Soyoung Kang, CMO at eos, a company known for its lip balm, talks about how she embraces the unknown by constantly calibrating and always choosing the option that will teach the most. By embracing the unknown early and always budgeting for experimentation, Soyoung helped eos become a giant on TikTok, where it has nearly 900k followers, and Instagram, where it has 1.7M.
Soyoung and Eric discuss eos’ Bless Your F*ing Cooch Campaign, which pulled directly from a TikTok user’s unsolicited – and very enthusiastic – endorsement of eos’ shea butter shaving cream. This campaign caused sales of the shave cream to truly skyrocket and cemented eos’ place as a social media darling. Eos ran with it, making an ultra-limited edition shaving cream bottle with Carly Joy’s exact instructions on it in lieu of the classic usage directions on the bottle.” She explains the importance of experimentation in marketing and how to do it well: make sure everyone on your team is on board, identify expectations, and set parameters so you will know if it’s been successful.
Soyoung insists that marketers need to understand that they are never in complete control of the narrative – and that the true gift of social media is that it puts brands in conversations with consumers, and this leads to not just better marketing but better products and happier people.
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Transcript
Soyoung: One of my principles in marketing and I think in life <laugh>, is to always be learning. And so within our marketing team, we have created very much a culture where it's not about success or failure, it's about success or learning.
Eric: I'm Eric Fulwiler, and this is Scratch Bringing You Marketing lessons from the leading brands and brands rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today.
Hey everyone, my guest today is so Soyoung, chief marketing officer of eos. I think I said it right this time. You'll hear that I did not say it right in the interview but that's what edits are for. So this is a really, really good conversation with Soyoung. Soyoung, comes from the consulting world, spent a lot of time in beauty and retail, as you'll hear, she was at Victoria's Secret Bath and Body Works for 10 years as the SVP of brand. She also sits on the board of Bob's Discount Furniture since 2021. She is a Forbes cmo. Next, a business insider, CMO to watch campaign, US cmo, top 50 brand innovators, top woman and glossy 50 innovators. So a lot of credentials and you will see that those are very merited in the conversation that I have with her. So we talk about a bunch of different things that I think you'll find interesting and helpful. A few of my favorites include how to be early and make sure that you are investing in experimentation, how to capture viral moments and make the most out of them and how to use social media. But just in general, your customers as how to use your customers to really listen and draw insights that can inform proper campaigns in the bulk of the conversation. As you will have seen from the title of this episode is about an incredibly successful campaign that they ran on TikTok, which is very entertaining, engaging, and drove some real business results. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Soyoung.
Hey, before we get to today's episode, I wanted to take just a second and ask a favor if you're listening to this, I really appreciate it. This is a new podcast. We arrival our new company. It's hard to get this all off the ground and I really appreciate the support to ask an even bigger favor of you if you could please, if you're enjoying the content that we're putting out, if you've listened to a couple episodes or even if you're new, could you please take a minute to share scratch with someone else that you think would enjoy it, that would mean so much to us. Get the word out, start to build our audience. I'd really, really appreciate it. So if you could just take a minute, you can pause this just about is there someone else out there, another marketer who you think would find this content valuable? And please send this along to them. I really appreciate it. Now onto the episode. Hey, Soyoung, how are you doing?
Soyoung: I'm good, how are you?
Eric: I'm good. How is New York? Got well, you got a good amount of snow. Not as much as my family did up in Boston, right?
Soyoung: Yeah, it's come and gone in a matter of days.
Eric: I'm kind of sad actually. I mean, I'll be there next week and I'm looking forward to meeting you in person, but I miss real snow and real winter being over here in London.
Soyoung: Oh, well you'll get real gray and real rain.
Eric: We Got enough of that
Need anymore. Great. Well thank you so much for making the time. I am really looking forward to this conversation that people will have heard in the intro a bit about what we talk about, but let's get into it. So starting with what is a brand that you're obsessed with right now and it can't be one of your own?
