Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins

It's a business show. It's a marketing show. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing is the show that argues they’ve always been the same thing. Coming Tuesday, May 12. Follow now on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nick Tran has been one of global marketing's most influential voices for over a decade, from Taco Bell to Hulu and serving as TikTok's first Global CMO when it became Ad Age's Marketer of the Year. Now, as both President and CMO of the joint venture relaunching Cîroc Vodka and Lobos 1707, he's rebuilding a brand whose defining association became a liability while scaling another. For Nick, the value creation equation can look different from the CMO's and President's seats, even if maybe they shouldn’t, and often requires unlearning and breaking old models. From Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Yeti to Uber and now as CMO of global wellness company AG1, Paulie Dery has built value for companies whose products could easily be commoditized, but weren’t. Having started his career on the agency side as a copywriter, Paulie understands that to stand out in a sea of competitors, you need a strong brand and creative, to maintain customer trust and to instill pride in the building. A strong brand allows performance to take care of itself at a much lower investment. And failing to maintain the brand destroys value, diminishing the product, and diminishing the pricing power. From Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram or TikTok @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well before she was CMO, and now President, of eos Products, Soyoung Kang was an architecture student at MIT, where, she tells Seth, she learned less about buildings and more about how people move through space. She's been applying that same lens to building value creation systems ever since, across a career taking her from BCG to retail operations at Victoria’s Secret and Bath and Body Works, to leading a brand and business turnaround as eos's first CMO. The throughline is her conviction that value gets created when you design every decision around how your customer experiences what you build, and destroyed when you design around what your competitors are doing instead. Soyoung explains about why empathy is the most undervalued operating system in business, why any disconnect between how customers talk and how companies talk is an opportunity, and why she believes fresh perspective is worth 60 IQ points. From Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram @createordestroypod  and TikTok @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fundamentally, a political campaign isn’t all that different from a business – it’s an enterprise where every decision either builds value with voters or destroys it, and the voters are customers who only get to buy what you're selling, on just one day. This week’s guest is legendary political strategist David Axelrod, who was President Obama’s chief strategist and senior advisor. Currently he’s a senior political commentator for CNN, and the co-host of the Hacks on Tap podcast. In over 140 elections, Axelrod has shaped the story of a candidate and the choice voters face in the polling booth. As a self-proclaimed idealist, he sees the American brand as having been devalued, but not beyond repair.  Produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Silicon Valley, value can be created or destroyed with every new technology and product innovation. Over his career, Don McGuire, EVP and CMO of Qualcomm, has seen waves of value creation and destruction. From Don’s POV and experience, the most significant destructive force in tech comes from complacency – companies wary of disrupting short-term profits trot out the same gameplan quarter after quarter. As a result, they stop innovating, fail to adapt outdated product strategies, and miss critical technological inflection points. Former industry leaders like Blackberry and Nokia are case studies in how market dominance can slip away, and value can be destroyed.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, one of the central ideas of Create or Destroy gets flipped: namely, that product is marketing. Every single product decision is ultimately a marketing decision, and it either contributes to value creation or value destruction. Lara Balazs, Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Global Marketing at Adobe, agrees with that thesis, but says we need to think of marketing as product too. And like a physical or digital product, you have to "ship" your stories and narratives to create true meaning and relevance with your customers. Lara speaks from a heralded track record of driving massive enterprise growth. Prior to Adobe, she was the CMO and GM at Intuit, ran worldwide marketing for Amazon Prime, and drove iconic brands like Visa and Nike. In a world where marketing has long since moved past isolated campaigns and channels, Lara views the craft as a discipline powered by deep systems thinking. Her job isn’t just managing a department; it’s orchestrating the many moving parts of a massive corporate ecosystem so that every single piece performs as if it is one unified whole. