How new company values support Contentsquare’s rebranding

January 30, 2025

Employee Spotlight: Sarah Deel, Senior Director Brand Strategy

In early November of last year, Contentsquare launched a new brand and updated its core values to better reflect the company. This rebranding coincided with the company's stronger market position after acquiring Heap and Hotjar.

Be daring
Be understanding
Be deliberate
Be simplifiers

→ are now the core values of Contentsquare.

Sarah led the way for renewing our company values. We asked her some questions to learn more about what the process was like and to understand her unique role in driving its implementation.

Hi Sarah, thank you for your time and accepting the interview. First question, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I started at Contentsquare 2.5 years ago as the Global Head of Brand. Since joining I’ve led our creative team, helped launch new products, led our social team, and just last year I co-led our rebrand that made its debut in November. Now I’m focused on leading our brand strategy efforts, including audience segmentation, messaging, and social. Before Contestsquare, I was at an ad agency leading brand work for Google, Charlotte Russe, and One Medical; and then I was at Twitter on the Product Marketing and Brand teams.

When creating new company values, do you consider the long term goals of the company, or are those aspects independent from one another?

Our rebrand wasn’t just for Contentsquare - it was a merging of three companies together. Contentsquare, Hotjar, and Heap all had distinct cultures, ways of working, and their own histories. As with any rebrand, we started by creating our new strategic foundation (which includes our values). And we did this with two core principles in mind. First, we knew we had to create a strategy that would represent the company we wanted to become years from now — and one that would help us get there. Second, we knew our company values needed to represent the culture and employees from all three companies. Our new values are aspirational because they represent the long term goals and vision of the company, while also balancing the current needs of our people and company culture.

What was the actual process like and what were some important factors you considered to ensure that the values resonate with all Contentsquare employees, especially given the acquisition of Heap and Hotjar?

We followed a rigorous and thorough process that involved “bottoms-up” and “top-down” feedback, along with many working sessions and brainstorms! It was a cross-functional effort with much of it also being driven by our People Engagement team. We looked at a variety of sources from all three companies: employee engagement surveys, Glassdoor reviews, existing company values, and previous research. From this we extrapolated a list of common organizational “needs” that we grouped into themes, which helped to define what our workforce values. So we started with this “bottoms-up” feedback from employees.

We cross-referenced the themes with our company vision, and then gave our executives a focused list of recommendations. After several working sessions with our executives, we honed in on four themes and created the first draft of values. This was the first time we incorporated that “top-down” feedback in the process.

We presented these to the workforce, alongside our plans for release and activation. Over the next several months, we interviewed 10% of employees for feedback on the draft values and ideas for implementation.

Why? We knew if we wanted the workforce to adopt and embody these values and new brand, they needed to trust they helped create it. To ensure we had a well-balanced representation of the organization and captured employee feedback throughout the process, we spoke with teams from each department and company at varying stages in their careers, and folks who had varying stages of employment tenor.

After completing the focus groups, we shared our findings with the executives, presented final values, and created activation plans for how we’d bring the new values to life across the company.

How do you ensure the CSQuad understands and embraces the new values?

Our hope is that since we included employees throughout the creation of the new values, they’ll feel a sense of ownership and desire to embrace them. In addition, we’ve released a series of activations to make them a tangible part of our new company culture. We’ve rolled out things like personal user manuals, meeting standards, and project governance tools, and we have more to come in 2025!

Is the intent to have these new values be our core values forever? Is that something you kept in mind when establishing them?

Since values are created alongside the rest of the elements in our brand strategy, they should last as long as the rest of the strategic elements are in place for the company. If the vision or direction for the company changes, that would be a natural time to reevaluate the values to see if they’re still the right fit for who we are as a company.

Given your huge involvement in this process, I assume that you are very much in alignment with and embody our new values., Which value resonates with you the most though?

“Be simplifiers” because it aligns so closely with our new brand positioning, and it’s the one I struggle with the most. I can sometimes over-communicate, so it’s a good personal challenge to try to make things as easy as possible for my peers. I always have a positive experience when someone makes something easy for me - whether it’s making it easy for me to do something, understand something, communicate something, etc. It’s not easy to simplify across timezones, cultures, and hybrid ways of working, but I’m learning and growing through it and I think that’s a good thing!

Since the launch of our new company values, we have identified behaviors that support our values and put into place actions to help activate these behaviors daily. These behaviors provide a guide for the practical application of values - they are short, memorable, and easy to act on. While the activations are initiatives designed to bring our values to life in our daily operations, systems, and processes, ensuring continuous reinforcement and alignment. Our new values are at the heart of everything we will build together. They are our north star guiding us every day as members of the CSquad.