Soyoung: So a brand I am obsessed with right now is Duolingo. I spend a lot of my time, I know we're going to talk a little bit about TikTok, but I spend a lot of my time just as a user of TikTok and I have just been obsessed with what they've been doing on TikTok. It is the weirdest, funniest, and I would say most endearing content that I've seen recently from a brand on the platform.
Eric: It's funny, first of all, you're one of the few CMOs I've talked to who has said, I'm spending a lot of time on TikTok. And it comes hand in hand. Your business is doing a lot of great things on TikTok and it's clearly important to what you're doing, but also I think there's no shortcut to this stuff. You really need to experience it firsthand to understand not just how the platform works, but to your point of weird, funny, there's a whole different culture around TikTok content that is not Instagram. It's certainly not any other social media platform that we know. And I'll be honest with you, I need to listen to my own advice here because I've spent a little bit of time on it and even made myself create some tos. But I still kind of feel like an outsider when I'm on the platform with the way that people communicate, the way they produce content and certainly how they produce content. So I hope this conversation will inspire me to get back on there and start to learn some of the nuance because it's just a different place.
Soyoung: It is, and I think you're absolutely right that marketers really do need to spend more time living and breathing the ecosystem of the platforms in which they communicate and activate, because I think that's a huge part of understanding the difference between being there and being great.
Eric: And also as we'll talk about being there helps you be there when things start to happen so that you can respond to it first or respond to it early and be a first mover. So what about outside of just brand marketing, but in your professional world in general, what's something that you're very curious about right now? What are you really into?
Soyoung: So I mean, right now I have been reentering society as we all have <laugh>. And it's funny because I think as somebody who's a recovering retail person, cause I probably, I've spent about 15 years of my career in retail. I was so used to just being out and about in the world on a daily weekly basis. So being in stores, whether they're your own stores or competitive or just being out and doing things that consumers experience on a daily basis is a huge part of retail life. And I really brought that into my current role at eos, which is not a retail brand, it's a wholesale brand. And yet I do think that understanding what people experience in the physical and real world is a really big part of also what marketers and storytellers should be doing on an ongoing basis. So I have really enjoyed feedback out and about walking the streets of New York, popping into stores, going back into coffee shops and restaurants, like checking things out in the real world. So I'm just so happy to be embracing that in my daily life again.
Eric: Are there any trends that you're noticing as you're going about doing that or with your business when it comes to this post covid normalcy that we're all coming back to? It's actually a topic that we're researching for some content that we're going to release in April is just, I think we all talk about this post covid world, but when it comes to particularly a retail business or a C P G business, I don't know that we've really figured out what the post covid hybrid, weird, we're not really out of it, but we are landscape looks like. I'm just curious what your perspective is on that from what you see.
Soyoung: Yeah, I think that's a really great question. And I think that I don't know that we've reached post covid normalcy, but I think we're on a path back. But I do think that a lot of what retailers were doing pre pandemic, frankly, to increase the seamlessness in the consumer experience, whether it's digital or physical to not overuse the word omnichannel, but it is something that I think was happening pre pandemic and it really accelerated during the pandemic. So this idea that you have the seamless experience, even things as simple, just think about how simple this is, but the fact that you don't have physical menus at restaurants anymore and that everything is just QR code snapped to the menu. These are things that have accelerated over the course of the past two years that I think we were always on that path to getting there. But really the past two years has forced us all to really think about what our touchless seamless virtual slash irl kind of experience is as brands and as retailers.
Eric: So beyond walking around experiencing retail and restaurant life and spending a lot of time on TikTok, what does the day in the life of the chief marketing officer for aos? Oh sorry, eos. eos. eos, what does -
Soyoung: you're not the only one.
