Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins

On day two as Starbucks’ CEO, Brian Niccol published an open letter saying "there's a shared sense we've drifted from our core," and Tressie Lieberman, who Niccol hired to as Global CBO after the stock had dropped 38%, has spent the time since rebuilding what this drift cost them—and their customers.

In this conversation with Seth, Tressie's extremely candid about how it happened, which wasn't through any one catastrophic decision but through convenience becoming so dominant that the craft, community, and connection that justified the brand's premium receded until the experiences felt transactional and the soul of the...

Seth’s guest is streetwear legend Jeff Staple who, in 2005, designed a Nike Collab—the Pigeon Dunk—that caused a riot, resells for thousands of dollars 21 years later, and gets the credit (or blame!) for bringing sneaker culture to the masses.

It’s also a moment Jeff says opened a Pandora's Box he's still reckoning with. In this conversation, Jeff draws a line from the Pigeon Dunk to Nike falling off the S&P, arguing that the moment sneaker culture went mainstream, the brands that fed on it started asking the wrong people what they wanted, and stopped...

This episode Seth sat down with his friend Noel Mack, Gymshark's Chief Brand Officer, for a conversation that became a masterclass in what it means to turn down money in service of meaning. Gymshark is one of only two bootstrapped unicorns in UK history, built by a pizza boy with a sewing machine and a hundred British pounds. The strategic discipline that runs through everything Noel describes, from refusing to make yoga pants because other brands do it better, to pulling product they were selling out of because they were making it less special, to canceling every order and...

This week, Seth Matlins talks with Amazon Web Services CMO Julia White, who’s spent 25 years inside enterprise tech, including a 20-year tenure at Microsoft, where she led product marketing for Office 365 and Azure, leaving to become Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer at SAP. Twenty-five years later, Julia says the features and functions she spent years believing were the most important things, actually don't matter if you're not hitting the deeper human need on the other side of the product and B2B desk. And this shift in her thinking, from product truth to human truth as the foundation of...

Lululemon Chief Brand and Product Activation Officer Nikki Neuburger has been inside three enterprise realities that couldn't be more different: Nike at its peak, where brand was the business and everyone knew it; Uber Eats, where she helped build a brand from scratch inside a three-sided marketplace during a trust crisis; and now at Lululemon, where she's lived through both extraordinary revenue growth and significant value erosion. In this conversation she tells Seth something every CEO and product leader needs to hear, which is that the best product doesn’t always win, backing it up with a career's worth of...

Entrepreneur and author Eric Ries wrote the seminal book "The Lean Startup" and spent years teaching founders how to build companies, before realizing he'd never taught them how to protect what they built. In an economy where profit and value are often conflated, too many companies allow what Eric refers to as “the ghost of the public markets” to sit in every strategy meeting, trading long-term customer trust for short-term stock price bumps. Seth and Eric dive into the themes of Eric's latest book, "Incorruptible," examining how shareholder primacy became an economic orthodoxy that can destroy enterprise value, how prod...

In Q425, Duolingo's CEO told the Street the company would accept slower revenue growth and lower profitability in order to prioritize growing the number of people who use the product every day. This is a strategic decision that runs counter to what most enterprises do under pressure from analysts and investors. 

In this conversation, Duolingo's CMO, Manu Orssaud, walks Seth through why the company made that bet and what it reveals about where value actually comes from. They also talk about why brand consistency and brand sameness are two very different things that most companies confuse; why 40% o...

Early in his career as a social media coordinator at Burberry, Musa Tariq spent six figures to livestream a 2008 Burberry fashion show that, despite hopes of reaching one million viewers,  delivered only 673. While it looked (and felt) like a failure and the end of his job, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts recognized it as a first of its kind that needed time to grow. 

For him, this was a defining lesson in resisting short-termism that’s guided his work and career from Nike, Ford, Apple, and Airbnb, to his tenure as CMO of GoFundMe. Now as co-founder of the...

LVMH’s Mathilde Delhoume-Debreu spent 30 years at Procter & Gamble before becoming the Global Brand Officer across the luxury behemoth’s 75 independent Maisons, which means she's navigated a spectrum of value creation across categories and has come to deeply understand what separates brands that drive value enduringly from those that don’t.

In this episode, she and Seth dig into how repositioning Pampers from functional superiority to a higher-order insight about baby development (without changing the product at all) tripled brand revenues in only three years; why creativity without coherence and craft without culture are two of...

Having previously led marketing at physical-product giants like Kellogg, PepsiCo, and Toys "R" Us, JPMorganChase CMO Carla Hassan offers a unique perspective on what changes when your product becomes completely intangible. When 84 million customers entrust an institution with their savings and financial futures, trust isn't built on a retail shelf, it’s created or destroyed in the quiet consistency of 320,000 employees and 5,000 branches executing every single daily interaction.

In this episode, Seth and Carla discuss why brand reputation relies on human connection in physical branches and seamless enterprise alignment,  the dangerous trap companies fall into of shipping the...

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 learn...

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 romanci...

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 destru...

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...

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 ho...

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...

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...

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...

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 po...

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 yo...

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...

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 W...

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.

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