Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer, Hopin

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Gainsight Former Chief Marketing Officer, Anthony Kennada on Category Creation

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Front Former Chief Marketing Officer, Anthony Kennada on Brand Strategy

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Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer

Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer

When creating a category how important is it to have a new title to sell into? Can you create a category with an existing role as main user?

Not critical. In fact, you may be better off launching a new category into an existing (and much larger TAM) than also taking the task of creating / expanding a smaller TAM. The work that Gong and Drift are doing within the sales and marketing community (respectively) is quite impressive. The ...more

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Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer

How do you differentiate "value proposition", "messaging", "pitch", and "story"? Do you see these as separate, complementary, the same thing, or else?

Interesting! I'll take a stab at it. My sense is that all of these fall under the parent bucket of messaging and positioning. Value Proposition is a subset of messaging that refers to the benefit of the feature or product or platform to the end user or economic buyer. What business impact can t...more

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Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer

What role should your brand story have in product roadmap planning?

The brand story ought to be the true north for the product strategy. There are so many competing priorities when it comes to setting the roadmap -- getting to feature parity with the competition, executing on customer requests, bug fixes, etc. -- the brand can serve as a useful filter and framewo...more

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Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer

What analyst activities actually help reinforce your brand differentiation vs are expensive and produce little ROI?

It may be a controversial pov, but my perspective is that the analyst community is getting disrupted by DTC user review sites like G2, TrustRadius, and the others. Customer voice is just as powerful as it's ever been, but now, there are increasingly more and more ways to access that customer voic...more

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Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer

How do you keep competitors from copying your product messaging so that your value prop stays differentiated?

This is an important question that points to the relationship between brand and product marketing in context of competitive strategy. Short answer, I wouldn't optimize around the competition -- as there's not much you can do in this case to prevent them from copying your messaging. The thing tho...more

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Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer

There is often a huge emphasis on analytical skills, instead of brand marketing skills, when it comes to product marketing job descriptions. What role does brand marketing play in product marketing?

I definitely appreciate this tension -- and in a perfect world you find the right mix of both on the team. Analytical skills will benefit our understanding of market sizing and opportunity, pricing and packaging decisions and so on. The "brand" or creative skillset would aid in storytelling aroun...more

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Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer

Brand marketing efforts usually get discredited because it's hard to measure revenue. How do you build a business case to invest in it, and what should you do first as a SaaS product?

I think anyone who discredits brand as a function of growth is living in an early 2000s era of B2B marketing that doesn't exist anymore. The truth is that behind every logo we are trying to sell to as vendors, is a human (crazy, I know). These humans have a job to do, and are trying to self-actua...more

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Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer

What would you rec highlighting in prod mar portfolio? Writing samples? Case studies? What would make a candidate stand out to you? Thx!

I think it depends on what sub-function of PMM you've excelled in (or are applying for). If more technically-oriented, I'd want to learn about a product launch that you've been a part of, walk through a set of messaging you've developed, and understand how you've worked closely with the product t...more

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Anthony Kennada

Chief Marketing Officer

How do you view the distinction between brand marketing and product marketing?

I think the two are very tightly correlated -- both are storytellers by nature, but telling stories at different parts of the funnel. A simple way to think about it is that brand is principally responsible for the "why" while product marketing owns the "who," "what," and the "how". Since people m...more

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Credentials & Highlights

Chief Marketing Officer at Hopin