Soyoung: It's a huge matter of contentious, some contention among our audiences. Some of the best content that we put out there is like, how do you say it? Do you say e o s? Do you say eos? Do you say eos? And it, it's actually always generates a ton of conversation. But I would say a Dale in day in the life never looks the same for not only frankly somebody who is in my professional role, but just frankly as a person who's navigating this hybrid work from home, work from the office, I'm in the office right now situation. I'm also a working mom and have to do all of the basic things, get my kids up and out the door and to school, I have to cook them dinner, I have to figure out how to prepare for C-suite meetings. It just is all happening all the time. And I feel like this probably sounds familiar to a lot of folks who are listening right now who have had the boundaries of their life just completely disappear. And so we're all in this constant state of juggling which I think has been, I think the upside of it has been that we can find the space in between things that used to be dedicated to either home or office to get your stuff done. And then really the risk of it all is that you just have to manage so that you keep some time for yourself, keep some time to think. I now actually have taken to actively blocking out working time on my calendar to be able to just have processing time, reading time sometimes connecting time. I actually set aside time to just connect with people in the industry or connect with people who want to reach out and get career advice. So my life is definitely not as regimented as it was pre pandemic. But I think that I, I've really tried to learn how to embrace that and turn it into something for the positive.
Eric: That tactic of blocking downtime on your calendar, it's one of the best productivity, just life, happiness, fulfillment hacks that I have. So I try to block time every morning cause that's typically what I'm most productive to work on, the most important things because always the urgent ends up taking over from the important if you let it. And so I think blocking that time, I'm also really trying to hold onto this no meeting Wednesday thing that I've had going. But as the business grows, that's getting harder and harder, but I'm holding on. But in general, you know what, I've said this a few times, but I just think it's so important what gets prioritized gets done. And at least for me, what goes in my calendar gets prioritized. Therefore, it sounds so simple, but literally looking at the things that you feel like are most important or that you feel like you might be a little bit behind on and just put time in recurring or even one off, if you put it in your calendar, there's a much better chance that you're going to prioritize it, which means there's a much better chance that you can get it done.
So it's not just me talking to CMOs and senior leaders, successful people. I hear this time and time again of people blocking time for the things that matter most. And I think it's something that everybody can learn from and do. So when we look back on your career, the guide you to where you are today. So you spent some time in the consulting world, you moved into beauty and retail, you spent time at Victoria's Secret Bath and Body Works for 10 years. You're also on the board of Bob's Discount Furniture. That could be an interesting conversation about advertising growing up in the Boston area, very familiar with that. But when we look on your career and the path that got you to where you are today, what would you say are some of the most important things that created the opportunity that you now have?
Soyoung: So I would say I think back a lot because I do think that my path hasn't been conventional to get to where I am now. I don't think that when you look at my career, you necessarily see cmo. I think you might see a commercial background, you'll see some finance and strategy. I actually spent a decade as a strategist before I became a marketer. But I think that probably the most common thread throughout the various steps that have somehow gotten me to where I am today is that I've said yes. And I think saying yes is a big part to opening up doors and opportunities within your career and frankly within your life. Because sometimes saying yes will not yield what you, I think at hoped, but at the very least, if you don't say yes, you're never going to find out. And so trying new things, taking on new challenges I think is always a part of evolving and learning and calibrating.
And I've always believed that a career path is never just this sort of meticulously plotted linear path from A to B, but that it is a series of calibrations that you take through throughout the course of a long period of time. And I think that for me, those calibrations have led me to where I am today and I don't know where it's going to lead me next and what the future of my career holds, but I'm excited to be able to learn new things by saying yes to things that I may not have anticipated or expected in my career path, but will hopefully yield some new learnings.
Eric: I want to ask you a follow up question because it's actually something that I've been struggling with. I a hundred percent agree on the importance of saying yes. There's a quote, I'm sure somebody else came up with that, but I think I first heard it on a Tim Ferriss podcast of increasing the surface area for luck to stick to. If you put yourself out there, if you say yes to more things, serendipity plays a huge role in anybody's life and certainly their professional career. But if you put yourself out there, you say yes to more things, there's more chances for good things to happen to you at the same time. The thing I'm struggling with right now is how do you not take on too much, especially for us, the stage that we're at with rival right now, another quote I think about a lot, startups don't starve. They drown. It's taking on too much too early. And so when you apply that to careers for the people listening, how do you find that balance between saying yes, increasing the surface area of luck, but also making sure that you don't take on too much?
