Transcript

Bennie F Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for another special episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episode today, we’ll explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, our really special guest is a true powerhouse, Soyoung Kang. Newly minted, Soyoung Kang is president at eos Products, the iconic Gen Z focused beauty brand.

Previously, she served as chief marketing and innovation officer and was named Adweek’s brand genius, Forbes’ CMO, a campaign US CMO 50, and Business Insider most innovative CMO. Soyoung has served as a board member and advisor to several companies and was previously an executive with Bath and Body Works, Victoria’s Secrets, and the Boston Consulting Group. She holds a BS in architecture from MIT and a dual MBA in marketing and finance from the Wharton School and was a Fulbright Scholar. And she has a special distinction for those who are part of the AMA community as well. Soyoung, welcome to the podcast.

Soyoung Kang

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to have this conversation.

Bennie

Well, I am so delighted to have you here. I will tell you every single time I hear about what you’re doing, I see the campaigns or I encounter you, it always brings a big smile to my face. I get so excited every time. The nature of the work, the presence and the overall vibe, I always feel better about the marketing world. So this really made me smile. We had already set up time. We like, we’re going to talk. We’re going to talk.

And then this incredible game changing news was announced. My friend, you went from chief marketing innovation officer to now president. Talk a bit about that moment and that experience. And this is at this recording of this podcast. This is really fresh news.

Soyoung

It is. You guys are, I think, you guys are the first people that I’ve talked to in this type of a forum since the announcement went out. And I just feel incredibly grateful. I feel incredibly grateful to the organization for putting the trust in me to be part of this journey in the next certain phase of growth that we are going to go through as a business.

And I feel incredibly grateful for all of the folks around me who are part of this marketing community who have rallied and just showed unbelievable amounts of support and enthusiasm. I have never felt this much just community support before, and I just feel immensely just humble and grateful for it. So thank you for your kind words. They’re like. It’s been like an endless stream of kind words from so many people. It’s been amazing.

Bennie 

My goodness. It’s all well earned and well deserved. And so as you can tell, I’m still smiling now, but I’m going to ask a little different question because there is something in your bio that we had in common that I never realized. So my friend, we both studied architecture as undergraduate students. You are the first CMO, yes, who I’ve met who studied architecture. For years, people would look at me and go, you studied architecture? And I’m like, yes, it is such a powerful prompt.

Soyoung 

My god, I didn’t know-

Bennie

And training for being an innovation and CMO officer and CEO. And so I’m looking through the bio and I was like, my goodness, this is why I like you.

Soyoung 

So you’re literally the first person as well that I have met who has that same background. I guess I’m not that unique anymore, I don’t know. But you know, I…

Bennie 

You are very unique. It’s just two of us.

Soyoung 

We’re two peas in a pod. I often actually say that architecture was like the perfect training ground. I think there are things that are, when you think about it on the surface level, maybe if you haven’t thought about it, that are legitimately appropriate for a field like marketing, which is the amount of left brain and right brain balancing, the fact that you have to think analytically, but you also have to think creatively, the fact that you’re thinking about all of like the big picture impact of everything that you’re doing, but you’re also thinking about the tiniest, tiniest little details that if you miss the tiny details, then it’s like the big picture is for naught. I think all of those things are the perfect sort of brain training.

Bennie 

Yes.

Soyoung 

Which, let’s be honest, like that’s what undergraduate is. It’s brain training. It’s not necessarily like going to tell you what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. But beyond that, I think there are things that maybe people aren’t as aware that happen in the discipline of architecture, which is unlike many of my friends who were studying other courses. I was doing long months, long projects, right? Which is very different than

Bennie 

Right. Right, right.

Soyoung 

Homework assignment, you know, turn it in, get a grade, turn it in, get a grade, like this sort of like more day to day, week to week kind of gyration of studying. Instead, you’re investing in a months long development and you are iterating and changing along the way. You are presenting and defending and sometimes evolving because you have to think about it. It’s like, how do I take this feedback?

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right. Right.

