The whole pitch is like, we keep your data safe at Salesforce and that's become the whole campaign. Now I'm looking at the Island website and it's like, oh, this actually makes a ton of sense. You have all of your team, employees, partners, whoever in one browser, you can have much more control over the data and the behavior and activity there.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:56]:
So also, so fun for you from a marketing standpoint because I do feel like it's much more rare these days to truly be able to create a category. And, you know, a lot of the stuff that we see people talk about in Exit Five and in other places, it's like they've begun to roll their eyes at category creation only because like, there's just so much noise and people will try to make a category out of anything when like, actually you have something like Island, you're like, oh, no, this actually didn't exist before. We actually are creating a category here. That is a fun challenge from a marketing standpoint.

Ari Yablock [00:06:25]:
Yeah. And I would, I would say, like, if you're going about category creation out of need to define yourselves versus your competitors, you're probably not a category. Right. You're probably just searching for a way to, to find some room, some separation from your competition.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:42]:
Say that again and say it slower so I can understand. I can let that soak in because it's good.

Ari Yablock [00:06:46]:
Okay. Yeah. So, like, you're either a category because what you built is a new thing, or you're trying to be a category because you need a way to separate yourself from the competition. And the best way to do it is use other words. And that's really just more strategic positioning and not category creation. And those are two very different things. And category creation is a whole discipline of educating a market, of doing things completely the opposite of what all playbooks tell you to do. Forget SEO, because you're trying to build new language, you're trying to say new words, although you do want to get people's attention, you know, from old keywords, but you need to bring them into your world and create it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:29]:
So when I was at drift, we created a category called conversational marketing.

Ari Yablock [00:07:33]:
Sure.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:33]:
And what you mentioned is so spot on. We used to get in all these arguments with, like, demand gen people and SEO people because there was no search traffic for conversational marketing. And so we wanted to own that term, but, like, we couldn't actually capture demand from that term because there was no search volume there. Then we had to play this weird game. But, like, all the traffic was actually coming from terms like live chat. That's where all the traffic was. But we didn't want, from a brand standpoint, we didn't want to be perceived as live chat because it was a different thing. And so it's like, how do you own this category, but then, like, build SEO at the same time? And it's like you have to play this game where you're like, you might need to write, you know, try to rank for live chat, but then you're writing articles about, like, how this is not your grandfather's live chat or something like that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:20]:
You mentioned something there. Strategic positioning versus category creation. Are you of the belief that you can pick either. There's some people out there who are like, either you're creating a category or you're a moron. Sounds like in your voice. It's just an approach that you can choose to take. You could have strategic positioning or you could have category creation. I'll give you an example.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:40]:
I'm building a business called Exit Five. I don't think we need to create a new category. We don't. My mission is to build the number one community for marketing and soon sales. Spoiler alert. And so I don't think we need to create a category. I don't think we need to call it something new. I think we can be strategically positioned to own that space.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:59]:
Am I guessing what you're going to say? A little bit, yeah.

Ari Yablock [00:09:02]:
Your positioning is ruler. You are the ruler over your space. The number one is your position. And you could be the easiest one. You could be the most accessible. You could be the one for executives. Right? Like, those are obviously your product has to match, you know, the argument you're making. But that's a position within a well defined category, which is a marketing community.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:24]:
Right.

Ari Yablock [00:09:24]:
Or a B2B marketing community. Even B2B could be the positioning. Right. A category is saying there are things out there that you're buying. We are not one of those things. We are a thing that you've never bought before. You don't even know you need it because it didn't exist. We need to now explain to you why you need this and what it could do for you and maybe why you don't need other things as a result.

Ari Yablock [00:09:47]:
So the same way, Salesforce, if we go back to that classic example of building a new category of SaaS, essentially where you used to have to buy software. Thats a bad idea. Now this is a new thing where you dont buy software, you subscribe to it and you dont need to own it because thats a mess.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:05]:
I like that. All right, so lets talk about, I want to rewind a little bit back into some of your lessons from before joining this company, you worked at a branding and creative agency. How did you figure out how to do brand and what does that mean to you?

Ari Yablock [00:10:23]:
I'm so glad you asked that because, oh, thank you.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:26]:
I do this often. Thank you, thank you.