Soyoung: Oof. That's a really hard one. I do think that it's actually very similar to the role of a marketer, I think because as a marketer you can also take on too much. There are many areas in your life where if you have a lot of appetite if you are somebody who is inclined to take on opportunities to learn, if you are somebody who tends to say yes to more things, you will always risk hitting that tipping point where you've exceeded your bandwidth and your capacity to do anything well. So I think that it's always a matter of reassessing the opportunities that you have at hand and being mindful and choiceful about saying yes to the things that you think are filtering for the things that you think could potentially yield the most amount of learning and opportunity for you. And I think that when I think about, we're going to talk a little bit later about some of the work that we've been doing at EOS, and we're going to talk about things like testing and learning and trying new things. And that's also related to your career, right? When you say yes to things, you're always testing and learning and trying new things. And I think that you just have to be thoughtful about trying the things that are going to yield something that you didn't know before versus saying yes to things that you've already done a million times over.
Eric It's such a tough one, and there's a word you said a couple times that I think is so important and really helps me, and that's calibration. I think we're always looking for, especially at least the way my brain is wired, you're always looking for the black or white, the honor, the off to something. And really the reality is, and the opportunity is usually in a calibration of a little bit more gray in this direction or a little bit more gray in that direction as opposed to it being black and white.
Hey everyone, just a quick note to say that we have partnered with attest, a powerful consumer research platform, and we are producing our own research using attest. But I just wanted to highlight a stat from one of the recent reports that was relevant to the conversation that I'm having with Soyoung today. And that stat is from the US D to C digest study published in April 21 on US Consumer Trends. It says that social media plays an important role in the shopping journey of Gen Z. 13% of Gen Z consumers say they would begin there if they wanted to buy products in toiletries, makeup and health supplements. If you want to find out more from this report or if you want sign up to start running a free survey with access to 110 million consumers in 49 markets, head on over to askattest.com and see how they can help you remove the guesswork from your business growth. So you teed up the segue, let's talk about the work. We have a case study to talk about. I'm going to let you tee it up. So set the scene for our audience on this campaign that we're going to dig into, and then let's talk about how it came to life, the tremendous success that it drove, and also how that has impacted the rest of your marketing strategy and how you've doubled down on some of that success.
Soyoung: Yeah, so we're going to talk a little bit about TikTok and it's been a journey for us. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are looking to jump into the platform and looking to drive success. We've actually been on this journey now for quite some time. We started on TikTok in 2019. Prior to that, we'd actually been exploring the platform since late 2018. I went back and actually checked my phone to see when I downloaded the app. It was in 2018 in the fall. So I've been on the platform for quite some time. And I think that one of the first things that I would say is that for any marketer out there who's intrigued by something new, there's no better way to figure it out as a marketer than to figure it out As a consumer, you have to consume what you're about to explore as professionally as in marketing in order for you to truly understand the ecosystem. And so for us, we started to get our bearings and we launched our first campaign on TikTok in the fall of 2019. It was a big sort of splashy hashtag challenge that we launched as part of our experimental marketing budget. And then since then we've been on a journey. We have been continuing to activate from a paid media standpoint, leveraging a lot of really fantastic influencers and content creators on the platform as well. And then also growing our organic audience. I think we're now over 800,000 followers on the platform, which I think is it's a huge testament to just literally the day in day out work that the team is doing to nurture and engage with the community. And recent, and then a year ago a little less than a year ago actually, we had this incredible moment that happened that really all of that work that we have been doing, investing in listening, engaging and building up a presence, presence on the platform, I think truly paid off in a singular and big way when a content creator named Carly Joy posted a completely unsolicited but enthusiastic endorsement of our shave cream. And the thing that really caught our attention wasn't just how funny it was. I mean, yes, it was funny, and the way she speaks is just kind of priceless and authentic. But the thing that actually really caught our attention was the more we dug into the comments, we realized that people were appreciating in the educational content. I mean, people were legitimately, this is the information that I've always needed that no one taught me. And it opened up a dialogue using language that not only did communities generally not talk about in the open, but brands certainly don't talk like this, right? And we knew that we desperately wanted to collaborate with this partner with creator, and yet at the time, we were reaching out to her and she was ignoring all of our messages and we were trying to get in contact with her because her content is her ip. So we really wanted to be able to use her content in a marketing campaign. So we then had this really, we got together with some partners and internally regrouped and realized that we could actually take her exact words and put them on our product. So we created in record time, I think it was from the moment we said, go to the moment we had product in her hand. I think it was a little over three days. We created the Blesser effing cooch shave cream with all of her detailed instructions printed in lieu of our normal product usage instructions. And we essentially duetted her TikTok so that we could get her attention. I often say this folks ask me, why did you do this? How did you think of this? And we were just desperate to get her attention. We did all of this as a desperate plea for attention to get through to her, and it worked. So we duetted her and then she finally responded to us, and then we were able to collaborate with her on a much larger campaign.
