Tune into the eighth episode of he MovotoMic featuring Karen Starns, a seasoned expert in marketing and brand building. With over 25 years of experience in technology, marketing, and brand strategy, Karen brings invaluable insights to the table. This episode is a must-listen for anyone in the industry looking to enhance their personal or professional brand. For more updates follow Movoto on Instagram @movotorealestate or download the Movoto app.Â
Full Episode:
Full Transcript:
Patrick: Hello and welcome to Movoto Mic, a new real estate podcast brought to you by Movoto.com. My name is Patrick Kearns. I’m an ex-journalist and 10-year vet of the real estate industry who’s currently working as Movoto’s head of communications. Here with me today, as always, is my associate Sophie Brandeis. Sophie, how are you doing today?
0:30
Sophie: I’m doing great, Patrick. I’m excited for our guest today because I actually met her about five years ago giving a campus tour to her and her daughter. So it’s sort of a full circle moment for me.
0:43
Patrick: That’s a great tease, Sophie. Who have you brought as our guest today?
0:46
Sophie: Coming onto the Movoto Mic today, we have Karen Starns. Karen has over 25 years of experience in technology marketing and brand strategy. Previously, Karen served as the Chief Marketing Officer at Ojo Labs and before that, she held executive positions at Amazon, Microsoft, and Pearson. Her expertise is in driving business growth, from building global brands to executing high ROI campaigns to driving innovation. She, like myself, is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and is serving as a lecturer in the McCombs School of Business Master of Science in Marketing program and was a past chair of its advisory council. Currently, Karen is the CEO of Houseful, a consumer real estate platform acquired by the Royal Bank of Canada in 2023. Welcome to the Movoto Mic, Karen.
1:29
Karen: Thanks, great to be with you both.
1:31
Patrick: So Karen, as Sophie’s intro very beautifully put, your career spans a lot of different tech companies, a lot of household names, a lot of big reputable brands. 25 years in tech, that to me is like before tech is what we think of tech today. So talk to me, like bring me back. How did somebody 25 years ago get started in tech? Why are you working in tech, working for some of these big brands? I know Amazon, Microsoft, Pearson. Talk to me about that.
2:04
Karen: Yeah, absolutely. So I was a marketing generalist coming right out of UT and really what kind of got me headed down this path and kind of deeply interested in sticking with marketing. I had the opportunity to lead a brand naming project pretty early in my career. That was the enterprise storage brand for Compaq Computer. Some of your listeners may remember Compaq, and that first project was disrupted by acquisition. So when Compaq acquired Digital Equipment, we also got their marquee brand StorageWorks. So that disrupted my project but essentially led to kind of brand portfolio and M&A rationalization being a thread in my career over the next 20-25 years. Now, I’m sitting in a CEO chair and we’ll probably talk about that, but going back to marketing and brand, I’m just really drawn almost like a moth to a flame to this kind of work.
3:07
Karen: I’ve had the opportunity to lead big, meaty, messy portfolio strategy and naming projects at Microsoft, Amazon, and Pearson. As you mentioned, Patrick, I’ve been in rooms trying to influence decision-makers like Jeff Bezos and Steve Ballmer and had some really fun experiences there. I helped name things like Echo Buds and Echo Frames, some of Amazon’s products, really battling it out over the brand strategy of Amazon’s first smart microwave. Was it Echo or not? The answer was no, it was not Echo out of the gate. And even Amazon Astro, which is the robot. So lots of really good experience that I got started on that journey quite a long time ago back at Compaq.
4:04
Patrick: It’s crazy because you look at companies like Amazon and stuff and like you’re talking about creating words that become part of everyday language, right? It’s almost like you’re adding things to the dictionary when you’re working for such big companies like that. So it’s crazy how much you’re equipping people with language and they’re not realizing it.
4:21
Sophie: You worked at these huge name-brand companies influencing major leaders and then you went through a major transition. Can you talk about the transition? You went from working at these big tech companies to a smaller, more startup-focused company at Ojo?
4:37
Karen: Absolutely. Because it doesn’t seem like an obvious arc. During my second stint at Amazon, so I’m what Amazon would call a boomerang. I worked there twice. I was leading consumer experience for devices and services. And as it so happened, an executive recruiter reached out. I was intrigued about what they were pitching. So it was a CMO role that I was interested in at a fast-growing tech company. I love the speed and the pace and all of the energy that you get in a fast-growing tech company. Excellent culture, outstanding talent, right? It ticked a lot of boxes even on paper and also had an Austin address. Right now, I’m talking to you from Seattle, Washington. So I’ve been in Seattle for like 20 years. So the opportunity to get back to Austin, even part-time, was something that really intrigued me. But more important than any of that is, I clicked right away with John Berkowitz, the CEO, and I really loved what a thorough and high-bar interview process there was. So when the offer came, I ultimately decided I was gonna take the plunge. It brought me back to Austin at least part-time.