Ari Yablock [00:10:28]:
Yeah, you should do this full time and stuff.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:33]:
Hey, what do you, you know about an hour? I spend about an hour in a week.

Ari Yablock [00:10:36]:
Have you considered yet? So I have a degree in social work. I started my career at a university in nonprofit community building, student programming. I was not a brander at all. And I know you've had a few guests on your podcast that have similar stories where they kind of arrived here, they didn't start here. And when I realized I needed to make a different, carve a different path in my career, I had always been a fan of tech. I was always interested in creative and inspiring people. That's really kind of the nexus or the common denominator I wanted to inspire. And I found that creating kind of messages that moved people was what I would love to do.

Ari Yablock [00:11:21]:
And I started in a startup in this world, in a startup called Saludo that actually doesn't exist anymore, doing kind of smaller branding projects and product content, working in content teams. And then I moved to Atreia once I realized that I wanted to go all in on brand. And there is, when I was in the room with CEO's and cmos, veterans of this space who wanted to take their products to the next level, who were launching all new technologies like quantum computing and things like that. And I was in the war room with them kind of going through the back and forth of, can I say that to my customers? Is that creative but totally off brand for how we want to behave? And I saw kind of that, how these messages resonate with them and how it couldn't just be a creative idea, but it needs to be something that moved their business that really kind of brought them somewhere. And through all that back and forth and watching some experts in the field, people like Carmel Yoeli, who I mentioned before, the CEO of Atreo and my VP strategy, Shira Barekat, who was there, a veteran of the space. And then I was given the reins. I kind of was told, okay, start building stuff and pitch it to the CEO's yourself, and kind of think the whole concept through start to finish. And that's when I really started to find my, my place here.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:40]:
Something that I struggle with is like, I think we're in like the framework ofication era where everybody wants to, you know, there's a particular framework for positioning, right? Or there's a particular framework for naming. And actually, I always thought it was Atrio, but Atreo.

Ari Yablock [00:12:59]:
There you go.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:00]:
They did the first website for me for initially DGMG, and helped me create a brand and, and the style, and it was great. And it was actually a really interesting exercise that we did where they basically asked me a bunch of questions on the way in and then we kind of did a call that was interactive and I was asked to move some things in a PowerPoint on a slider to get a brief for me on how much risk. I don't know if risk was one, but how much of this do you feel versus this? Which style do you relate to? This or this? I really like that as an input on the way in, we also talked a bunch about brand archetypes and I think that's a useful exercise. But I also feel like the way that I think about things as a marketer is seemingly like how you came up with the name Island. You kind of just have an intuition and you have done this for a while and there's not necessarily a framework. Do you feel like you need to follow a framework to build a brand and to create the guidelines for something and to create this brand? Or what if you're just out on a walk one day and boom, you get the idea and that is the one liner that becomes the thing. I want to just talk about how much of this is art and how much of this is science and having a process.

Ari Yablock [00:14:12]:
Let's put it this way, you can't start from zero and just come up with as many good ideas as you can and hope one of them feels right. I don't think you could start from nothing. You have to know what you're searching for. But there is no formula. There is no, at least not that I'm aware of, GPT that you plug in the right questions and it will give you the answer. Here's your new strategic positioning, here's your narrative. It's never been done before. The nature of what we're doing, and maybe this is the point that I'm getting at.

Ari Yablock [00:14:42]:
The nature of what we're doing is I need to come up with a story around what I am offering the world that has never been told before, which reflects the fact that this is a product that you've never been sold before. So if I'm selling you something new, but the story is the same, or there is no story, then why do you exist? What are you doing here? So the story needs to reflect the newness of the thing that you're trying to sell. So by definition, there is no formula that gets you something new. That is the essence of creation. Something from nothing. So yes, you're putting different ideas together, usually the way great artists deal. You're usually finding ways to reinvent and reimagine ideas and concepts that are out there. But what you need to arrive at is something new, and if it feels the same, and I just, you know, I was in a couple meetings, we're working on some really big creative stuff moving forward, and the first thing I asked myself was, can other people say this? Can the brand next to me come up with the very same argument and it's believable? Then I can't do it.