Eric: So should we play it?
Soyoung: Sure
Eric: Let's play the tech talk. We'll have to figure out whether we need to edit some of it out, but let's play it. Here we go.
<video> For my people with female parts out there, I'm about to tell you the secret for how to bless your [inaudible] cooch. You need this. It is an absolute blessing, and you can dry shave with this saying something. I use the fat ass Venus Gillette razors. I obviously cannot show my cooch on camera. So pretend this is it, right? You're going to take this hopefully in the shower. If you're not, it still works. You're going to put that all there. Then listen to this [inaudible] part. You're going to go down first, then you're going to go sideways on half of it this way, sideways on half of it this way. And then you go up, I swear, I swear by it. Whatever you [inaudible] do not use this. It'll make you smell [inaudible] after a couple days because it throws off your pH bounces. Do it. And now you have a smooth ass. Hoo-ha. You're welcome.
Eric: So now that we've heard, and for people watching on YouTube have seen what we're talking about, I want to actually go back before we talk about going forward, and I've got some of the stats for the results that this campaign drove, which are amazing. But there's a couple things that you talked about in how you set up what happened that I think are really important to draw out. So for me at least, the fact that you were on there in 2018 or as a brand in 2019, whatever it was, that was so early, anecdotally for me, and again, I was in the FinTech space at that point, just leaving the agency world. So I wasn't as much having conversations with CPG retail marketers. I would've been in previous years, but still that was so early. And also the fact that you had an experimental budget set aside to do stuff like this. So can you talk about how you created a strategy, but I think just as importantly, if not more so a culture where you were able to get there early and actually have budget to test things that you weren't sure would work or not?
Soyoung: Yeah, I mean, I think one of my principles in marketing and I think in life <laugh> is to always be learning. And so within our marketing team, we have created very much a culture where it's not about success or failure, it's about success or learning. And in order to do that as a leader, you really have to create the space for your team to be able to feel that they have room and trust to take these risks and to be able to lean in and learn. You obviously as a leader, you have to be measured about it, which is I think where the resource constraints, the budgeting process, all of that comes into play. But you do have to set it up with your team and make sure that from the top to the bottom it's understood that testing, experimentation and learning on a day-to-day business just it's just a part of fundamentally a part of what we do.
And so we always leave room for testing in every campaign that we run. We always leave a certain portion of our budget. We always leave some portion of how we're of our tactical plan is going to be different from the last time that we did it. We don't repeat the same thing twice. Now, whether that is related to the content strategy, whether it's related to the, let's say the organic versus paid mix, whether it's related to platform strategy, in this case that can be different every time, but the team has now it now understands that that's a big part of how we continue to grow as marketers. So we leave a portion of the budget of everything that we do for experimentation. We always identify what that testing agenda is going to be upfront so that we can manage to understand what our KPIs and how we're going to just measure success.
How are we going to know at the end of this experimentation that it's something that we would want to do again, that it will be part of our ongoing arsenal. In the case of TikTok we had been keeping an eye on the platform form for quite some time, and it was early, but it was also something that just really spoke to all of us as marketers. And that's why I say that I think as marketers, you really have to be consumers first before you can be a marketer because you have to really see the potential and the stickiness and just frankly, that sort of joy that we had as non Gen Z audience members of just consuming what was, I think thought of as Gen Z content at the time, but we could see the potential. And so we knew that we wanted to lean in and really dedicated that experimental portion of our campaign budget against a TikTok campaign.
