In 2022, HubSpot set out on an ambitious mission to reenergize the customer relationship management (CRM) category and become the go-to CRM partner for scaling businesses. But their target audience of senior-level decision makers perceived HubSpot as a small business marketing automation tool, rather than an upmarket CRM software partner. HubSpot’s challenge was to shift perceptions and prove that a CRM platform can be powerful, seamlessly connect teams and customers, and easy to use for businesses of all sizes all for a better value, while driving consideration and awareness with prospects. To change that perception, it would have to go head to head with the leader in the CRM space, Salesforce. In 2023, HubSpot continued this ambitious mission with this latest campaign to consistently move the needle closer to its goals of increased awareness and CRM perception.

HubSpot strives to be an outlaw in its category – challenging the status quo in its engineering of its products and its go to market motions. It was important to reflect that in our creative work, differentiating the brand while staying true to our DNA. We developed a flexible and extendable creative platform: HubSpot Success Stories. The concept flips the familiar business testimonial on its head with a fantastical CEO disrupting an unconventional, unorthodox industry. It’s a clever, memorable way to highlight how HubSpot can help solve real business challenges and puts our customers at the center. Kathryn Hahn was the perfect brand ambassador, and she is loved by our target audience (confirmed by Infegy research). In this campaign, Hahn and her partner-in-crime Marcel (portrayed by TikTok personality and comedian Morgan Jay) demonstrate how HubSpot can help businesses grow better, this time as actual outlaws in the Wild West.

While Salesforce leads the category for awareness, global research revealed an underlying frustration shared by almost all users: once implemented, Salesforce’s software was too complex for their teams to use without the support they needed. Many were forced to hire expensive third-party consultants to implement their Salesforce CRM, stalling usage and slowing growth.

CRM category choice felt limited and not differentiated –same blue logos, same jargon, same solutions. Our target of senior-level decision makers were craving something different – a more human approach to CRM that balanced product sophistication with ease of use.

Our approach? Illustrate HubSpot as a helpful, humorous breath of fresh air. HubSpot CRM is crafted with customer 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 in a way that's easy to understand and entertaining.

We made our customer the hero and positioned HubSpot as their partner in growth. We reinvented the familiar business testimonial making it memorable with tales of fantastical, yet relatable, HubSpot customers – like an outlaw CEO scaling her business across the Wild West, speaking to our audience’s pain points.

All of this was in effort to outsmart, not outspend, the competition by showing up in high-impact ways where our consumers tend to over-index their time—like being the first B2B brand to execute a TikTok Top View Takeover in the US, positioning OOH in high-traffic business travel airports, retargeting and optimizing our OLV creative rotations based on consumer passion points.

Our suite of channel-specific assets felt native to each platform, thus breaking the norm for how B2B brands have gone to market throughout the funnel. This broadened the campaign’s appeal beyond targeted placements to make HubSpot a relentlessly relevant CRM.

Top of funnel demand (content leads + software signups) in Q1 '23 is up 19% vs Q4 '22

Focused CRM positioning is breaking through — Recognition of HubSpot as a CRM platform among those aware of the brand is at the highest levels ever at 65%.

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