How Liz Carter and Reputation Are Redefining Brand Intelligence

Stacey sits down with longtime friend and colleague Liz Carter, CMO of Reputation, to explore the new playbook for brand and reputation management in the GenAI era. Liz shares why Reputation rebuilt its platform around a unified intelligence hub, how buyers’ generative searches are changing discovery, and why reputation data can’t live in marketing silos anymore. With examples from healthcare, auto, and property management—and a peek at “Voice of Brand,” which aligns review responses to brand guidelines—you’ll leave with practical ways to monitor how your brand shows up daily, uncover blind spots across the journey, and bring reputation intelligence into BI/RevOps.

Transcript

Stacey Epstein
On today’s show, I have a very special guest—special because she’s a close friend and a former colleague at multiple companies. I’m thrilled to welcome Liz Carter to the show!

Liz Carter
Hi! So happy to be here.

Stacey Epstein
It’s so fun to have you. Liz and I worked together at SuccessFactors and ServiceMax—some of the biggest highlights of my career were alongside Liz. Now she’s CMO at an impressive company called Reputation.
Liz, I always like listeners to get to know the guest. Tell us about your journey—how you got to Reputation and what drew you to the role.

Liz Carter
I kind of fell into marketing. I started in event marketing—big sales kickoffs, major trade shows, internal and external brand moments. I began in tech in Atlanta in internet security, then a friend of a friend pulled me to SuccessFactors, which brought me West. I’ve now been in Silicon Valley almost 20 years.

Those early brand moments were a crash course: analyst relations, PR, product marketing, demand gen—everything converges around big events. At SuccessFactors and then ServiceMax, I realized I enjoyed working across all those areas and had a unique perspective because of how I came into marketing.

Working with you, Stacey, you always emphasized staying close to sales. That stuck with me—marketing isn’t successful unless the business is successful, and you have to be able to sell in the market.

I kept taking on broader scope. At ServiceMax we went through a lot—acquired by GE, spun out to private equity, we acquired a company, you came back via acquisition, then left again. I became CMO for about two years—and then we were acquired again. I felt ready for a new market, and that’s when I found Reputation about two and a half years ago.

Reputation sells to marketers and operators—after 11 years selling into service and field service, that felt creative and fun. Reputation was also a similar size to where ServiceMax had been, so my experience fit the transformation they wanted to make. That’s how I landed here.

Stacey Epstein
Most listeners are marketers, so Reputation is for them. I know you’ve made a big shift toward AI. First, what is Reputation, and why should marketers care?

Liz Carter
We work with companies that are “B2C”—often multi-location brands serving consumers or, in healthcare, patients. We help them understand how they’re showing up online, why customers choose them (or don’t), and what to change to be chosen more often. That’s the goal.

Stacey Epstein
Give us some customers or use cases so everyone can picture it—even our B2B listeners. Brand management and reputational awareness matter to all of us.

Liz Carter
In healthcare, Intermountain Health is a great customer, operating hospitals and other units across the Western U.S. In auto, we work with major OEMs like GM and Ford, plus dealer groups like AutoNation. We also work in property management and real estate.

Across these industries the specifics differ, but the common thread is meeting consumers where they are as they make emotional purchasing decisions—where to live, which doctor to see, which car to buy, even where to celebrate a birthday dinner. With AI changing search—and how precisely people can describe what they want—this market is evolving quickly. We help customers stay on top of that.

Stacey Epstein
For the uninitiated: is it data, ratings…what does the customer actually use?

Liz Carter
When Reputation started, we helped customers manage online reputation—public data and reviews were a game changer. Ten years later, reviews are table stakes: everyone checks them to decide whether a business makes the first cut.

We built infrastructure to manage all those surfaces—Google listings, etc.—which is surprisingly complex at scale. Then we expanded: bring survey data into the same place, bring social signals into the same place. Our “always know, always act” vision means unifying the sources your customers use and turning them into real-time insights about how your brand is performing.

Stacey Epstein
GenAI must have changed the game—people are searching differently now.

Liz Carter
Totally. About 18–24 months ago we saw the shift accelerating. Website visits are down; people use generative search to research and find options. Many vendors started bolting AI onto old platforms. We chose a harder path: we rebuilt our platform so AI sits at the center. Traditional, linear data storage fights AI—you need data structured so LLMs can draw connections from every angle.

We’ve been moving customers to a unified intelligence hub over the last 18 months. As we build new products on it, customers get deeper insights from data we’ve collected for decades—now re-piped for AI-native use.

Stacey Epstein
There are “bolt-on AI” companies and “AI-native” upstarts. Your rebuild meets buyers where they are. With the AI-native platform, how has the use case changed?

Liz Carter
Our customer profile is similar, but their needs evolved. Consumers search and buy differently, so brands need to understand how they show up every day—because it changes constantly. That’s put a spotlight on brand and reputation management. It’s no longer just a marketing concern; it’s operational intelligence.

Because the data is unified, we can show performance by location and brand, across competitors and the customer journey. Which stage did a review reflect? Often multiple. We surface blind spots: where you’re strong, where you’re weak, what to fix. I see reputation intelligence living at the center of BI and RevOps.

Stacey Epstein
Right—this isn’t just “adding AI”; it’s evolving how you manage brand because of AI.

Liz Carter
Exactly. And it’s still changing. As platforms update, they may prioritize different sources—video, photos, etc. Businesses need those assets on listings so they’re indexed. Search intent is getting more contextual; people specify exact experiences they want. We help customers see those patterns so they can be known for the things buyers are actually asking for.

We also launched Voice of Brand: upload your brand guidelines; the system inventories them, analyzes reviews and responses, and shows how responses align with your brand—where you’re on-message, where there are gaps, and how to train teams. It also informs frontline employees: here’s what reviews say that doesn’t match the brand—address it in the experience.

Stacey Epstein
Love that. Any closing thoughts on where this is headed for brand marketers?

Liz Carter
It’s a fun time to be a marketer. Brand and reputation are surging back to the forefront. Make sure you have the right data at your fingertips and pull reputation intelligence into BI/RevOps—don’t leave it siloed in marketing or CS. Unify it so you can act on what customers experience in real time.

Stacey Epstein
So powerful. Hopefully listeners learned something—I sure did. And it was a blast having you on. Thanks for joining!

Liz Carter
Thanks for having me—loved it.