Eric: It's really all about being customer-centric or focusing on the customer understanding. That's all roads lead back to that successful campaign, successful strategy, successful cultures, that that's really what underpins it all at the end of the day. And that's regardless of the function as well, having spent some time in a product business, that's what drives successful product development and engineering cultures and all that stuff, at least in my opinion as well. I think it's what you talked about in terms of having something to test. I always think back to, I did a lot of work with Amazon when I was on the agency side and they had this thing that they called a test learn agenda that they made us run with every campaign. It sounds very similar to what you're talking about. So there's the results that you need to deliver for the campaign, but then there's also a hypothesis that you test for each campaign that you do. And so I think that's an how you talk about it. My experience work using that with a couple clients. I think that's something that people can take away and apply pretty easily if you're able to share what is the percentage of a campaign budget or even a rough range that you put towards experimental. Is it like a 70 20 10 type framework or how do you split that up?
Soyoung: So it may differ from campaign to campaign just because we're generally looking at a split that sort of averages out throughout the year, but we think about anywhere up to about 20% of our annual resources time and money, because time is actually just as important as money being dedicated to things that are more experimental and test and learn.
Eric: Yep. Great. Okay, so coming back to the campaign. So it's amazing the results that Adro got. A couple stats here. So after Carly Joy posted this TikTok, you saw a 2500% jump in sales of that product website. Trafficked jumped 450 x, is that right? Is that type bro? That's right. 50 x. So one, it's just unbelievable the power of an influencer and a platform like TikTok where still I think there is so much underpriced attention for brands to tap into, but you have to do it the right way as well. I'm curious with this, so what we were talking about before in terms of increasing the surface area of luck, there was a bit of a lightning in a bo bottle moment or kind of how you said it, real serendipity to this happening because you were also already focused on this as something that you, as a product that you wanted to grow and you were looking for an opportunity to do it.
When you think about TikTok or influencer marketing or your marketing in general, I always think of this framework of you need kind of the baseline day-to-day stuff, posting content, paid media ads, et cetera. But then every once in a while you should be finding these opportunities for big breakthrough moments and you really have to grab them by the horns because sometimes it is something that's like there for a minute and then it's gone. Another way of thinking of it is you need to push for 1% incremental improvement, but then you also need to be thinking about 10 x ideas. So this was clearly something that was more of a breakthrough 10 x idea. Do you have a structured way, a strategy or a principle within your culture of the team that kind of thinks about that? Was there something where that created an environment where people were looking for an opportunity like this? I guess that's what I'm getting at.
Soyoung: Yeah, I mean I think that it is important that you mentioned it earlier that the day in day out is important because it allows for these breakthrough moments to you to be able to take advantage of the breakthrough moments. Because if we're not in it on a day in out business, I think that it makes it that much harder for you to see the opportunity and then seize on the opportunity at the speed at which the platform moves. And this is specific to TikTok, but I do think that this is the case in general with marketing and how much of marketing has shifted to how much more reactive marketing there is today versus years ago. So I think that when we think about where we live and breathe as a marketing team, that's already defining what our strategy is. Cause we're basically saying we have to have priorities as a team because I don't have an endless team size to be able to monitor everything that's going on across every platform. We do have to choose where we think the most kind of fruitful opportunities are going to be for our audience, for our storytelling, and then for these types of moments. And then when the moments happen, I think understanding the ecosystems so that you can react in a way that is native to that ecosystem is a huge part of also driving that success. So in this case we, we've said this as a team, but we didn't engineer this viral moment, didn't I? This was a gift. So a great marketer can't create a viral moment as much as we all try to, but a great marketer seizes on that viral moment and then extends it as much as possible in order to be able to keep that momentum going. And that was really, I think what this team did. I, when I think back to the strategy that was applied, it was really much more about continuing the lengthening that wave instead of letting it pass by us. And that really is a cultural that's really a cultural attribute within this team figuring out where the big opportunities are and then also figuring out how we amplify them. And I do think that that is something that we've as a team been highly attuned to through the course of just many, many years of being very keyed into social media as our key strategy and platform that we activate on.
