Early in the year, HubSpot set out on an ambitious mission to reenergize the customer relationship management (CRM) space and become the go-to CRM partner for growing businesses. But their target, the enterprise CRM buyer, thought of HubSpot as a small business “starter” tool, rather than an enterprise software company. Their challenge was to convince people that HubSpot was the most powerful, capable, and easy to use CRM tool on the market by driving consideration of new users and shifting perception of the brand. In order to change that perception and claim the CRM crown they needed to go head to head with the de facto king in the CRM space, Salesforce, and prove they could grow any business.

UNLIKELY FOUNDER SUCCESS STORIES

We developed a flexible and extendable creative platform: HubSpot Success Stories. The concept flips the familiar business testimonial on its head by featuring a fantastical CEO disrupting the status quo in her own unexpected, unconventional industry. It’s a clever, memorable way to highlight product use cases and how HubSpot can help solve real business challenges. The charming and hilarious Kathryn Hahn was the perfect brand ambassador to bring aboard for the advertising campaigns – a talented character actor who is familiar to and loved by the target audience, and can convincingly play any “founder” under the sun. In HubSpot’s first-ever global brand campaign, Hahn demonstrates how a savvy pirate CEO uses HubSpot to scale her business across all seven seas in a way that’s more human and joyful for employees and customers.

While most respondents named Salesforce as their CRM recommendation, global research revealed an underlying frustration shared by almost all users: once signed on, they found Salesforce’s software was too complex for their teams to use and they weren’t getting the support they needed. Many were forced to hire third-party consultants to implement their Salesforce CRM software, stalling usage and slowing growth.

CRM category choice felt limited and not differentiated– same blue logos, same dull language, same solutions. Our target was craving something different– a more human approach to CRM that balanced product sophistication with ease of use.

Our approach? In a sea of complicated and blue CRMs, HubSpot is a vibrant, joyful orange beacon. HubSpot CRM is crafted with human needs at the core. The campaign positions HubSpot as an easy to use and powerful CRM that drives growth at any business, no matter how unorthodox the business may seem.

We made our customer the hero– highlighting their pain points and positioning HubSpot as their growth guide. We took the familiar business testimonial and flipped it, making it memorable with tales of fantastical, fictional, yet relatable HubSpot customers– like a pirate CEO scaling her business across seven seas.

We translated the RTBs into wit-filled pirate dialogue that struck the right balance between Pirates of the Caribbean and The Office, that called out our audiences' business challenges.

We aimed to outsmart, not outspend, the competition by showing up in other familiar places, in high-impact, unexpected ways– like a Fast Company takeover honoring Captain Hahn as one of the 50 Most Innovative Companies…in the actual 50 Most Innovative Companies issue. And a NYC ferry wrap designed to look like a pirate ship, flying its CRM flag high. This broadened the campaign’s appeal beyond targeted placements to make HubSpot a relentlessly relevant CRM.

Quickly after HubSpot’s first-ever global brand campaign set sail –

HubSpot overtook Salesforce, for the first time, as the number one peer-recommended CRM platform for Enterprise Usability.

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