Issue #14: Brand Baby’s very first interview
With Marina Cooley, Professor at Emory University
Hi everyone. I’m so excited to share my first interview today. It’s with Marina Cooley, Associate Professor in the Practice of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. It was so difficult to cut this interview down because we covered such a wide range of valuable topics in just thirty minutes. We spent the first half of the conversation diving into Marina’s career path, which I think will be really meaningful to my younger audiences, as well as anyone who has ever wanted to pivot or change things up. Then we discussed how Marina designs her curriculum, learnings from her students, and some of her favorite brands right now. I hope you enjoy it.
BTW, I’m hoping to do more interviews for Brand Baby in the future, so if you have any suggestions for whom I should speak with, please reply and let me know.
CA: Marina, tell me a little bit about your background. Where did you get started, and what has your career path looked like? Specifically, how did you make the jump from corporate marketing to academia and teaching?
MC: My motto is, I never want to be bored, and that's going to require having the guts to shake it up. I studied marketing in undergrad at NYU Stern, an amazing, competitive program. Everyone there wanted to be an investment banker. So studying marketing was already a little bit of like, ‘Oh, you're artsy.’ Which, you know, is not accurate. But I loved marketing so much. I've always loved consumer behavior. Why do we buy the things that we buy? And even with that interest, I got distracted by shiny consulting offers. So I ended up doing management consulting. For four years, I worked as a consultant for CPG companies. But I was never a decision maker, I just worked on communication strategies. I also traveled every single week. I got on an airplane either Sunday night or Monday morning and I was on for four days. And that was like an early entry into understanding that you can't build deep relationships if you're not in one place.
Also, I was beginning to form interests in natural food. That segment was booming. There was so much innovation happening. So I wrote a business plan for a peanut butter company. I quit my consulting job four years in and launched an early days DTC business. And at the time, blogging was just starting. So I would work with bloggers and have promo codes and I was filling up my car with peanut butter jars and taking them to UPS. All of it was new. I think I'm entrepreneurial by nature, but this idea of connecting blogger communities was super new. The idea of selling direct to consumers instead of gathering people in a physical place – that was new. It was 2010 – early days.
And I think it exposed me to this new ecosystem. It was like year one of the creator economy. We weren't calling it that then. I loved building a brand and I loved building a community, but I didn't like any of the other parts. So, I went back to business school and this time, I was very direct. Like no distractions. I want to work at Venture and Emerging Brands at Coca Cola, I want to have access to the biggest distribution in the world, and I want to learn what it's like to market a business with every resource possible. And then take those learnings back and apply them to a world-changing product. Very idealistic. My business school application was no BS. I was like, I'm getting a job at Coke. It is going to be in the Venture and Emerging Brands Group. I will be there for six years and then I am going to take this on the road and I'm going to start a company again.
So the consulting pivot was like, I don't own anything. I don't like that. The entrepreneurial pivot was like, I don't like doing all of these things. I want to sleep at the end of the day. I had gone from flying business class as a management consultant to filling up my car with peanut butter jars and driving to UPS. So I did Coke for six years. I learned all the things that I wanted to learn plus more. I got an opportunity to lead marketing for a series B food startup, just like I wanted, in the plant-based space. And then probably a year into that job, my favorite professor from business school emailed me and said that they were hiring a practice faculty member, which means that instead of focusing on research, you focus on the classroom. He asked me if I wanted to interview. And I pretty much knew the second I got that email, that that was my dream. I saw that and I was like, I don't care what kind of pay cut I have to take, this is what I want to do. I want to get paid to mostly think. I want to write and think and put ideas out and out in front of young people and get immediate feedback. So I am in my sixth semester.
CA: I’m curious how you design your courses and shape your curriculum, given how quickly this industry moves. What does that look like for you?
MC: I think a lot about who is in the classroom and what is going to be valued by them and how my students are going to be differentiated in the marketplace versus anyone else. How can they build exciting and sustainable careers? And I work relentlessly to deliver that.
I created a class that didn't exist. I was brought in to teach content marketing. I looked at the 20 top marketing programs in the U.S. and couldn't find a single other content marketing class. So I had nothing to go from. Step one is, how do I create content that breaks through? And step two is, how do I distribute it in the most cost-effective way possible?
But I think about people like you in the classroom and being lectured to when your attention span is accustomed to TikTok. I don't truly lecture. I facilitate exciting conversation. My students are oftentimes experts because they've grown up on these platforms and are making their own observations. I never talk for more than 18 minutes because the human brain can't listen for longer than that – that's why a TED talk is 18 minutes.
I love modern brands. I want to study Poppi and SKIMS and Sweetgreen. I want to be in the now and I also want to go further than the now. We are actually working on some research on SKIMS. I don't think anyone realizes yet, but they've abandoned their target. You know, they built that brand off of inclusivity. And they were featuring plus-sized women from different ethnic backgrounds. And we don't see that as much. We are right back to where Victoria's Secret was.
They're dripping it really slowly, but we've gone [...] to an airbrushed, unattainable [body]. I research a ton and that's what I do in my class. I want to be in the now, but I want to spend even more time in the future because I want my students to go out there and be the most exciting person in the room because they've been taught the future.
CA: As a professor teaching Gen Z students, what are a few learnings from your own students that have stood out to you recently, and how does that inform your curriculum?
MC: Because you've grown up accepting many messages, I find Gen Z to be far more savvy about when they are being marketed to than older generations. And a lot of people that are in leadership [positions] right now are older. I think they live in a magical land where they're like, ‘We can dupe them. We can bait them. They're young. They don't know.’ I do a lot of office hours and have TAs and some time with students. They always know when they're being marketed to. And when that thing adds value to them, they're good with it, but they're so much more savvy than we give them credit for.
I've learned that they're not as addicted to social media as we would like them to be. My students are constantly deleting apps from their phones. It's this conscientiousness of, am I at a point [...] where I can afford to burn hours? And if the answer's no, they just delete it. And I don't think that's being captured by the data yet, but I see it and that to me is an early indicator that we're not as addicted as you think we are.
And then the last one is boundaries. I find that my teaching assistants are very much like, ‘I'm going to Mardi Gras this weekend. I'll talk to you in four days.’ Ten years ago, or when I was a TA, I would have been like, ‘I can log on from the hotel!’.
CA: Can you share a couple of examples of some favorite brand campaigns or case studies (perhaps any that you teach in your classes, but not necessarily!)?
MC: Poppi is one that I really want to highlight. I have a LinkedIn post that went viral about Poppi. It is just a textbook classic [example] of how you evolve your positioning. They just did a Super Bowl commercial, which is just such a big deal.
I think electric vehicles are a really interesting one because you have to change consumer perception, oftentimes at the cost of promoting your own brand. I think watching the way that electric vehicle companies approach adoption is one of my favorite case studies.
Thank you, Marina! What a pleasure to speak with you and learn from you. And if you’re interested in continuing to learn from Marina, give her a follow her on LinkedIn.
Love this!