6:16
Karen: And, you know, I kind of felt like I’d done startup because I was working in enterprise-backed startups like Alexa and Bing. But this was the first real opportunity to say, you know, what is an all-in startup environment like? And I felt like I really flourished in that. One other thing that I’ll share because I think that, you know, that high-bar interview process, I think part of it was to say, like, can she do actual work? You know, she’s worked in these big companies, she’s had these jobs like, you know, can she roll up her sleeves and do work? I think the message there certainly for people who also might be considering this type of transition was I knew the company really wanted to grow, right? So if you’re a small business and you want to stay small, maybe somebody that’s worked in a big business at scale may not be the right fit. But ultimately, if you look at a startup that has these really great ambitions, bringing folks in that have led scaled mechanisms and driven business at a much higher scale, you know, that’s kind of a winning combination or at least that’s what I pitched.
7:10
Patrick: For someone listening right now who’s considering maybe a job at a big company versus a job at a startup, what would you say are maybe one or two key differences from your experience?
7:14
Karen: Yeah, I think it’s the idea of, are you going to be a specialist or a generalist, or where do you kind of want any particular role to hit? At smaller companies, you might have a really crisp job description, but ultimately, you know, teams are all in on driving the business. And so you might pick up adjacent work that oftentimes is how you can really broaden out your experience and say, OK, how did I move quickly in a small company to get lots of different experiences? Whereas if I start out in a large company, I may really kind of specialize and stay on that specialized path. Neither one is right or better than the other, but knowing the type of path and experience set that you want will help you decide where you want to be at any given point in your career.
8:08
Sophie: So you make the transition from the CMO at Ojo to being CEO of Houseful. Make the case a little bit for CMO as CEO, right? That’s a transition I’m fascinated by. What parts of your role equipped you to lead an entire company as CEO and what new challenges have you encountered there?
8:29
Karen: Yeah, it’s still pretty niche, although we’re seeing more and more of it. I would say throughout my career, I really made it a practice to seek out messy, challenging work where success isn’t guaranteed. So often it’s projects that other people don’t want to do—things like change management, getting in the thick of an acquisition, restructuring, turnarounds. I mean, it sounds like a nightmare, right? But yet I found out that there’s so much you can learn from that less attractive stuff. And it’s been a way in the different organizations I’ve worked in to really deeply understand the business and the business context. You look at the role of a CMO and it can vary so much company by company. It’s a really rich, broad role. You can’t compare them to other roles in the C-suite given how many different things we have within our scope. It can be brand, demand, PR, insights, creative, consumer experience, packaging, advertising—a really long list of intertwined disciplines. Being able to manage and successfully manage that broad of a scope really gave me confidence and caused me to think about the CEO role as being an interesting potential career path.
9:59
Karen: And you know, it was something that I had written down in my own personal career plan a couple of years before it happened. Building a brand from scratch is something we talked about a lot. It sort of dawned on me that it’s like it’s a decision that almost mirrors buying a house because you need to commit. Eventually, you have to take this really big plunge, right? Eventually, you have to say, OK, we can’t keep talking about it. We can’t keep looking at logos, we can’t keep looking at names. You’ve got to commit to one. Walk us through your experience building a brand from scratch and just what things go into that.
10:35
Patrick: Houseful is a new name. It didn’t exist a year ago. It’s a new everything, really.
10:39
Karen: Yeah, I love the analogy, and I would say a rebrand is even more difficult than building a brand from scratch out of nothing. First, you need a compelling case like why would we do it? And you need a clear decision, right? It’s like, are we doing it or are we not doing it? And that can take a lot of time just to do stakeholder management, trialing your case. You’ve got to weigh the risks, you’ve got to look at lost time. Can we bring our consumers along, our partners, our stakeholders? What’s the opportunity cost of doing this project versus other marketing work? It typically is a pretty big tradeoff and also an organization-wide tradeoff because while much of the work might be driven out of marketing strategically, if you’re rebranding your product, if you’re changing the voice of your experience, everyone gets involved in that.
11:50
Karen: And then, once the decision to head down that path is made, the process for identifying a strong name gets underway. I love this stuff, right? Some of it is as you would imagine, spreadsheets and roots of words and what are you trying to evoke? And do you have a tight enough brief? There’s strategy, there’s creativity, there’s judgment. But there’s also luck. And then I would throw in budget and lots of trademark and legal help. Getting to a viable, ownable, trademarkable, well-designed brand introduced to the world could easily take a year or more. We did it in about six months. All of the design was done in-house as well as the brand campaign creative. I am just so, so proud of the work and doubly pleased that our brand team was recognized just recently with two industry awards for their work on the Houseful brand. So it has been a big change in less than a year. I feel great about where we landed and the path that we’re on.