Ari Yablock [00:15:46]:
I have to be honest there.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:47]:
I like that. As a litmus test. Can anybody else claim the thing that we're talking about? I feel like out of all the things we talked about, strategic positioning and category creation, the one missing ingredient I see in a lot of startups in this space is the differentiator. And what's hard is I don't think that a differentiator can be made up by the marketer. I think that it has to be embedded in the company's DNA. I think a marketer like you or me could come into a company and we could tell you some ideas of things that we might have. But I don't think that company is eventually going to work out. Whereas the successful companies that I've been around or advised or done consulting with, it's like the founders had a clear vision, or like in the example of Island, the enterprise browser does not exist.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:30]:
We are going to create that, and this is the category we're going to build.

Ari Yablock [00:16:33]:
Yeah. So I want to dive into that point because it's so important. We are not telling a story that doesn't exist. We're just trying to frame the existing story properly. And the existing story being why this company exists. You've talked about this, you wrote a book about this. With the case of Island, our product exists. If I could take just a few seconds to explain.

Ari Yablock [00:16:54]:
Our product exists because the world of enterprise work has shifted to web based work, which means it's all on a browser. And yet the browser, the one place where all work is happening, was never built for work. And that has caused enterprises to have to spend millions of dollars, hire entire it, and security teams do crazy hula hoop, backflip things just to get a browser to do the things that it would have done if it was designed for the enterprise to begin with. It's like, just retrofitting an example is like, imagine if you wanted to drive a Camry into a war zone. Like, what would you have to do to a Toyota Camry to make it ready for war, not to get military? It's a great car. It's the number one selling car year after year. It's just not for that. And what you need is a Humvee, right? Like, that's what you need.

Ari Yablock [00:17:44]:
Go get that, and then you're good. So that concept of, oh, if you build it in, if you design the browser so that it's doing what you want to do to begin with, your world just got simple. Your workspace is now natural. You're not doing anything unnatural to it. Suddenly, the story emerged from that. So now we're saying the words, the natural workspace work as it should be. You're building it in instead of bolting it on, which is the second section on our homepage. Right? Then we think of, like, this is the evolution.

Ari Yablock [00:18:15]:
We're going, instead of kind of this tack on environment, we're going a built in environment. That's where this phrase from, from our hero of the homepage works. Natural next step, which is something came up with down the hall, right, where we're bringing this evolution of work that's more natural, the way it's meant to be. And all of those decisions on our brands, including our color scheme, including our booth experience at a trade show, including the type of blog posts we choose to write about and the ones we don't, including our language. We don't use the word risks and threat, landscape and attacks. And we're a cyber company, right? So how could we delete that from our vocabulary? No, because we are the natural way to work. And if you are put yourself in the natural environment, then you're by definition, not at risk. And we wanted to put you in that world, draw you into that world and build it so that you're in it and full circle.

Ari Yablock [00:19:09]:
That's what category creation really is, building a world that other people can now live in.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:14]:
I love that. That's very good. By the way, did you, are you wearing your Island green headphones and Island green pulp matching shirt. Today you're very for the brand guy. You are very on brand.

Ari Yablock [00:19:24]:
I feel this pressure all the time to kind of show up the right way. There was one day I didn't like wear a logo shirt to meeting and I see I was like the brand guy, really? The brand guy.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:34]:
So, so what's the role of the brand guy? What do you own? What are your deliverables? Maybe what were the first initial deliverables joining the company. Because, you know, brand can touch everything. You gotta come up with the website. You got the website, you got the visual identity, you got the copy, you got the sales deck. There's, there's lots of things. And the role evolves over time. So maybe let's talk about what that initial role was and what is the role of a startup head of brand?

Ari Yablock [00:19:59]:
Sure.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:59]:
What's the job? Also, I think it's unique. I don't think everybody should go and hire a head of brand as a startup. I think just if we kind of replay your backstory, like you had a unique set of skills working at this agency that was helping this company and then there was an opportunity to go in house and own this full time. I think this, what you're doing was essentially my job as head of marketing at a, at a, you know, earlier stage company. But I think, I don't want people, I think, you know, this is the fun part about early stage marketing to me is like you can, you kind of gotta figure out the ingredients and make this thing up, up as you go. It's like, you know, Ari didn't need to be head of marketing or head of X. There was a unique match opportunity. But that aside, I do want to like dig into the deliverables and the things you, you do and create and take ownership of.