Soyoung 

And take the truth at the core of it and help that influence my work. All of these things, you’re doing this and you’re like 18, 19 years old. Like what an amazing way to learn as a young person. And honestly, it sets you up for kind of anything that you want to do in life.

Bennie

Right, right.

It really is. My team has heard me use architecture metaphors all the time. And I have some of the quotes from our professors along the way. I just come back and they fit in the marketing team leadership concept. I’ve oftentimes riffed and said, if it’s not going to stand up and model, what makes you think it’s going to stand up in real life? And I had that experience, so sharing here. But yes, and the fact to your point that as architects, at your heart,

Soyoung

I love that.

Bennie

Your visionaries. But you not only are selling a vision, you then have to bring it all the way through. So the carpenter and the plumber, the electrician and the policy, you understand what you’re doing, right? And bring you along. And often I find in leadership, I get to set the big vision and then pragmatically talk about how we get there. And being able to balance those two things, the vision and the pragmatism has really been an awesome space. So.

Soyoung 

Yeah.

Bennie

So when did you decide that you weren’t going to be a practicing architect? That’s always another big moment.

Soyoung

Yeah. So, I, I don’t know if you, you had this experience as well, but I, you know, I, worked and interned at firms throughout my, my undergrad. You know, as a, in the summertime, I would, I would, you know, intern at an architecture firm. And I think I just was so much more in love with the study, and the discipline at more like a theoretical level than I, was in the reality of the practice. And so. You know, as I was kind of finishing up, had decided that there were a couple of things that were happening. Number one, I felt very keenly the responsibility of a first generation immigrant to go out and basically make my own way and be financially responsible for myself. And I felt like years of more school, which you do have to do in order to become a licensed architect. That just it wasn’t where I was at that time.

And also, felt like some of these like big, big meaty, like juicy ideas and things that I fell in love with in the study of architecture. I did ask myself whether I could find that in a different way in other fields and other disciplines. I wish that I had discovered marketing at the time. And it’s why I sort of like believe.

Bennie 

Right.

Soyoung 

Believe deeply that right now the best thing that we can do is to get more young people hooked on the discipline of marketing today. Because I don’t think that a lot of people actually understand or even are aware of what it is. But what I did end up doing was going into management consulting, is not at all what I, you know, what I maybe what I was thinking it would be. But I think that I really enjoyed the process of going through the recruiting process.

Bennie

Right.

Soyoung 

You do tackle a lot of these sort of high level conceptual strategic ideas and problem solving. And I really enjoyed that process. And so I ended up trying my hand as a management consultant for a few years.

Bennie

Right. Right. Right? It’s so true. Architecture is strategy in all the different ways, right? It’s strategy and it’s creative strategy. It’s a cultural strategy. It’s business and financial. It’s environmental strategy. It’s all of those things. Well, for me, my friend, it was Noxzema. Yes, skincare brand. It was Noxzema. I got a chance to intern in the storied Procter & Gamble brand management program as a college student. And I went…

Soyoung 

Yeah, yeah. Amazing.

Bennie 

To spend three, four months at Procter & Gamble headquarters and I worked on Noxzema skincare brand. As a teenager, they had me working on teen marketing and I was hooked. It’s like, this is the type of work that I want to do.

Soyoung

That’s amazing.

Bennie 

You know, just blew it away and found the space, the entrepreneurial side of me that I didn’t feel expressed in architecture. Architecture felt like you had the agency over the project in theory, but then you always went into the world of who’s going to fund it, who’s going to like it, who’s going to put in there. And I had always been an entrepreneur at heart. So that didn’t gel well with that. But the notion of taking business products and having your way to be able to build gave me more agency. And that was what did it for me.

Soyoung

See, I wish that somebody had introduced me to that world back then. I’m immensely grateful for my career journey, but it definitely has been circuitous to get to where I am today.

Bennie

I am happy for your path because the other part of your path is you study finance. So like me, you’re not afraid of numbers. And that’s a big deal. I talked to a lot of our friends, our CMOs, and if we ever have any kryptonite to mix our real and imagined measure, it’s often I get pulled aside and people freak out about numbers. I’m like, numbers are such an integral part of what we do. We try to work through the fear.