13:28
Sophie: I feel like there are a lot of misconceptions out there between the differences of marketing and brand building. Can you speak a little bit to that?
13:37
Karen: Yeah, I feel like one of the simpler ways to talk about this is that brand building is the encapsulation of every single touchpoint a consumer or a customer has, and that’s the good and the bad. So when we think about building a brand strategy, it’s kind of like, what do we want to say? What do we want our brand to represent? What do we want it to look like and sound like? But ultimately, the strength of your brand is a reflection of how your consumers or audiences feel about you. If you look at marketing, they are, I don’t know, cousins or siblings. Marketing is the act of going to market, thinking about the inputs and the outputs required. What are our audience insights, the creative positioning and messaging, production of assets, MarTech decisions, campaign executions? Typically, but not always, brand sits within the CMO’s remit. It’s tightly tied to all of the work that goes into go-to-market. And more so than anything, it should be something that is managed in a way that every single person in the company, not just the marketers, pays attention to and has a role to execute against.
15:06
Patrick: We’ve talked about some of the bigger companies you’ve worked for—Pearson, Amazon, Ojo, now Houseful, which is backed by RBC. But if I know anything about you, Karen, it’s that you love a well-branded side hustle as well, right? So we’re talking about projects that maybe don’t have as big of a budget as an Amazon or a company backed by RBC. For our listeners, can you give us some broad and more tangible tips for smaller entrepreneurs, people working solo, on how they can still build an impactful brand without a really big marketing or branding budget?
15:38
Karen: Absolutely, because all those touchpoints are building a brand. And so the question is, are you going to be active in how that gets shaped or leave it to somebody else? And I think that we shouldn’t be inactive in the building of our brands. Some of the basics are just, how do you get that foundation figured out? How can you be clear and consistent across free and paid touchpoints? There are lots of places where we build our brand where we’re not writing big checks or executing on big digital or TV campaigns or expensive events. It’s going back to a really clear understanding of who we are, who we are for, how we are different, and why someone should choose us. There are both straightforward ways of speaking to that as well as creative ways, taglines, messaging, etc., to start to build toward that. But having the clarity of that foundation and equipping your marketers, your call center leaders, your salespeople, your product leaders, really everyone in the organization to have that same information and to bring it into their jobs is a great way to get the ball rolling to build a brand.
16:59
Sophie: And I think a lot of our listeners are real estate agents, and building a brand for yourself as a real estate agent is really important.
17:04
Karen: Absolutely. I would add for individual brand building, there’s so much you can do about being part of a community, and we know how strong and robust the real estate community is. Joining the conversation, contributing ideas, asking questions, and showing up for people who come after you. I’ve had 25-plus years of experience, lots of people have come after me. But even if you’re right in the industry for only a couple of years, there’s someone who’s just starting out where you can help them build their brand and learn the ropes as well.
17:43
Sophie: Changing the topic just a little bit. You are a lecturer of the Master of Science in Marketing program, and that was actually a program that I was a part of. Could you give our listeners a little crash course? One thing that you would want any of your students to walk away with after sitting in one of your classes.
17:58
Karen: One thing, that’s tough. I think the important part about having brand be a topic in the context of a Master of Science degree in marketing is all about context. If you’re studying to be an analyst or a consultant, do you understand the broader landscape of the business and how a strong brand can be a very positive asset? Things like creating customer pull, driving value, commanding price premiums, bolstering reputation. Even when you think about brand and PR, how does the brand help strengthen a reputation? How can it insulate you against the downside? Because sometimes things happen that are outside of our control. We also have to look at how we are managing the reputational side of our brand. Those are the types of things that go into the conversation of why we’re talking about brand when I’m really learning how to go deeply analytical in the marketing science space.
19:05
Patrick: Yeah, very cool. We talk a little bit about your work as a lecturer, you mentioned sharing advice and being a bit of a mentor. Why put so much care into the next generation of marketers? You’ve spent all this time mentoring, you spend all this time teaching, you are clearly very busy as the CEO of a big growing company. So why spend all that time giving back and caring about the next generation of marketers?
19:36
Karen: Thank you, Patrick. I mean, I wasn’t born this way. As a professional, I’ve gone through transitions that I know many other leaders have as well. You show up early in your career, you’re an individual contributor, you want to do a great job. Many of us want to be recognized for doing that great job. Then you become a first-time manager and you’re trying to figure out how to make an impact through people. How can I help people? As you’re a more senior leader, I remember when probably one of my biggest early successes at Microsoft was I was able to promote someone else to be a director and write how I was helping them on their journey and could see the value add that I was bringing to that. Now I’ve just got a pretty big view as I’m later in my career of how can I make that biggest contribution? What’s the way to make a scaled impact? Mentoring is a big piece of that.