Ari Yablock [00:20:45]:
Yeah. So we, you know, our unique set of circumstances was we knew early on that brand would be even more important than lead gen and classic kind of marketing, funnel marketing functions. Because our enterprise sales team were having high level calls with cisos, we weren't going to go grab them on a display ad. We really needed to educate on a new story and the brand was going to do that. So that's very unique. Most startups get going and saying, hey, we need people clicking on stuff and buying stuff and that wasn't my job because we didn't need that as much as we needed to build this story out. So the first steps was we needed to decide on a category. Enterprise Browser was a conversation that we had among leaders and I was in that room, and we had other options, and we needed to come up with that.

Ari Yablock [00:21:33]:
Then we needed to build the strategic narrative around it. The story, the one that I pitched a few minutes ago of the browser is where work happens, but it was never designed for work. That was a story that I wrote on a Google Doc that we needed to vet with our founders and our executive leadership at the time. And we started to turn that into the basis for essentially what become our homepage and our sales deck and our pitch and, and all that, obviously different variations and dialing it up and down.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:01]:
Oh, I love that. This is how I work. This is similar way how I work. I always struggle to, like, go right into the deliverable. Like, I think I don't like the format of, like, going to build the deck first. I always kind of write out, like, a script and almost a narrative, and I like to, like, socialize it with everybody, get them on board. Then that gets translated. And I like this even more than, like, a positioning framework.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:22]:
I like to just write it all out. Hey, let me just tell the room, like, hey, I want to. I want to read something to you. I like to read it. I like, like, literally, like a script. I'm like, let me read. I'm already excited. You're the founder at our report to.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:33]:
I want to read you something I wrote. Like, we're talking about defining our category. I want to read you something and I'm just going to. I want you just to shut up for a little bit. I'm going to read it, and then we're going to talk about where this go. And I'll get your feedback, incorporate that feedback. Then you go and then create the sales deck. Create the website.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:47]:
Because I feel like people get stuck on each of those deliverables and, like, the website is going to be different than the sales deck and the sales deck is going to be different than maybe like, the boilerplate. And, like, you get too into the details, and I feel like the delivery vehicle often ruins the overall story. So much of our, like, early success at drift in writing the narrative was literally David, the CEO, and I in a room. He's pacing back and forth. I'm like, his, he's the president. I'm the speech writer. You know, he's a pacing back and forth, and we're going line by line writing this thing out. So is that, is that what you did? Was this like, your, your Don Draper moment? Like, let me, let me read you this script that I wrote to the room of the founders.

Ari Yablock [00:23:25]:
It existed in some form like that. Now I have a founder who's just a master of storytelling and of sales. He's just a killer. I don't know. I've never met anyone like him. Mike Fay. So he had really strong storytelling skills before I showed up. And what I did was refine that.

Ari Yablock [00:23:45]:
I wanted us to choose words. I want us to make decisions. What not to say, which I say over and over again, is such an underrated part of branding. We will not say these words. We will not say the story this way. We will choose this, say this part before that part. All of those are decisions that we needed to kind of concretize. And, yes, there was a pitch of this story to the founder.

Ari Yablock [00:24:09]:
He gave me some notes. He said, I like this. I don't like that. We decided on it, and we even turned it into an early video of him kind of presenting it with a PowerPoint behind him. And then it started to go from there into, okay, does this turn into a messaging map? Does this turn into the skeleton for our homepage, like we just said? So there was that moment. And this does really validate the idea that I've heard over and over on this podcast, which is the story, is the strategy. How do you not start with the words you choose to tell the story? You know, there's. The building blocks of what I learned at Atreo is like this.

Ari Yablock [00:24:45]:
You cannot delete that from the process. If you want to talk about frameworks, like, you cannot get rid of that. If you want to come up with an original idea, it has to fit into a narrative, or else you're just saying, we're better or we're faster, or you're just. You can't start the conversation.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:00]:
All right, so you start with this initial Google Doc, this script. You also mentioned another important key ingredient, which I also think dictates your role, which is, like, a strong founder who's really good at sales and master storytellers who are trying to channel that. Then. Then what? How does this go from you writing a narrative into Google Doc to, like, the sales deck, the website? What. What is the. Let's. Let's dive into the things that you are responsible for as head of brand?