And encourage you that you have the kind of skill and resource. And so it’s just a wonderful background that sets you up perfectly for innovation. Now you’ve had a lot of roles in retail, in beauty, in other spaces. I only had that one at Noxzema. I had like a supply of Noxzema for like hundred years. It just was. My goodness. And so that is important. And we’re going to share with the group.

Soyoung 

Your skin is so amazing.

Bennie 

One of the stories that I sent to you and it just made me laugh. I heard you speaking at the Brand Institute at Columbia. Shout out to Matt Quitt. And I was there as CEO of AMA, but also as a proud alum. And I was sitting in the room and you were giving a presentation. You talk so much about your brand ambassadors. Dare I say fanatics. You’re going in there. And I was super excited and I hadn’t tried because I’m not the core target audience at that time.

I hadn’t tried vanilla cashmere. So I ordered it, I’m on the road a lot. I come in, you know, unpack it, I put it in my bathroom, minding my business. As you know, I have a 14 year old daughter. All of a sudden I come home and all holy hell breaks loose in my house. There is a family meeting that has been called by the 14 year old. And she wants to know why in the world does her dad have her signature scent?

This was a violation. You know, her older brother was there. He’s confused. My wife is like, you should know better. I was like, but it makes my skin feel so soft and I smell so good. I don’t know if she’s forgiven me, but we’ve come to a truce, you know, that I fund all of her skincare routine. And she said the same thing. She’s like, why is your skin so, so no. So I share that because it speaks to the power of brand and the power of community. And I didn’t even know I had one of your biggest brand supporters living under my nose. My apologies. But you also have my support, so I’m funding.

Soyoung

Thank you. Thank you for your support. We really do appreciate it. It is really an incredible journey that we’ve been on to go from where we were when we first launched on the scene, think, like 15-ish years ago, eos was founded as a total upstart brand that was meant to disrupt a category that nobody was paying attention to, which was the category of lip balm. And so we created those, you know, viral collectible egg shaped lip balms that an entire generation of consumers went crazy for. And I think that, you know, at the time there were some really, really brilliant ideas that went into making, you know, making what this company did, which is they created a desirability, they created a sense of joy in a category that was not known for desire or joy. And I think this idea that we can do that and that if you honor that principle that the company was founded on so brilliantly, that we can bring desire and joy into pretty much any category. 

And I love seeing and hearing the stories like your daughter, who clearly gets a lot of joy out of using one of our most popular products because it’s not about the product category, it’s about the connective tissue and the brand equity that we have built over those 15 years and how do we stretch that into new areas that we can continue to grow this business and continue to win new fans and new generations of fans. And so I love hearing that story because actually it’s not an unusual thing for parent and child right now to both be fans of EOS. And it’s something that we’re immensely proud of that for us, it’s not as much as we do think a lot about Gen Z as sort of like the center of our rules eye, but our fan base actually stretches pretty wide. this summer, this past summer, I was reflecting back and in the same two week period, I found out that

Bennie

All right.

Soyoung 

My kids who are tween boys, my kids’ friends were big fans of our product, right? Tween boys. And within that same two week period, I got a letter from a septuagenarian in the Midwest who talked about how much she loved our product and how she was spending all of her social security money on our product. It’s just, this brand is so stretchy and it’s because when you bring

Bennie 

Yes. My goodness.

Soyoung 

Joy into people’s lives in any way so that little moments throughout their day can be more enjoyable and more joyful. You can win fans of any age across the country.

Bennie 

Alright.

You really can, and most importantly, Rabid ones. Rabid fans who are all in, which is the beauty of your brand connecting with the cultural moment and the product and the work you do. So you’ve had a lot of innovation. And one of the things that’s interesting is this place that you start for joy isn’t always where our brands come in. How was it the first time you started to break through in an innovation and say, is really our voice and our dimension and our, dare I say, vibe?

Soyoung 

Yes!