20:39
Patrick: As a mentor, what advice do you find yourself giving often to people?
20:43
Karen: I think that helping people really look into themselves. Oftentimes, you’ll sit down in a mentoring coffee or a virtual conversation and the person really already has the answer. So you’re helping spur that curiosity within themselves of, OK, what are you thinking? What are your tradeoffs? Just to help people unpack that. The idea of grit with grace is something that I like because oftentimes someone has decided either this isn’t working for me or I’m ready to do what’s next. But the idea of grit or sticking with something is holding them back. I think oftentimes we have to say, OK, we have to give ourselves some grace whether it’s because something isn’t working out or whether it’s because it’s worked out splendidly and I’m ready for the next thing. Those are the types of conversations I often have with people, especially as they’re looking for career mentoring and advice.
21:48
Patrick: I do want to touch a little bit more on Houseful because when I was a reporter and then in the sort of brief time that Ojo had the Ojo Canada portal, Canadian real estate really scared me. Talk to me a little bit about the learning curve of how the real estate transaction works. How does prop tech innovation look coming from US prop tech to the Canadian real estate market?
22:12
Karen: Yeah, it’s a great point, Patrick. Those of us sitting in the US working in the Canadian market continue to learn and grow every single day. I would say a couple of things are mortgage terms are different. You get a five-year mortgage. Where in the US, we’re used to a variety of mortgage terms. This really means that you’re having to look at the current mortgage as well as what that next one might be because that next one is gonna come up pretty quickly. I’d also say affordability in our largest cities in Canada is tougher on average than US cities. So as we look to help, especially first-time homebuyers navigate that, it’s looking at the affordability, what are those tradeoffs? I would say in the industry writ large, there’s plenty of greenfield opportunity for real estate tech like Houseful to make a meaningful and positive impact on the homeownership journey of Canadians. We’re doing a lot of interesting research, qual and quant right now. As a venture that is owned by the Royal Bank of Canada, we’re in a great spot to bring property and mortgage resources together for the consumer, really unlike anyone else. So when we go back to the brand conversation we had, it’s kind of like how are you different? Why should I choose you? Those are some of the things that we’re looking at and helping people navigate what really is one of the biggest decisions that they’re likely to make in their entire lives.
23:55
Sophie: Looking back on your time in the real estate industry and looking forward on your time coming in the real estate industry, what sorts of futures do you envision for the real estate tech industry, whether that’s in Canada or the US?
24:10
Karen: I think a lot of it just comes back to people, right? How do people make decisions and helping people be confident in the decisions they’re making? There are hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions. It’s so much more complex than almost any decision that you would make. Certainly, do I one-click buy something on Amazon because I’m out of it? Or am I determining a neighborhood, a type of home, looking at schools? All of those sub-decisions. So I think helping people make decisions and bringing the humanity to that is really important. And then just to say, how can we reduce friction in the journey? We can’t make it easy, right? None of us would promise like this is easy, but how can you reduce friction there? I think that there are huge opportunities for companies that are bringing a combination of people and technology to this huge life decision. I think tech has a huge role to play. I’m certainly intrigued about the AI facets within tech. But ultimately, buying a house happens with and through people. So, I’m still a believer in that.
25:14
Patrick: Sort of one of the final things here is just talk a little bit more about the future of real estate. What do you hope to achieve as CEO of Houseful and what impact do you hope to make here?
25:49
Karen: I would say, just being five years in real estate in many ways, my stint in the education sector with Pearson and then certainly teaching as I continue to do at UT where I know firsthand how transformative education can be to life trajectory. I look at and bring a level of reverence like that to homeownership. It’s another one of those outsized areas of impact. It’s your life, your family, your community, your long-term wealth all together inside the four walls that you would call home. I love being part of that level of societal impact. As CEO of Houseful, we have plenty of KPIs like any business would have. But at the highest level, I’m looking to build a sustainable, valuable experience that helps people on this life journey.
26:47
Sophie: That’s awesome. We play a little game here at the very end of each interview. It’s called Let’s Get Real, like let’s get real estate. We’re going to ask you three questions, just try to answer as fast as you can and don’t think too much on it. All right. What is your favorite marketing campaign you’ve ever worked on?
27:00
Karen: OK, this is way back. Bing It On. It was like a blind taste test against Google. It was built on an incredible insight.
27:11
Sophie: What’s one skill every marketer should have?
27:13
Karen: Empathy.
27:15
Patrick: And lastly, what’s your go-to coffee order? I know you’re a coffee drinker.
27:18
Karen: Oh, recently a flat white. Perfect balance of milk and espresso.
27:23
Patrick: Awesome. All right, Karen. Thank you so much for coming on the Movoto Mic.
27:27
Karen: Thanks for having me.
27:28
Sophie: Thanks, Karen.
