We had the pleasure of talking to Oren Ezra, Chief Marketing Officer at K2View, about the K2View brand and the role of a domain name in branding today.
What is the story behind K2View?
In 2009, 2 techies decided to leave the telco world and open up their own startup. Achi and Rafi didn’t quite know what they would do, but with roots in the farmland of northern Israel, they did know that they wanted the company to stand for: Fairness – to its employees, partners, and customers.
Today, K2View is a data management company renowned for its innovation. Our 200 employees enable some of the largest enterprises to become more data-driven, and much more agile – thanks to our revolutionary way of looking at data.
We developed a disruptive platform that organizes big data into millions of Micro-Databases™, where each micro-DB integrates all the data, across all source systems, for a specific business entity. This is the core of our technology, and it’s the secret sauce behind our data fabric.
When did you start thinking about your brand name? What was the reason to get the domain name K2View.com for your brand?
K2 is the second-highest mountain in the world (after Everest) and is reputed to be the hardest to climb. Those Himalayan peaks are at the same height as airliners fly, so, theoretically speaking, from their summits you can see the entire world.
That’s analogous to the monumental challenge that enterprises face in organizing their “big data mess” – integrating the massive volumes of data fragmented across hundreds of systems, formats, and technologies, and then making the data easily accessible to anyone in the company, whenever, and wherever, they need it.
Those enterprises that “make it to the top”, however, gain a true 360-degree view of their business. With K2View, they get to the top incredibly fast. They benefit from a holistic, trusted, and real-time view of their customers, suppliers, products, stores, and so on – to make timely and informed decisions, and enjoy a sustainable competitive edge.
How has owning K2View.com affected your business? Do you own any other domain names?
The great thing about our domain name is that its meaning is not obvious, which means that it almost always spurs a conversation. We’ve found that customers relate to the story right away, especially if they are avid mountaineers!
How has K2View evolved as a brand since it was launched?
For the past 11 years, the K2View brand has been in stealth mode, with the company operating via word of mouth alone. With 100% year-over-year growth, and enterprise customers like AT&T, DirecTV, Farm Credit, Hertz, and Verizon, that’s quite an accomplishment.
Until 2021, the company has been focusing all of its investments into making its product the best on the market – and into enabling its customers to succeed in a big way.
After the 2020 funding round, management decided to pay back its marketing debt to the enterprise industry. To strengthen the company’s go-to-market efforts, a newly formed marketing department was tasked with turning K2View from an unknown, into a well-known.
But we didn’t start from scratch. The K2View brand already had an excellent reputation, and a strong foundation (just ask any of our enterprise customers) – all we had to do was add some shape, color, and careful positioning to tell our remarkable story.
The K2View logo is now circular, to symbolize the critical elements of our positioning: 360 degrees, data continuity, and microservices. It also symbolizes our patented Digital Entity™ and Micro-Database™, the atoms, so to speak, of the business data universe. The circle is blue, which conveys innovation, clarity, and the limitlessness of the sky. And we made K2 more prominent because although it’s the hardest mountain to climb, the view from the top is truly panoramic and end-to-end.
We relaunched the refreshed brand in March of this year. Going on 6 months is too soon to tell, but, even in that short time, we’ve grown our site visits by more than 20% and increased Google keyword rankings, and social media followers, significantly. Best of all, we’ve generated some impressive qualified leads digitally, which are already impacting our sales forecast. Having said that, there’s still a long way to go. Let’s talk in another 6 months.
Why should entrepreneurs value their brand?
I’ll answer that question with a true story from our part of the world. Tesla, which began marketing in Israel just a few months ago, is now the fastest-selling car in the country. There are no showrooms, no ad campaigns, no sales reps, no test drives, and only one service center which, reportedly, can never be reached by phone. You order the car on your phone with a down payment of $150. The final price is an approximation, since taxes and duties may vary (to the tune of thousands of dollars).
You wait months for your ship to come in, and delivery can be delayed by many more months. Finally, you pick it up at the port yourself, clear customs, receive a 5-minute explanation on how to operate the car, and you’re on your own. So, after waiting 7 months, and then handing over $70,000, you’ve got your car – in a country with no experience with mass-scale electric vehicles, no recharging infrastructure, no resale statistics, and no service to speak of.
That’s the power of a brand. That’s why entrepreneurs should value their brands.
Has the pandemic affected your company in any way? What has changed since?
The pandemic forced us to be more creative in how we communicate and collaborate with our customers, vendors, and own staff. I was hired during the lockdown and built our marketing department from scratch during the last 9 months (until then, our marketing was outsourced to an agency). The entire team was hired during the thick of it. We started off by working at home, with daily video calls. Even now, we split our time between working at home and working in the office. In many ways, it’s made us incredibly agile. We now know that we can work anywhere and be effective.
What do you do to make sure your marketing is effective?
We are extremely data-driven, striving to combine science into the art of marketing, wherever possible. This enables us to make decisions with confidence, and be able to close the loop on our marketing efforts to understand what works, and where we need to improve.
To enable us to be data-driven, we have a MarTech stack that includes Salesforce, HubSpot, Demandbase, and SalesLoft – all of which are integrated, to provide us with a single source of truth at all times.
What would your advice be to entrepreneurs who are just starting out, in general, and when it comes to branding and naming?
Branding and naming are crucial assets that can really add value. In the long term, it pays to invest some serious effort upfront, because fixing mistakes can be a very costly business.
Branding and naming are crucial assets that can really add value. In the long term, it pays to invest some serious effort upfront, because fixing mistakes can be a very costly business.
Oren Ezra, Chief Marketing Officer at K2View
Where do you see your business in the future and how does your brand name fit into that vision?
K2View is definitely different – and we intend to play that differentiation for all it’s worth.
We see K2View becoming synonymous with real-time, high-performance, massive-scale, data management to our enterprise IT target persona. This includes data engineers, data scientists, and data consumers – as well as their bosses, and their bosses’ bosses.
We hope the above information will help you in making informed decisions about your brand. If you want to say hi or have any questions about naming, branding, and domain names get in touch, we’re always happy to hear from you.
Find out more about K2View
Previous Next