Ari Yablock [00:25:26]:
Sure. The next two big things that I was directly responsible for building was the website and our launch video, which is essentially our story, just with an animated visualization around it. Those, obviously are table stakes to get off the ground. We needed people to know that we're a legit entity, and that if you wanted to find out what we were doing in two minutes or less. We had an easy destination for that right there. The sales deck had already been a work in progress quite a bit because there had been a lot of talks with investors and with early cisos and executives around this idea. This was a year in the making before we were even in stealth mode. We were in pre stealth mode shopping this idea around before I showed up.

Ari Yablock [00:26:13]:
So I had the luxury of walking in and saying, okay, there's already some skeleton work here to do. But we started to use that story framework as the first, I call it the narrative section of the sales deck, and we optimize the messaging there around that. So we have our sales deck, we had our website, which was our homepage, our product page, our about page. We didn't have a blog yet, and we had our press page because we were going to be launching with some press. And then we had the video launching. Those were kind of like the first staple assets you need. If you don't have that hard to convince people that you're running a company.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:50]:
How do they know if you're doing a good job?

Ari Yablock [00:26:54]:
They have to feel good about it. They have to feel good. They, as in my stakeholders, the founders, the leadership team, that this represented them well. The strongest answer to that is if it was founded on a strong and a solid foundation of strategy, then you know what youre doing makes sense. You know what youre doing has logic to it, has strategy behind it, and ultimately there is no alternative that you can say has a statistically higher likelihood of working over this. Ultimately, it does come down to belief and maybe a good segue and a plug. Im about to launch a podcast called believe in brand because it does come down to, you need to know what youre believing in and go forward with that because you wont be able to measure it before its out there. You need to know why youre doing something.

Ari Yablock [00:27:45]:
Build off of that. I could give you a framework around that, like why you know it works and actually drawing from the world of psychology, if youre up for that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:53]:
Yeah, lets do that. Yeah, please.

Ari Yablock [00:27:55]:
There is something in the world of psychology called CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. Its one of the most commonly used therapies right now to treat anxiety, depression, and a whole list of common mental health issues. And I believe that is the perfect framework for knowing you have a good brand. And I call it cognitive behavioral branding. And the way it works is as follows. It's actually quite simple. Think about a triangle. The top of the triangles are actions.

Ari Yablock [00:28:23]:
One other corner of the triangle is our feelings and the third corner is our beliefs. This is a cycle that we are constantly going through. Our beliefs influence our feelings, our emotions, which influence our actions. So the way to change an action, right, of, let's say every time I see someone walking down the street I have social anxiety. I cross the street just so that I don't walk near them. I can't just say, don't do that anymore, that doesn't work. I have to change the way I feel when I am in that situation. But I can't just tell myself to feel differently.

Ari Yablock [00:28:54]:
That's not how people work. What I have to do is really change the way I believe in that situation. I believe someone's going to look at me and laugh at me if they see me on the street or someone's going to insult me because of that. When I walk near them I feel anxious. Because of that I cross the street. So if I'm able to change my belief, actually I have some self worth, actually I don't think anyone's going to hurt my feelings today because it doesn't matter what they say, right? There are all sorts of ways to change beliefs. Then I will feel differently and then I'll behave differently. And imagine how you could apply that framework to branding.

Ari Yablock [00:29:31]:
All we're doing in marketing is trying to influence behavior. I need to get you to click on stuff so that you enter my pipeline, so that you become a qualified lead, so that we can get you on some sort of buyer journey, so that I could tell my board that marketing money is well spent. Right. All that starts with action. But I can't just get you to act. I got to get you to want to act. I got to influence your feelings. But I can't just tell you to want to act.

Ari Yablock [00:29:53]:
I have to influence your beliefs and your beliefs are I think I need this. I think this is the future. I think I can't continue the way I have gone until now. These are all things that I could believe and when I believe it, I will feel something about it and when I feel something about it, I will do it. It's just science, it's how we work. And that's really where I could test how I used to test. Is this a good strategy? Is this getting me to believe differently or is this just getting me to superficially act differently? Because then I'm not really building a category or putting a different position in the market out there. I'm just trying to get you to click and it's not going to work.

Ari Yablock [00:30:31]:
It's not sustainable. That's one way that I say to myself, is this working or not?

