The New Generation of Customer Engagement: Braze CEO Bill Magnuson on Innovating Brand Experiences

A decade ago, when Braze Cofounder and CEO Bill Magnuson was fresh out of school and employed at Google, he found himself caught up in a mobile revolution that was still in its infancy. While working on App Inventor for Android, he “had this growing conviction that mobile was fundamentally going to change the world, our relationship with technology, and our relationship with commerce. That conviction really stuck with me.” In the years since, that vision led him to co-found the company that became Braze and play a significant role in how modern customer engagement has evolved.

You can hear that vision—and the passion fueling it—in Magnuson’s recent appearance on the Powered by Battery podcast. The episode looks at how marketing has evolved since the rise of iOS and Android, among other topics, and how companies like Braze can have a significant positive impact on their customers’ ability to communicate effectively with consumers. “What we [Braze] really represent is a new generation, a new way of thinking about this entire customer engagement space,” Magnuson explained. “It’s not the silos that are broken down by which channel it is, it’s really how do I deliver these experiences regardless of channel...to deliver a customer-centric experience.”

What does that kind of innovative, customer-focused experience look like in today’s mobile-first world? Ask Burger King—this year’s winner of the prestigious Titanium Lion award at the Cannes Lions festival for a campaign that’s a prime example of how the right technology can bring human creativity to new heights. “The Whopper Detour campaign...this was a really exciting one for us because it was a great opportunity to see a creative vision come to life through the use of technology,” Magnuson said. “And not just ours, but a whole ecosystem of modern technologies” that included Braze and Braze Alloys technical partners Branch, mParticle, and Radar.

Check out the whole episode—”Building a Whopper of a Customer Engagement Platform: Bill Magnuson of Braze”—for more from Magnuson on what it takes to support great customer engagement, as well as what he makes of today’s so-called “techlash” and the lessons he learned from his company’s 2017 rename and rebrand.