It’s funny because I actually think that the brand has always been about, you know, if I go back and I’ve been with the brand now for seven years, so clearly the company had a life before me that was very successful. And the original, if I go back and look at, for example, the campaign work that was done in the beginning, it was the lip balm that makes you smile. so, delight and joy and happiness has always been a core… A core equity within the brand. And so I believe that, you know, CMOs and leaders can come and go, but at the end of the day, the brand endures. And so my job has been really to honor and be a steward for what the brand stands for, which is partly what we create, but partly what our audience is.

Create around us too, because they have just as much of a say in what we stand for, because they’re sort of like the final judges, to be honest, and the final arbiters of whether we’ve been successful at delivering joy in their lives. So, you know, I think that when I really think about it, like, I think that the, if our job is to deliver joy, the only difference that in that timeframe, in that 15 year journey, is the how, it’s not the what. And how we do that today, you know, if I think about it with the marketer’s lens, is different than 15 years ago. The tools are different, the landscape is different, media is fundamentally completely, you know, revolutionized in that timeframe. What brands are willing to say and do?

Bennie 

Right.

Soyoung 

Is different and the amount of sort of authenticity and realness that brands are expected to kind of show up with in our storytelling, that’s different as well. And so I really love this journey of evolution and why marketing is so fascinating to me is that it’s not a matter of like create a playbook and rinse and repeat. I think that what you do is you create or you identify the things that are timeless.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Soyoung 

And then you’re constantly evolving how you execute against those timeless things. So it’s a lot of fun for anyone who is curious and likes to learn and change all the time.

Bennie

Right. Right. So when you think about winning in this moment, what does winning look like for you? For the brand and as a leader, what does winning look like?

Soyoung 

Well, I I think that there’s like the obvious things around the business and certainly we feel that, you know, we’re in a position of winning. You know, I think that we’ve had multiple years now of very strong business growth, which would attest to winning from a business standpoint. I think that winning for us from a marketing and brand standpoint is creating…

Creating something that lasts beyond me. So what I really consider winning is how do we win people today, but how do we win people for the long run? And for us, what that’s meant is to create a true affinity with our target audience that is rooted in something that feels very true and community-centric. And that’s really been our focus for quite some time now as a team.

Bennie 

Right.

Soyoung 

We’ve thought a lot about how do we truly act like a brand that puts our community at its center, but with the same joy that we talk about as the heartbeat of who we are as a brand. And for us, that means not taking ourselves too seriously. It means engaging with everyday people every day.

Bennie

All right.

Soyoung 

Being real and surprising and delighting and showing up in places where our audience is and making sure that they get to experience our awesome product and our awesome brand and have fun along the way. And so a lot of the marketing campaign work and activations that we are focused on are really all about reaching and engaging with our everyday fans.

Bennie

Right. So this question for you, talked about the tween boys and you talked about being a first generation immigrant. Does your family understand what you’re doing? That is another one of my favorite marketing questions because that’s another thing like, you know, we tell people we’re doing, you have an advantage because they can see, smell and touch what you do, but do they actually understand what it is that you do?

Soyoung 

You know, I actually think that my direct family, I actually do think that they understand what I do and in large part because of this sort of post pandemic world that we live in where our work and our home lives have become so intertwined. And so the number of times that my young kids have been able to kind of sneak into the background and watch me do, you know, record a podcast or, you know, be in a meeting or…

Or just engage with people at work, it’s just so different. It’s night and day versus the pre-2020 days. And so I’m really appreciative and grateful for the opportunity for them to grow up in a way that brings them closer to what work, but also what work that I’m passionate about specifically looks like so that they can really help to shape, so that it can help to shape their own notions of what being passionate about your work and having a career that you love, what that could look like. Because honestly, I’m not gonna lie, that management consulting path for me was not something that I was passionate about, you know, for many years. And I’ve found my way, fortunately, into a career that I so love so much every day. And I’m really grateful for that.

Bennie 

Right.

Soyoung 

But I hope that my own kids in the next generation, they are able to get there faster than I did.