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:35]:
Then over time you'll obviously be able to measure adoption of this category. Like the more people searching for enterprise browser, the more enterprise browser gets mentioned in certain reports and articles, the more people coming inbound and mentioning the need for this thing. I think the signals become a little bit more obvious. But I asked about measurement. But also I feel like when you're doing something like creating a category here, the measurement is going to be, is going to come down the road. It's not a short term thing. It's like everyone has to be bought in. I think I've seen smaller startups make mistakes where you kind of are playing whack a mole.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:11]:
This goes back to what we talked about the beginning whack a mole with category creation. It's like, let's try this category. Okay, it wasn't that let's try this category. It's like this company is built around the idea of enterprise browser. That is not going to change.

Ari Yablock [00:31:24]:
Exactly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:25]:
Maybe how the website looks and feels, that's going to change. But this is why I always said that quote that I have, which is lifes too short to work for a CEO who doesnt get marketing. So much of marketing success is about the founders and executives and whoever runs the company being bought in and bought into a long term, seeing marketing as a long term strategy. Thats why you were brought in as head of brand in the early days. It wasnt to get the first customers, it was to create this long lasting brand that youll have. Let's talk about the definition of brand a little bit. In your role. Do you own like the visual side of this brand also?

Ari Yablock [00:32:03]:
So we have a brand design team that the best way of defining it is they're adjacent to me. I don't manage them in the sense that they work under me, but I manage their projects, I manage what they work on. And yeah, design goes hand in hand with our brand strategy and messaging and, you know, the decisions we make around how to present ideas visually across social, across content. Experience is a big part of our design as a brand. You know, how we show up at trade shows. Our company specifically has a big emphasis on showing up face to face events. We do literally several hundred events a year, which is insane to even say out loud. And how our brand shows up in those events is key because they get to feel like they're stepping into our world, like I said.

Ari Yablock [00:32:51]:
And design is a huge part of that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:53]:
So design is a huge part of it. They work in parallel to you. If you have a project, ultimately, if you as a company wanted to change the look and feel of the website, would you be leading that project? Would that project come to you as head of brand to lead and then change with the creative team as your partner?

Ari Yablock [00:33:12]:
Yeah, that would be me and the design lead and our CMO kind of agreeing that we need to go in a new direction or it's time. And we just did that recently with our kind of rebranding of our homepage and ultimately our website.

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:24]:
Got it. So brand is. There is the visual side of brand, but there's also, I don't know if it's lowercase b, capital b. There's also brand which I think of as like the company's reputation. And I think what's cool about your role as head of brand, it's not like you're not head of branding, you're not head of, you know, you're not in charge of the colors and the fonts. You were head of the brand, which I interpret that as the company's reputation. Do you have a way that you define brand? Because I often will find myself in the middle of discussions about brand marketing, which is like, there's kind of multiple definitions of these things. There's like brand marketing, which people see as like, doing billboards, but then there's brand, which is the reputation of the company.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:07]:
Maybe you seem like a very thoughtful guy, like, can we, can we try to define brand in this context for people?

Ari Yablock [00:34:13]:
Yeah, I think there's like one comfortable way and one uncomfortable way I think about it. The comfortable way is I would, you know, I like to use the words brand strategy together and maybe let's just take the word brand out of it for a second. I know that's a loaded word strategy, but that's really what it's about. Like, strategy just means what is the deliberate course of action or set of actions that we're going to take for how we are going to present ourselves to the outside world visually? Is one part of it the sales deck? Why are we even talking about a sales deck in a brand conversation? Why? Because that is the strategy for how we communicate value, why we need to exist and why you need to give us your money. All of these touch points really come back to why the strategy. I like to also call it the soul, which isn't reputation, is the outcome. If you know someone's what they are, in their essence, your soul, it's just who they are. It's even harder to define which is why it's uncomfortable to talk about that in a business context.

Ari Yablock [00:35:11]:
No one really used that word, but I like it because it's like the less tangible stuff, the less measurable stuff. It doesn't weigh anything, but it's there and you know it, because you, you could kind of get right to the essence of it. And it's easy for me to think about what I do that way.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:26]:
What else should we talk about as it relates to. To brand? I got some questions, but I want to give you an opportunity to help me drive a little bit.

Ari Yablock [00:35:33]:
Yeah, sure. So I just talked about today on LinkedIn. Put a thought out there called the 2080 rule. We know the 80 20 rule, right? Of like, 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:46]:
Pareto principle.