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mayur Gupta is an engineer who spent eight years writing code before he ever touched marketing, and that beginning shapes everything about how he thinks about value. Across 26 years at Spotify, Kimberly Clark, Gannett, and now as Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Kraken, he's lived the same inflection point repeatedly, the moment a product-led company that grew to enormous scale without traditional marketing finds growth slowing and has to build a function the enterprise never needed before, justify the spend to people who have evidence they can grow without it, and prove that every dollar creates value on top of what would have happened anyway. In this episode, Mayur and Seth dive into how everyone in an organization owns the brand, why growth and marketing are never separate functions to begin with, and how to stop your company from destroying value the moment your product-led momentum hits a wall.  NOTE: The book Seth mentioned during the interview is "Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves" by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For this episode, Seth sits down with strategist Zoe Scaman, who has spent two decades working inside and alongside companies like Droga5, Lego, Netflix, L'Oreal, Tesco, and with Mark Cuban and Luka Doncic. Their conversation covers a lot of ground from why brands don't create meaning but rather create the conditions for it; why misaligned incentives are the single biggest source of value destruction; why she believes executive leadership is good at spotting what could create value but almost universally unwilling to examine what's destroying it; and Zoe’s perspective on why the current race toward AI adoption is hollowing out what she calls the heartwood of organizations, the accumulated culture and knowledge that took decades to build but can't be regrown on any reasonable timeline. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gary Vaynerchuk was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Coinbase, and Uber, founded VaynerMedia, and is one of the most recognizable voices in marketing and business. In this wide-ranging conversation, he and Seth get into what Gary has learned from sitting across from hundreds of founders about the patterns separating value creators from capital destroyers (including the answer he rarely gives publicly about what connects every investment decision he's ever said yes to), what nine years of stagnation at Twitter reveals about how enterprises destroy value, why Apple's run under Tim Cook is both a masterclass and a cautionary tale, and why the single biggest gap in Fortune 500 marketing isn't what most people think it is. And on a personal level, Gary gets into what growing up as a Soviet immigrant taught him, and why '80s pop culture shaped his instincts as a consumer strategist just as much as anything that happened in a boardroom. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LinkedIn CMO Jessica Jensen calls herself a "painter with an abacus"—which might just be the most perfect shorthand for what a modern marketing leader should be. She grew up writing advertising jingles at the kitchen table with her father, a creative director at DDB, and her mother, a speech and language teacher. This unique combination of rigorous quantitative training and a deep passion for artistic expression runs through Jessica's leadership journey across six massive companies—BCG, Apple, Meta, Booking Holdings, Indeed, and LinkedIn—and informs every part of this conversation. Jessica observes that the fastest path to value destruction is losing focus, that fiefdoms kill more enterprise value than bad creative ever will, and that good strategy cuts like a knife. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some of the Italian luxury audio brand Sonus Faber’s speakers are made with a window on the top so buyers can see every detail of their handcrafted interior. Because as Jim Mollica, CMO of Bose and President of the company’s Luxury Consumer Audio division puts it, everything matters and everything communicates. This conviction, that what a company chooses to care about when nobody's watching compounds into pricing power and trust, and is the thread that runs through this entire conversation.  Sixty years into building the Bose brand, he's its first CMO, hired after the company learned the hard lesson that better products don't always win. We talk about his time at Disney, Ralph Lauren, and Under Armour, why decisions about Italian leather sourcing and climate-controlled hand delivery of a $250,000 audio system are brand decisions that compound whether they’re measured or not, and why his time at Viacom taught him that asset allocation is the number one predictor of whether value gets created or destroyed. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jonathan Mildenhall has spent his career believing that brands can be bigger than their categories. In a storied career, he helped create “Open Happiness” at Coca-Cola, which became the brand's most profitable platform in its history; at Airbnb, he wrote a white paper for Brian Chesky and the Board titled "The Business Case for Building an Iconic Brand," and four years later he’d proven the case and was managing a marketing budget that had grown from  $25 to $750 million during his tenure. Now as the first CMO of Rocket Companies, he's helping people on their path to prosperity by romancing the American dream through homeownership at a time when every macroeconomic force is working against the premise.  Seth talks with Jonathan about his argument, one every CEO needs to hear, that the single biggest destroyer of brand value is the erosion of belief inside a company; about why so much marketing never transcends its category; why he's replaced the traditional funnel with a model called priming and proving that treats humans and machines as two distinct audiences, and why the two questions he asks every CEO before taking a job are questions every marketing leader should be asking.  Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / Threads / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices