Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins

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 creating and innovating for the ones who'd made them great.  It’s a great conversation that gets into why the bread-and-butter, Monday through Friday business is what actually builds a brand that lasts 30 years, why you can't buy your way into culture no matter how big the check, and why 40 hours of meetings a week and none of them about what the customer actually wants is the most common way he sees enterprises destroy value. And when Seth asked him what he'd destroy with all the power in the world, he said “likes and comments,” because if they'd existed when he started, he never would've made the next thing. 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 and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 value creation, runs through the entire conversation – from why B2B decisions are emotional ones made by humans not "businesses," why she believes an earnings call is one of the most important brand building or brand destroying moments an enterprise has, despite most companies treating it as a financial reporting exercise, and why the way companies store and govern customer data is a marketing decision that nobody making it thinks of that way. 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 and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 product quality can get sacrificed when quarterly targets drive strategy, and what exceptional companies like Costco understand about building a governance fortress that protects sustainable growth. 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 and on LinkedIn. 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

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

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