Renaming a public company is rare. Renaming one in the B2B technology sector is even rarer.
Earlier this year, Pure Storage became Everpure, marking the culmination of more than a year of work and a broader effort to reposition the company beyond its roots in enterprise storage. According to Everpure CMO Lynn Lucas, the company concluded that its brand no longer reflected the business it had become.
“Our business had advanced, but the brand had not,” Lucas said.
The rebrand arrives as AI is transforming both sides of the B2B equation. Enterprise leaders are investing heavily in data infrastructure and bringing more executive stakeholders into technology purchasing decisions. At the same time, marketers are grappling with a new reality in which buyers increasingly rely on AI tools to conduct research, compare vendors and shape purchasing decisions long before they speak with sales.
Lucas recently spoke with Chief Marketer about the company’s rebrand, how AI is changing marketing and why trust remains a critical differentiator in B2B.
Chief Marketer: Why remove “Storage” from the company’s name?
Lynn Lucas, CMO at Everpure
Everpure CMO Lynn Lucas: This was a business strategy to change the brand. Our company focuses on delivering storage and data platforms to B2B organizations, and we have been well on our way to adding to our capabilities over the last several years to extend into data platforms. Our brand was not keeping up in the way we expressed it visually, in the tone, and, candidly, in the name.
I worked very closely with the CEO and the founder. We did a lot of research and due diligence, and we ended up with a conclusion that, for the next 10 to 15 years, which is the timeframe that we think about the brand strategy, we would be better served to shift and move storage out of our name because of the expansion into data platforms.
That’s how we came to not just rebranding visually, but changing the company name to Everpure.
CM: How did AI factor into that decision?
Lucas: Today, data for enterprises is scattered in silos, and that makes AI extremely inefficient or downright ineffective. The value proposition we’re offering to organizations is to help them unify that data and provide context so AI can work more effectively. We believe that data is a company’s most important asset, and that factored largely in the brand.
We are an “as a service” business. This concept was taken into the entire brand strategy and architecture, starting with our name. Everpure was a combination of the equity we had in Pure Storage. “Pure” was well received, and then “ever” comes from our as-a-service evergreen subscription. That combination resulted in our name.
The way we express the brand is also based on the idea of an ever-evolving solution. That’s the differentiation in our platform. It is always evolving, always keeping up with the needs of the business. The more natural aesthetic, the softer-toned colors and how we talk about ourselves are coming through in that brand expression.
But we really didn’t do this because of AI. We did this because of the value proposition that we offer and the core tenets of what we do.
CM: The infrastructure and data platform market is crowded. How are you trying to stand out?
Lucas: We did a bunch of research. If you look at some of our primary competitors, they’re screaming loud colors in this industry. From a tone point of view, it’s more around the tech.
When we did research with the executives we are reaching, they’re interested in business outcomes. We believe that we are coming across in a very sophisticated but natural way that visually also differentiates us from the other brands that are in our industry
CM: How is AI changing the way your marketing team operates?
Lucas: AI is rewiring how we market and how buyers buy.
More than a year ago, I formed what we call “AIM” — AI for marketers. We had a couple of pillars. First is psychological safety. We’re using AI as a tool. AI is not here to replace you. It is here to make you a better marketer, allow you to do more of the fun things we love in marketing, and be more creative. The second was education on what could be done with the tools. We use Gemini and Claude. We also have a lot of AI capabilities in the tools we already have. As an example, we’re an Adobe customer, and they have a lot of AI capabilities.
Almost every marketer uses an agent on a day-to-day basis for copywriting or editing. We’ve taken all the new brand guidelines and put them into an agent — so that when someone’s writing, it is making sure that we’re on brand.
Many of my marketers write custom agents. For example, in product marketing, they’ve written a custom agent to take a look at our customer wins and synthesize the top three reasons we’ve won in a certain vertical or with a certain solution. And they keep that going, so we can update our value propositions. My creative teams use it to build websites very quickly or to enhance our video capabilities. It’s fairly embedded, and the next frontier is how to create some agentic AI to really streamline a workflow that might cross multiple departments.
The key is that we always have a human in the loop for everything. We’re very customer-centric and want to make sure we stay attuned to what we are doing from a messaging point of view. We don’t want to inadvertently do something that would hurt the brand as we reach out to our customers or partners.
CM: How are younger B2B buyers changing marketing strategies?
Lucas: I focus on making sure, first of all, that in our organization I have marketers who are that generation or younger. Because they know, especially in communications, what we need to do to speak that language. We’ve put our founder on TikTok in the last year and a half or so, and he’s quite popular there. We also know these buyers are very AI savvy, and we have a very strong program to ensure that now our buying committee is both humans and an agent.
We are focused on ensuring that the agents are part of the buying committee and that they receive the answers they need. As I talk to customers, they’re spending more time on research, and much of that is through AI.
The other main thing that I would say hasn’t changed, and in fact is increasing with younger buyers, is peer-to-peer references. We have a large customer marketing department because these younger buyers want to hear from their peers, and they want to hear from them on social. So we have a digital community, but they also want to hear in person. We focused on really fun meetups. That is another way that we can get our buyers talking to each other.
CM: How do you build trust with buyers making major technology investments?
Lucas: I love working here because our founder has kept the culture [focused on the] north star, “we always do right by the customer” in marketing. As it relates to the rebrand, what that meant is no brand works if it’s not authentic. When we went through the brand strategy principles, one of our pillars was how we continuously serve the customer in an agile, automated and intelligent way. It’s about a customer-centric approach.
We are bold in our language, but we are not arrogant. We are always focused on the benefit for the customer versus our technology. That’s been a shift in how we move the brand. The proof is in our NPS score of 84, which is higher than Apple’s, reflecting our customers’ trust.
We also put our founder and other chief executives in front of customers and make that public. Every quarter, we talk about how every employee is a brand ambassador and that we always need to think about how what we’re doing is positively impacting customers.