Bennie 

But this is cool. did not tell my daughter that we were having this conversation today. Cause likewise during the summer, she gets to be a part of all the podcasts at home, right? But we’re in middle of the school year. I, you my focus was getting her to school this morning. I will tell her afterward and she, can tell you, she understands what you do for a living. Not me, but, but she will definitely understand. I know she’s going to be excited about that, about our, about our conversation. So when you think about people coming into the career and navigating, what advice do you have for the next generation of students who are, you know, thinking about going into marketing, thinking about being engaged in marketing discipline, whether they use the term marketing or not. We see a lot of that in our space where folks, if you close their eyes, are fundamentally brand specialists and marketing folks, but they may not use that language.

Soyoung 

So I actually literally just last night I was at an event and I gave this advice to somebody who sort of stopped me on their way out the door, on my way out the door. They said, you know, I’m in a different career. I would love to transition into marketing. Like, do you any advice for me on how I can make that happen? And I said, try anything. And I’m a big believer, I’m a big believer in the value of experience.

And the value that every experience has in getting you closer to your ultimate goal. You may not even know what your ultimate goal is. I will tell you that for me, I didn’t know that where I’m sitting today was end goals for me at all. I can see that in retrospect, you know, in hindsight, I look and I’m like, my God, I wish I had done this like, you know, 20, 30 years ago, but I didn’t know. And it took a series of

Bennie 

Right.

Soyoung 

Calibrations through my career journey for me to finally end up where I am so passionate about what I do. And I think that the only way to get started is to get started. And in marketing in particular, there are many different adventures that you can be on. You can be brand side, you can be…

Bennie

Right. Yeah. Right.

Soyoung 

Can be on the tech side, you can be agency side, and even within any of those, there are so many different roles that you can play. And every single experience that you get under your belt just makes you a better marketer for the next bigger experience. So I really believe that just getting in there and just doing more things is the best way to kickstart.

Bennie 

Right. I love the conversation of doing more things because you never know when that investment in time yourself is going to pay off. Think back to, I was starting as a senior marketing leader at an organization in one of my early conversations where we had to think about our trade show presence. And remember sitting in the room and whipping out a sheet of paper and it’s natural for me to draw, right? I’m an architecture major and I started talking about the concept and I drew out what the booth should be. And watching the team members in the rooms, mouths dropped open because they didn’t expect they hadn’t had a leader who would actually do that without thinking about it. And what really blew me away wasn’t just that, you know, in the moment I drew this out because I was trying to get the idea of ours and I used whatever tools I had to teach in the moment, was that actually gave a team member permission to be her true creative dynamic self.

So my team member who had been the most junior person on marketing team, she’d been the marketing assistant and she had a desire to be more involved in creative application. She took my sheet of paper that I drew out. I didn’t know this that evening and went home and she got to work. The next day I walked in my office. There was a perfectly scaled model of what I had drawn, fully branded. One of her passions had been building doll houses and creativity. She’s one of the most creative people I’ve ever met.

And that was almost 20 years ago. And she’s still my designer today. To just talk about giving, it gives you freedom in there. Because I did that, she had all these skills that she didn’t know where she could use in marketing space. It blew me away and humbled me when I came in and was like, you built this overnight from my drawing. And that changed the trajectory of our team and the work that we were doing.

Soyoung 

I love that, that’s amazing.

That’s so great. And I love that she took the initiative to just try something because I so appreciate when people on the team are just willing to kind of like put themselves out there. It’s like nothing tickles me more than when somebody’s like, know I wasn’t, you didn’t ask me to do this, but I tried doing this thing. That is the best because what you see there, you’re seeing initiative, you’re seeing passion.

You’re seeing curiosity. You’re seeing a willingness to learn new things. I just think it’s such a great hallmark in a fantastic team member.

Bennie 

It really is and something to help encourage and model as a leader. So we’ll talk about this, that you’re making a transition to president. So what in this opening couple of weeks, and this will change over time, what’s been your biggest aha moment from not being the chief marketing innovation officer, which I will say candidly, once you’re chief marketing innovation officer, you’re always, it is in your DNA. But what does it feel like now to have the president responsibility?