Ari Yablock [00:35:47]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, like, to me, there's a 2080 rule with brand, which is many people think that the way to build a brand is to just have a brand, and as long as you have it, it's good. But thats the 80% thats like, everyone is doing 80% of brand. You pick the color, you pick the tagline. Its great. Its not great. Its there. You picked a position, whether it was really thought out or not.

Ari Yablock [00:36:11]:
Everyone has one. You go to a trade show, everyone thought of something. Its the last 20% that defines whether you have a brand or not, whether the rest of that 80% is actually a brand. And the last 20% is, did you build this identity into the very fabric of everything you do? Did you go as far as to think, my headphones should be green? Right. Did you go as far as thinking, like, what are we giving out at a dinner party? If my brand as a person, what am I giving out at a dinner party? As kind of like a nice little gift? Is it a squeeze ball? Right. Is it a stress ball? Probably not. So then why are we all giving out stress balls? Right. So if you think about it all the way to the end of who am I? What kind of behaviors do I do? What are the accents around my brand? That's when people start to notice everything.

Ari Yablock [00:37:03]:
Before that, people don't notice your brand because you just exist and nothing more than that. And it's really that last 20%, as opposed to the first 20 that are the brands that we remember that they thought of the way the box opens on the iPhone. Right. And all of that was just extra thinking that no one else thought mattered. And yet, turns out it matters more than everything else. Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:25]:
And I mean, you're in the position to do that. Right. Like as a, this is the back to the point of category creation. If you were a small bootstrapped little SaaS app, like you'd have to make some trade off decisions and be like, ah, that's probably not worth us. But if you're Island and you have this big ambitious vision of creating a category, creating the enterprise browser, you know, you've raised $300 million in funding to obviously have some type of ten x multiple on that. Then that's the playbook. I do find like earlier stage startups, they're kind of, you can't really play in between both of those things. You have to decide like are you the scrappy startup and you're going to go for this? You know, here's the outcome you're looking for, or you have to be intentional.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:08]:
I see kind of people like they want to do what Island is doing, but they don't have the long term 1020 year vision and funding and ambition to go and do that. And so you gotta really be intentional about the stage and opportunity you have. Right. I think that's probably what drew you to the company. It wasn't like, yeah, we're gonna build this browser app and we're gonna try to flip it in two years and come help us do that.

Ari Yablock [00:38:31]:
Yeah, I mean the story was kind of built in. I saw it from the very beginning that this was meant to be significant. And I think that's an important word. I are you selling a product or are you trying to make a significant change in the world? And usually a founder, usually founders are thinking the latter and the product is just the means of making a significant change. Especially if they're repeat founders, right? If they're 2nd, 3rd founders who are still early in their startup, they're still thinking, I'm doing this because something matters here, something needs to change here. And that's why I think I don't fully believe what I'm about to say. But it's like you either get it or you don't. Do you know what I mean? Like you either get that brand starts from day zero or you get it way too late and then at some point you're just paying pentagram to like slap on a skin on your brand and you hope that people believe it, right?

Dave Gerhardt [00:39:25]:
Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, you get it or you don't. I'm building a company. We're not investing in brand at the level that say Island is. But I believe in brand. And for me, brand is how we act, how we talk, the type of things that we do, like we have a brand at Exit Five. It's different than brand at the stage of Island, and I don't have a framework for that, but I've just been doing it and I have a vision for what I want us to do and a certain level of expectation, and I want it to sound like this and look like this. And yeah, you either get it or you don't.

Dave Gerhardt [00:39:54]:
Two follow ups for you. This will be interesting for people. One discussion that, one question that comes up often is the use of the word enterprise when selling to the enterprise. And it's something that you all have used quite intentionally.

Ari Yablock [00:40:08]:
Yes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:09]:
What's your recommendation or advice there? My friend Pranav runs a company called Paramark, and they're a measurement and attribution startup. And he had once asked for some advice about, like, hey, we're going after enterprise. Like, do we say enterprise? Do we not? Do we not? So I'm kind of asking, I want to hear how you arrived at that conclusion for this business.

Ari Yablock [00:40:27]:
Sure. So there are a couple of important kind of like, signals we needed to take in to make this decision. Enterprise is like an old word. It's not a sexy word, it's not a modern word either. We were using it because we wanted to intentionally move away from certain other words, and we wanted to send a certain signal to who we were talking to. We wanted to move away from the concept of secure browser, of bottling ourselves up with just being a security offering, because it's way bigger than that. And we've heard our customers say, whoa, I thought you guys were just like an extra secure browser. That's just the beginning.

