This morning, we made the exciting announcement that our company has a new name: Skai (pronounced just like sky). At Kenshoo, we’ve evolved our brand several times before with logo updates, new taglines, messaging and more. I’ve even been around to lead a few of those. But this time—it has to be said—is different. This time, we’re not just changing our look, but our name. This time, we’re not just changing our message, but our mission.
The name Kenshoo is wordplay based on Japanese terms for strength and enlightenment, and in that vein, since its founding, Kenshoo has been focused on helping brands to both recognize and realize their potential. Our earliest clients (many of whom we are still humbled to service) were design partners that helped shape the performance marketing execution products for which Kenshoo became industry-known, and they included household name brands that pioneered ecommerce—think: Zappos, Macy’s, eBay, Expedia.
As consumer behavior evolved, shifting the balance from offline to on, Kenshoo has empowered brands to keep pace with solutions for engaging audiences as intelligently and efficiently as possible on varying digital channels. Along the way, we’ve had a front-row seat to strategic conversations about the more existential challenges many brands face today.
And in the course of those conversations Kenshoo did something I consider to be pretty smart—we listened. What we heard: Leveraging data in a privacy-safe, post-cookie, walled-garden-dominant universe is easier said than done. Owning customer relationships is a wildly new discipline to brands making the pivot from traditional retail. Understanding the online-offline connection with an omnichannel customer is impossible to track. Communication and collaboration between product, marketing, shopper marketing and fulfillment is practically nil. Optimizing the channel mix between retail, D2C and Big Tech platforms is a Netflix special-grade unsolved mystery.
When competition is rife—and thanks to the digital shelf, it is, in nearly every product category today—go-to-market decisions are higher stakes. There’s little margin for error, and when data, processes and teams are disjointed, error abounds.
Intelligence is the glue.
So we’ve been laser-focused on it. Acquiring Signals Analytics earlier this year allowed us to connect rich internal and marketing data to a powerful breadth of external sources, numbering in the tens of thousands. From this comprehensive base, we can, of course, enrich our marketing execution applications with better smarts. But we can also do so much more, addressing the needs for agility and connectivity between the stages of go-to-market that come both BEFORE and AFTER marketing execution for better planning, and accurate measurement.
Rebrands are tricky things, especially with already well-established companies, like Kenshoo. We arrive at this moment strong. But as proud as we are of the company we’ve built, we’re even more so of the one we’re building. Skai’s footprint within your organization will be wider than was Kenshoo’s, and our sole aim is that each function—data analytics, consumer insights, product and, yes, all facets of marketing—will be more strategic and successful for it.
Our promise is smarter, faster go-to-market for better commerce outcomes. The brands that can achieve it are probably the only ones we, as consumers, will remember in a few years’ time. The ones that ride the wave of change and get there first will pave the way, creating the norm for everyone else—but in the process they’ll dominate markets and win hearts and minds for the long haul.
The skai’s the limit, and we’re here to help.
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