Soyoung 

So what I will say is there is an entire side of the business that now I am sort of immersed in that I am loving learning about. mean, it’s a big part of, know, no matter where you are in your career, if you’re somebody like me and you’re just a curious person who likes to learn, you’re always going to be looking for opportunities to do new things and try new things, which is…

Which is sort of what gets me up in the morning. And the thing that I think is interesting about these few weeks is that I have to be comfortable with being the person in the room that doesn’t know anything. So that’s a very different role to be in versus the last seven years where I have been in, I may not know everything or have all the answers, but I’ve been in a,

A medium that I have gotten familiar with and had exposure to for a really long time. So now I’m like, wait a minute, the most basic things, wait a minute, what is the definition of this word? Okay, what is the purpose of this meeting? How do we do this or how do we do that or how do we create this report? Whatever the question is, I’m asking really fundamental questions.

Bennie

Right.

Soyoung

Basic questions and I have to be okay with that. I have to be okay with the person who’s least experienced in this content in the room because the thing with learning is that you have to be okay to be very humble and to start from zero and we all start from zero at some point and if you don’t ask the questions you’re just never going to get from zero to expert because you’re just going to be like

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Soyoung 

You know, if I let my ego prevent me from asking the questions, I’m just going to be spinning close to zero for way too long. I have to ask the question so could get it out of the way and then start thinking, you know, at higher order. And so that’s been a really fascinating experience for me. And it’s something that I’m actually really enjoying. And I don’t know how long I get to say I’m the new person in the room, but I’m going to keep writing that as long as I can.

Bennie

Own it my friend. Own it. I’m still, the AMA is almost 100 years old and I’ve been here three years this month. I’m still the new guy because we’ve been here 100 years. Still counts. But I love this moment. Yeah, I love this moment because two things can be true at the same time. You can have deep expertise of an expert or a teacher, but then have a childlike mind of being

Soyoung 

been 90 %!

Bennie

A questioner and a learner. We are encouraging that with lifetime learning through all the work we do at the AMA, because I’ll have someone who’s an expert on brand. They’ve been doing brand for 25 years, but they’re new at the technology that falls in marketing. They’re new at creator economy. They’re new at other spaces and watching the senior most marketing leaders come in and say, I’m going to come fresh to this. I know nothing about 3D printing, but I know that this could change my world.

It may be nothing, it may be everything. Or I can bring that other expertise that I have, classic media planning, to thoughts about digital.

Soyoung 

Yeah, no, that’s that’s so true. I think that what you’re also describing is, is this notion of like cross pollination and how in today’s world, like there’s there no more silos and walls anymore. Everything is just so much more complex and interconnected. And if you can be a cross pollinator and think like a cross pollinator, you’re you’re going to get there just so much faster than people who are thinking in the silos.

Bennie 

And I think, yeah, but I think it’s.

Yeah, it’s there’s another name for cross pollinator, my friend. It’s architect. Right. You have to be able to you have to be able to build buildings are systems of systems on top of spaces that you have to be able to, you know, I know everything about X, but I know nothing about solar energy. So how do we make a building that’s smart and solar? Right. I reach out to the best experts in that.

Soyoung

Hehehehe.It’s a trip.

Bennie

I know nothing about this material, but I have a vision for it. How do we do that? And I may know everything about plumbing, but I don’t want to be the one that gets it wrong. Right? You don’t want to be that architect. That’s why you and I are marketing leaders.

Soyoung 

I love how you brought that full circle.

Bennie 

Well, I told you, you make me smile and I got to get the most out of my felt that we’re going to do this episode and we’re going to start our own little group. And it will be the two of us, but I bet you they’re going to be some architectural, architecturally trained CMOs are going to come out the woodwork. And we’ll have to vet them unless, you know, unless they make us smile. Right. But I think we’re going to have our own little group that says we will get t-shirts too. Yeah, we are. You know, we’re going to say architecture equals marketing equals love.

