Louise Troen hasn’t had the traditional career trajectory of a CMO. Trying her hand at documentary filmmaking and then working in communications, she may not be your typical MBA but she does have is a resume rich in brand building at some of the most game changing apps of recent years: Airbnb, Bumble and most recently Headspace. When she joined new self-hypnosis app Reveri as chief marketing officer in February, she was excited about the opportunity to build a brand that she says has the potential to be huge.
Troen is motivated to tell the stories of brands that “impact culture and inform change.” At Airbnb the shift was in the idea of what constituted a vacation stay. At Bumble, it was to bring a feminist twist to online dating. At Headspace, it was about embracing mental health through meditation exercises at scale. At Reveri, the challenge is to educate people on the mental health benefits of self-hypnosis.
When she was first approached by Reveri, a new self-hypnosis app based on the practices of psychiatrist David Spiegel, she was a bit skeptical. But her experience in the power of apps to transform categories got her excited. When she read community feedback and considered the potential of the app’s offering, she took the job.
“We have people coming to us, saying that they’ve been smoking for 40 years and only have stopped through Reveri,” says Troen. “I was overwhelmed by the immediacy of the difference that it makes on your life and the power of the interactive nature of the technology built into the app which guides you individually.”
Her mission is to help grow brand awareness, and talk about how the app can help support people during the growing mental health crisis. “Social impact should be the absolute heartbeat of what the brand is,” she says. “To take a brand to market successfully and effectively, you have to change people’s feelings towards you or the brand. The best way to do that is by showing up in a way that impacts culture.”
Reveri is taking “a considered approach to growth” seeking consumers that we get on board rather than just scaling up pace to get numbers. “That is what will build a long-lasting sustainable brand,” she says. “How do we bring this brand to market in a way that makes people stop, feel and then ultimately change their lives or habits for the better.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Troen from her home office in London. She arrived fresh from a 10 minute sprint around the block to talk about the mental health crisis, social impact and judo chopping the stigma around self-hypnosis. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is your brand mission and how does this show up in your storytelling?
Our mission is to take hypnosis mainstream. When I interviewed for the job, I was skeptical. But the ingredients were put in front of me to change my mind very quickly, which is why I took the job. The brands that I’ve worked with in my career, whether it’s Airbnb, Bumble or Headspace all had judgments around them when I joined them. I love leaning into tension. Brilliant creative work can happen at that inflection point between assumption and re education. I love the friction. People are still having a visceral reaction to us, which is great, because it means we’ve caught their attention. This happened with female libido. This has happened with psychedelics. This happened with oat milk. Everyone said, no one will drink oat milk and now it is wildly popular. The tension point and the assumptions around hypnosis is where I get really excited about the work we can do creatively paired with this cultural moment that we exist in.
There is this desperate need for support from a mental health perspective. We’ve got academic clinical trials that are working. And we have a scientist that’s been doing this across the neurological space for decades. Our ingredients are there. The culture is in the moment. It’s really a big challenge. The people that are galvanizing around this brand have seen it done before in other categories. We are Judo chopping the stigma around hypnosis.
How are you showing up in the culture?
It’s about understanding attitudes rather than demographics. We’re moving away from Louise, who’s 36 and lives in London has tried talking therapy and still has anxiety. It’s less about where I live or my gender. It’s much more about my attitude to self development, technologies, my openness from a progressive perspective to bettering myself and developing my life.
Our first two markets are the US and the UK. The mental health crisis in both regions are overwhelmed and underserviced. We’re ensuring that our products are showing up with the right content and the right technology that can help people. Our role is to give people the immediate benefits of self-hypnosis. We know that there are a wealth of other therapies but hypnosis is one of the oldest practices. We have all these ingredients in front of us and a culture that is yearning for support. The marketing and communications work that we’ll be doing is really about building credibility and education around that immediacy.
How will you join the mental health conversation?
When I was at Bumble, we focused on success stories. Here are five people that fell in love, two of them were getting married, bang, there’s our campaign. What’s very different about the work that we’re doing here is mental health is such a unique, sensitive, protected space that is still so misunderstood. We’re doing a lot of work behind the scenes with our community to bring on folks that want to be part of our long term journey. This isn’t just about saying, we want 10 great stories around chronic pain and porn addiction and we’re going to highlight them within the cultural conversation and that will be our work. That is never going to be enough for us.
It is about our saying, these people are our testimonials that prove the value of this product. We want people to feel like they are empowered enough to champion their stories. We’re working on a model to work with people that have had really compelling experiences and we can offer them something in return. We can bring them in and empower them to feel like they can lead their own conversation to help other people. Then they’ll get time with Dr. Spiegel.
The power of brilliant brands that I’ve always looked up to like NextDoor, for example, is that they are peer to peer. We are going to build an infrastructure where these people will lead themselves and in leading themselves, they will feel not only that they came over their biggest challenges, addictions and bad habits, but they are part of serving future generations and other people with their challenges, too.
Are you trying to reach people who are also doing yoga and meditation?
There are so many amazing practices out there. The one thing that self-hypnosis offers is immediate impact. If hypnosis works for you, it works really quickly. It is about recalibrating the neuroplasticity of your brain, which meditation does not do. It combines a component of breath work within it to get you into that state, but it’s actually about activating your subconscious so that you can recalibrate the patterns of behavior, so that when you reach for a cigarette, or you want to eat badly, or you take another drink, you’re actually thinking differently from a habitual state perspective.
I meditate. I have a therapist. I do random sprints for 10 minutes. But I also use self-hypnosis. I do it for sleep. Meditation doesn’t work for me for sleep. It’s less about saying, nothing else is effective. It’s more about saying, there are certain habits and behaviors which self-hypnosis is arguably the most powerful practice to enable you to forget whatever that thing is. I genuinely believe that it is the next big thing, but our challenge as a marketing team is to make that happen.
Can you talk about how your past experiences have helped shape your perspective in this role?
The most powerful experience that I had at Bumble was really about going where your consumers are. It was better to be something to someone than anything to everyone. We kicked off an ambassador program at universities around Europe and the US. Our key was creating this cultural movement of young brilliant women making the first move. We knew that if we set this foundation for positioning the app, the good guys would follow. We never focused on any of the marketing on men ever. It was always about if we invest in women who are passionate about sharing our message, we were really confident that the right guys would then join the app.
One of the things that I took away from Headspace was trying to make sure you’re doing the right things internally first. We launched a women’s collection and as part of that, we had a long conversation with our HR team about what we are actually doing for women in the company? How do we feel about compensation around egg freezing and fertility? We handled that before we launched a collection in the app to support women with fertility and sex and hormones. Starting from the inside out is probably the biggest piece of leadership takeaway.
What trends do you expect to play out in the second half of 2023?
We’re taking our foot off the gas from a paid perspective because the industry and the category that we’re operating in, we really have to understand our consumers. We know that working on broader campaigns –that are actually about showing up and launching events or partnerships or content where they are, can actually help them – is a much more effective investment for us.
There will be a much bigger expectation for brands to lead with social impact and purpose. This concept of being a purpose- driven brand is now and probably will in future be just as powerful as our political systems and are often just as trusted. And so there will be an expectation.
You’ll also see a lot of brands moving away from automation. We’ve moved down this incredible AI route where everyone is so overexcited about the power of it. It’s important to state that whether it’s democratizing access to education, whether it’s about speeding up our healthcare systems, AI can be brilliant in some ways, but when you’re dealing with people’s mental health, and their feelings and their bodies and their physical systems, we we’ve made the decision not to move through an AI or automated route.
