Why SurveyMonkey Brought The Monkey Back
Reenactment: The town hall announcement of the unbrand and return of the monkey!
Katie Miserany is CCO and Global Head of Marketing at SurveyMonkey, and a member of our Exit Five Executive community. She came up through comms and has been at SurveyMonkey since 2019, through the public company years, the pandemic, a rebrand, a failed acquisition, and going private. She says it feels like twenty years of experience in just seven.
I usually hear a list like that as multiple reasons to leave a company, but Katie sees it differently: smooth seas never made a skilled sailor.
All that change kept her learning. Along the way, then-SurveyMonkey CMO Leela Srinivasan planted the idea with Katie that she could lead marketing one day, and introduced her to Shannon Brayton, LinkedIn’s former CMO who had also made the jump from comms. Shannon didn’t want the marketing job at first, but she ended up loving it, and told Katie she would too.
About a year ago, Katie went for the role, and that’s what brings us here today: a few of her early lessons from running marketing at a 27-year-old brand.
1. Be the monkey in a sea of AI so your brand stands out
With a 27-year-old brand, comes challenges and baggage. Katie recalled a period during the publicly traded years when sales worried that nobody would spend six figures with a company called SurveyMonkey - so the enterprise solutions moved under the brand name Momentive to create tailwinds.
But when the company went private in 2023, the new CEO Eric Johnson’s first act was to bring the monkey back. Katie was in the town hall with him and could hear the cheers down the hall. Which makes sense, because in the AI era - and what Katie calls the great flattening of affect and tone - it’s better to be the brand with the monkey in it.
When Katie took over marketing, she made the number one priority “be relentlessly helpful and relentlessly us.” This raised the question: what does it mean to sound, look, and act like a serious, results-driving company called SurveyMonkey?
The rollout campaign: Today’s SurveyMonkey
The answer was to lean into the fact that there’s a monkey in their name, and to do the things they’ve earned the right to do as a reputable brand. They don’t need the sheen and shine of Momentive anymore, because being themselves makes them stand out more.
For Katie, this started with curiosity, an essential trait shared by monkeys and humans alike. According to their own State of Curiosity report, they found that:
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95% of people describe themselves as curious. Only 30% of workplaces strongly reward it, because people think asking questions slows you down, even though skipping them means redoing the work.
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They launched the report at the start of summer and put it everywhere, from podcasts to the homepage. Then they brought it to life with the world’s most uncurious meeting, a 90-minute meeting run by an LA improv troupe, live on LinkedIn, that decided absolutely nothing. (Love this, because if I get even an hour-long meeting invite, I’m already dreading it.)
Katie said the campaign was fun, different, and unique in a way all brands need to be thinking about right now. In a sea of AI sameness, standing out as a brand is as good as gold. The campaign also primed the market for the rebrand with a fresh approach during their seasonal slowdown. A year from now, success means knowing the monkey is resonating and breaking out of that sameness, so they can keep building on it.
Today’s SurveyMonkey: in Katie’s words, the brand now feels warmer, sharper, more human, and so much more like who we are today.
2. Perception problem? Show the new you to counter what buyers think they know about you
SurveyMonkey doesn’t have an awareness problem. Almost everyone knows the name. Katie says the problem is that people are anchored on what SurveyMonkey was in 2009, the same way Zoom’s buyers remember the free, work-from-home version. People know the brand, but they haven’t seen inside the product lately.
For a brand everyone knows, the job isn’t getting the name out there. It’s disrupting the pattern of thinking buyers already have. An earlier-stage or lesser-known company still has to build that baseline, but it all starts with knowing what buyers believe about you today.
So the new homepage opens with a look inside the product, and the headline, Humans still matter. Listen to them. Katie’s take is that LLMs are mostly great at finding the average, so real feedback from real people matters more than ever if you want to make choices unique to your business. From there, the team runs what Katie calls lightning strike moments, big, specific swings designed to replace the 2009 picture with the one they want buyers to have now.
The new homepage hero is a look inside the product, because people know SurveyMonkey, but they haven’t seen inside the product.
3. Learn your buyer’s secret handshake so they see themselves in your ads
The new homepage bento grid lets personas with various goals click through their own path.
For years, the pitch was the Swiss Army knife: SurveyMonkey makes great surveys and forms, and you figure out what to use them for. Katie says they maxed out on that. Their higher-value customers are specific personas like HR, marketing, and CX, so instead of selling an HR leader on employee surveys, they sell the employee experience program and the benchmarks inside the product, with impressive early results.
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73% increase in click-through rate when SurveyMonkey moved from generic “surveys are powerful” ads to ads targeted at HR leaders.
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People don’t want generic marketing, especially if they think they know you. (Take my whole Instagram feed for example: other 40-year-old dads working out early in the morning.) Work products are the same: it has to speak to me, and I have to believe you get it.
Her team calls this knowing the buyer’s secret handshake, meaning their language, their vibe, and what they care about. To learn it, they dedicated a PM to HR and pressure-test their messaging with their own chief people officer and CFO. (I used to do the same thing at Drift. We were selling to CFOs, so I’d sit down with ours and try to crush every objection he had.)
As Katie puts it, moving from horizontal to persona marketing means moving from a shallow customer understanding to a very deep one.
That’s it right there - be memorable enough to get noticed and specific enough to get trusted. That’s how SurveyMonkey is winning bigger buyers with a monkey in its name. As Katie put it, they need to lean into the monkey now. It’s what makes them different. More on these takeaways and beyond in the full pod with Katie on YouTube.
– Dave
P.S. What’s the weird thing about your brand you secretly love? And for my SaaS folks, what’s the best win you’ve had from persona marketing, or from just showing people the product early? Hit reply, I read every one.
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