Eric: Yeah, we talk a lot here about obviously challenger marketing, that's kind of what the whole business and our point of view is built around. But the point within that being you don't need to be a startup to be a challenger, really. It's about the mindset and model that you apply to your marketing. And a big thing within that that I've seen in my experience that I think challengers do really well, whether they're a big company or a startup that helps to power their growth is when they find an opportunity. And that could be external, something happening that you jump on or internally in terms of the strengths and weaknesses and competitive advantages of your team, your business, your product, they quintuple down on that. It's not just, okay, yeah, let's lean into that. Yeah, let's go try to do something if we can. It's like, no, we are going to squeeze every last drop out of this lemon that we have. And so listening to you talk about that and how you harness these opportunities and really extend them, that's kind of one of the takeaways that I get that it feels like you are really instilling in your team and clearly played out in this campaign, is you had an opportunity, it was serendipity, but you made the most of it, and you clearly set up your team culturally and also strategically to be able to do that.
Soyoung: And I have to give a lot of credit to my background actually in specialty retail because I do think that when you're working in a day-to-day business, like specialty retail because you're constantly monitoring your business, literally not just every day, but multiple times a day you do sort of have these disciplines drilled into you. And so one of the things, the exercises that my team and I along with the broader organization, including the commercial side of the organization goes through here whenever we see the possibility for an opportunity is we do something called How high is high? And it's a thought exercise. So this idea is how big could this possibly get? Just take the handcuffs off, don't worry about time, money, any of the things because it's a thought exercise. So you gather your entire team and then you figure out all of the different elements of how hard you could push on this thing and how big it could possibly get. And then you're inevitably going to end up in a place where then you sort of size the action plan to whatever your resources are, whatever, whatever's realistic. But having gone through this thought exercise of the sky's the limit allows you to really think about things in a way that this untethered way of thinking about growth that isn't this sort of increment incrementalism that I think typically people who are in a day-to-day with the way that you think about it, you start from the other end. It's like, no, this could get enormous huge, and now let's work backwards to see how we can settle in somewhere in between based on some parameters. But the fact that you just even go through the exercise really, really opens up your mind.
Eric: I'm totally stealing that I really like it is similar to an exercise I do, but it's not the same. And I think they compliment each other, but in a way, I almost like yours better. My exercise is every once in a while and I try to do it quarterly if I can, going through an exercise of, okay, if we were going to start everything over again from scratch, how would we do it? And that's why this podcast is named what it is because what that does for me, similar to what you're talking about, is it removes the constraints. It's not about, okay, this is what we have, what's the next step with what we have? It's no wipe the slate clean. Even if you can't do that, go through the thought exercise because to me, fundamentally a challenger mindset, regardless of what you do, is about being fully fit for purpose for the world of today. And it's really hard to be fully fit for purpose if you're incrementally trying to evolve something. But when you think about something from scratch, you can design it to be fully fit for purpose for the way the world is right now. So I think maybe that's almost like a bottom up way of thinking about it. And yours is kind of a top down, but what I like about yours is that it pushes the ceiling of how people think about what's possible. And often that's sometimes just what people need is they need the box to be removed from them, they need to be encouraged to kind of think bigger than maybe they feel entitled to in their day or week-to-week role. So I really like that exercise and I'm definitely going to be using it. So I want to ask just staying on TikTok for a second, so if we've been talking about the 10 x, the breakthrough, what does the baseline and the 1% look like for you right now? What is the day-to-day content that you're doing, the day-to-day paid media that you're doing, the day-to-day influencers that you're working with? Can you just unpack your current TikTok strategy?
Soyoung: Yeah, so actually haven't always on approach to TikTok since it is a priority platform for us. So can't always be always on every platform, but there are a couple of platforms that are just sort of core to us. So we have always on organic and owned content that we are generating in order to keep that pipeline flowing. We have just generally goaling ourselves to growth of our owned community, and that's an always on measurement and tracking mechanism. We are doing daily community management engagement and then just monitoring what's happening within the ecosystem from a trend perspective so that we can make sure that we're always sort of saying, staying on that leading edge of trends. But then we also have more episodic campaigns that we're running on more of a periodic basis that kind of go around our tent, more of our tent pole moments. So those will involve larger investments in an influencer campaign a much larger paid media investment as well, so that we have a constant 360 level of activity, but that we pulse with larger campaigns as needed to support our business priorities.