Soyoung

Let’s do it. Of two, but we’re looking for new members, right? Yeah.

Bennie

That’s what we’re gonna call the group. I think that’s awesome. as you think about, we’re rounding the corner in 2025 at this recording, we go to 26. What are you most excited about for 26?

Soyoung 

I’m in.

I think that we, and I’ll speak, you know, maybe a little bit, you know, a little bit more high level, but like, I think that what I’m excited about is we have, we have a pretty exciting plan and strategy for growth ahead of us at eos. And I’m just so excited to see it come to fruition. I think we are going to experience really explosive growth and expansion within the next sort of 12 months or so. And I am just so excited for the ride that we are about to embark on, this journey that we’re about to embark on. And then more broadly, I would say within, or more specifically within marketing, I think that as an industry that is constantly evolving, mean, when has this industry ever felt like it was stagnant? It just never feels like it’s stagnant. I think there are so many things to be excited for. When I think about the power of technology to enable so many things that maybe weren’t possible before, but then the way that we as an industry are thinking about the importance of humanity and human creativity to basically balance with this

Bennie 

Right, right.

Soyoung 

Technological, you know, advance advancement that’s happening within the industry. I think that there are a lot of changes that are ahead of us within the industry that will be really exciting. They may be scary, but I think they’re going to be really exciting. And I think that the industry is going to be transformed similarly to the way that I was talking about our business, but the industry more broadly is going to be transformed within 12 months. When we look back, we’re not even going to recognize what’s

So as somebody who, as I mentioned before, loves to learn and is excited to embrace new things, I am just, I’m excited for the opportunity to continue to grow as a leader and to learn new things that I don’t know today.

Bennie

I love our conversation going full circle and then coming back to learning, right? Taking these chances to learn things that we didn’t know before. Taking a space under there. So I’m going to ask you this question. Is there anything you wish I had asked you today? Since this is your first interview out the gate, what, you know?

Soyoung 

Man, that I wish you had asked me.

Bennie 

Yeah, I gotta keep you guessing, my friend. I gotta keep you guessing. Or I’m outsourcing my job. Either way.

Soyoung

Well, I think that one of the things that we’ve talked about in the past, absolutely, but we didn’t talk about as explicitly in this particular conversation, was sort of like the specifics of the creativity that we’re baking into the work that we do at eos. And I just mentioned how excited I am about the one-two punch of technology plus human-centered creativity.

And I think that we are still very focused as a brand on figuring out how we continue to up our game in delivering creative and disruptive and innovative and bold and brave and inclusive stories in this world because that is incredibly important to us. It’s so core to our values. So, you know, I think you and I have talked about this a lot before and I’m just really excited to be part of a team and see where they take it as they’re kind of taking more, they’re stepping up as well at the same time that I am. And so I’m just so thrilled to see what they come up with next.

Bennie 

I love the fact that your example as a leader, as a creative leader, sets the bar and provides the accelerant for everybody else around you to continue thinking through it. And we purposely did not talk about the two magic letters that are in the most conversations on purpose. We didn’t spend a ton of time talking. And I purposely did as well because…

Soyoung 

I know, I tried to avoid it.

Bennie

You would think, talking to my MIT grad, that’s where we would begin. But we’re not. We’re beginning with human creativity and the power of our human creativity to grow our brands. I love that even when we use our classic language of target audience, you immediately share stories and proof that everyone who’s searching for joy is your audience.

And I think that’s a beautiful way and a beautiful sentiment to end our conversation on, my friend. Everyone who’s searching for joy, this is it. So as I mentioned, everyone, powerhouse, closet architect, mom of tween boys, leader of the revolution in the Johnson family.

Soyoung 

Thank you for that.

Bennie 

All of these things, but most importantly, brilliant leader. And I’m honored to call my friend and president of eos Brand. This has been an incredible episode of AMA’s Marketing Inn. Once again, I’m your host, AMA CEO, BennieF. Johnson. And this has been our afternoon with Soyoung. Thank you.

Soyoung

Thank you so much.