Ari Yablock [00:41:08]:
And we needed to send the signal that this was something that influenced all business operations. Like everything you were doing in your business and enterprise was essentially saying your whole thing, the whole organization is going to benefit from this. And that was an important point. And the word enterprise also was talking to the size of the company we were going after. This was going to be the most beneficial, the most value is going to be delivered. The bigger the enterprise you were. There was another competitor that came out that called themselves the corporate browser to me, that had all of the bad things of what enterprise is and none of the good things, because corporate just means old and boring and buttoning the top button and nothing else besides that. Enterprises, it should just be signaling, this is the size company that I want to target.

Ari Yablock [00:41:59]:
This is the level of business that I want to ask for when I'm going for budget line. And for us, it was, I want to separate from some misconceptions around being just a security browser or just solving certain use cases and not others.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:14]:
Let's talk about your core. Are you selling to it security developers? Who are you selling to?

Ari Yablock [00:42:22]:
This is such a good conversation. We initially targeted the chief security officer, CISO. They had the most immediately to gain because everything they were doing was just too expensive. The stack was way too big. What would happen in the sales process was we would get on the phone with the CISO, their minds would be blown, and then they would say, I cant authorize a browser purchase. Thats asking the entire organization to change their browser. That's an it decision. Even if I get value out of this, I need to bring the CIO into this conversation.

Ari Yablock [00:43:00]:
And then we have the CIO get in on the next demo, and we've literally had companies who are in the procurement process, and the only step left was arguing over whose budget this was going to come out of because it benefited them equally. So it's a weird problem to have, but it's almost a blessing. We'll take that problem. But, yeah, this started as a security kind of sell, but it's way bigger than that now.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:23]:
Do you feel like that Persona? Is that going to dictate how you do marketing? So, for example, selling to marketing and sales is going to look and feel different than selling to that audience. Do you feel like that plays an important role in defining this brand?

Ari Yablock [00:43:37]:
Absolutely. We've had conversations about this where there are certain executives that care more about day to day and just need you to explain to them how this is going to, bottom line, benefit them on a day to day level. And there are other executives that are the visionaries that their goal is to kind of make their mark on the company. And they often, they know, like, I'm here for four years. I want to, I want to hang my hat on something, right, whether there's an actual deadline or not. But we needed to decide, do we want to be visionary in the type of change we're bringing to your entire organization, or did we want to lead with a message that was more boots on the ground? Heres what changes for you tomorrow. Here are all the objections that you have that we could solve for you right now that we could get out of the way. We really need to do a mixture of both.

Ari Yablock [00:44:28]:
But we started at the highest level because our CIO, we made a decision. That person needed to get the signal that this was a big, revolutionary change for them, and we needed to get their attention on that. So our hero of our homepage had that vision. And then we immediately brought them in the weeds of heres what this is going to do for you. So we had to balance those two things out immediately.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:51]:
All right, Ari, this was great to have you on. I got a bunch of notes. Im excited we did this. I got early stage brand building. We talked about naming. We talked about bringing a new concept to the market. We talked about the role of head of brand. Strategic positioning and category creation, selling to security definition for brand.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:08]:
The importance of the color green. Green is. Green is a good. Isn't there like some psychological, like green means like wealth and happiness or something like that, right? Growth, safety.

Ari Yablock [00:45:17]:
Yeah, growth.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:18]:
Green is.

Ari Yablock [00:45:19]:
And green was natural. It was. It was perfect for us. Talking about the natural place for work. So there was a hand and a hand in there.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:26]:
Love that. Well, good to see you. I heard, I heard a rumor that you might be joining us for drive in September, which is a big deal. But you're in Tel Aviv. It's nighttime. We could have done a whole podcast on your six children, but we'll save that for, for another episode. Looking forward to meeting you in person. I'll see you in September.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:44]:
Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Ari Yablock [00:45:46]:
Appreciate it. Yeah, I can't wait.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:48]:
We'll put your LinkedIn here. People connect with you, send you nice notes, and I'll see you around the community. Right.

Ari Yablock [00:45:52]:
Appreciate it, Dave.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:53]:
All right.

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