Eric: So as expected, we did not get to talk about everything that I had on my list. I want to share a couple quotes that I've pulled from what you've talked about in the past and interviews you've given in the past. And then I'd love to have you just spend a minute or two, I know we're coming up on time, but a minute or two unpacking one of them, which is my favorite, but I want to make sure people hear these others as well. So you've talked about how traditional marketing is more about having a polished and controlled message while social media or I would just say modern digital, digitally led marketing is more about having a conversation with the audience. And I think you can actually pull that away from a channel conversation and apply that to how I see challenger brands thinking and acting versus incumbent brands. They try to have a conversation with their audience as opposed to trying to control the message. Number two that I loved is a brand is a story well told. I'm just going to let that sink in for a second. But the one that I would love for you to unpack in the time that we do have remaining is you said, as marketers, we like to believe we have a hundred percent control over our brand message, but it's never that way. And this is such a passion point slash pet peeve, depending on if I'm in a good mood or a bad mood with my experience in the marketing and the advertising industry. Because I think that sometimes we sit in our tiny little corner of the world in our ivory towers as marketers, and we think that we control these things, but we don't at all. And I guess I'm unpacking it for you, but I'm just really passionate about this and would love to just hear you talk about what that means to you and why you think it's important.
Soyoung: Oh my God, I could talk about this for forever. And I think part of it is honestly because I'm not a conventional marketer, and maybe it's because I'm coming from the perspective of coming out of, for example, retail where I had to go into stores and talk to literal customers in stores on a biweekly basis. And so the thought of not taking the opportunity to engage with people it to me would be, is mind blowing. So having that perspective of, you know, said it earlier, thinking being consumer centric will always lead to better work. And that's the thing about brand marketing is that brand marketing is that it's that long haul investment where you are gradually arcing towards this common story that you hope you're not the only one telling, if that makes sense. So if your consumer has to be able to tell your brand story back to you to be able to demonstrate your success as a brand marketer, and in the meantime engagement with consumers on a day-to-day basis is happening in digital media, social media every day. And so you're always getting this feedback. And for me, that's a gift to be able to understand what people are saying about my brand, my product, my experience on a day-to-day level. To me it's like what better gift is there? And so I'm truly appreciative of the fact that we put digital and social at the center of all of the marketing that we do, and that we happen to be a brand that has a strong appetite for leaning into that and for having that dialogue and then gaining those insights. One of the things that I didn't mention earlier when we talked about this TikTok, this TikTok case study, was that the original insight that led us to realizing that people were using our shave cream for their intimate area came from social media. We learned that by listening and having this conversation with consumers, and then we had to do the dermatological testing in order to actually be approved to be able to market to it. So none of this campaign would've ever happened if we hadn't been listening ears to the ground in the first place. And so that's a huge gift. All of the success that we've seen in this category has been, it's been a gift and then it's been our job as good marketers to be able to take that gift and make good use of it.
Eric: So we've covered so much ground, and I think there are at least a dozen things that people could take out of this and start doing tomorrow that could help them grow, help their teams grow, help their brands grow. But if you had to pull out just one thing that you would recommend people do differently after listening to this episode, what would it be?
Soyoung: I would say the one thing that I would say is as a marketer, spend as much time listening as you do talking.
Eric: Love it. Well, we will leave it there so young, thank you so much. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. If people want to get in touch with you or check out everything that you're doing, where do you want to direct them?
Soyoung: Either to LinkedIn or Twitter.
Eric: Amazing. Well, thanks again. Looking forward to meeting up in person next week in New York, and I will see you soon. I will actually see you soon. See you have a great rest of your day.
Soyoung: Thanks, you too.
Eric: Scratch is a production of Rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us, check out we are rival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me at eric@wearerival.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it, and please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
