How I Grew This

Noa Gutterman is the Director of Marketing at VSCO. Before this VSCO, she spent six years in the digital marketing game in various roles. Noa runs VSCO’s marketing function and in the ten months since joining she has hired four team members, built up the entire lifecycle and product marketing functions and refreshed VSCO’s paid acquisition strategy. Noa shares details of an upcoming influencer marketing campaign, targeting the Gen Z generation that she is very excited to see the results of. She breaks down the strategies that can be used to find influencers, the difference between a normal and micro-influencer and what your first step should be if you are also aiming to kick off an influencer marketing campaign. Noa also breaks down VSCO’s approach to re-engaging users. She shares a step-by-step approach from discovering what users like most about the app and what behavior patterns most commonly lead to these revenue generating actions to then how to encourage those behaviors through owned and paid channels. Hear Noa’s advice for her younger self, why she has marketing in her blood, why the VSCO growth team sits within the product function, the one animal that Noa would most like to talk to, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

Frank Hulsebosch is the Head of Digital Marketing Europe at Banco Santander. Before this role, he spent two years as a digital marketing manager in the Benelux region of Europe, also at Banco Santander. Frank was responsible for driving for Banco Santander’s Benelux region’s digital transformation, launching a new mobile home banking app, new digital onboarding journeys, and CRO programs to optimize online channels. He then moved on to lead the digital marketing strategy and performance of Santander’s Consumer Finance unit in Europe. Frank shares an honest account of his transition from a media agency to leading the Santander Benelux region’s digital transformation. He mentions that he oversold himself during the hiring process, which did enable him to get the role but led to a lot more stress further down the road as he struggled with a lack of experience in the world of mobile banking. Frank provides career advice for aspiring growth leaders: “do more.” Frank found himself completing his assigned tasks during his first internship and then always searching for more work to do. This approach significantly increased his rate of learning over that of his peers, accelerating his career. Hear more career advice along with why you should never give up when starting something new, the reason why other people don’t want you to succeed, the impact of COVID-19 on the mobile banking industry, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

Today's guest, Sachin Singla, is someone who didn't stick to one career or path but found his way to marketing via other paths like finance and consulting (not unlike our host Mada). Sachin talks about how marketing has adapted and how marketing teams have needed to pivot and become more agile in the age of COVID-19. Mainly looking at your customer segments, Sachin explains how the lockdown rules vary wildly in India and how brands need to make their messaging reflect their target market's current state.

Master at building community on the internet, Casey took his passion for user-generated content and built a career on creating sustainable growth strategies for companies like Pinterest, Grubhub, and Airbnb. At Pinterest, he drove an increase in sign-ups from Google by 50%, a tactic today that's still copied by Instagram and LinkedIn. Casey talks how companies can react to coronavirus, the mindset around building growth teams, and shares practical advice on decisions that build fulfilling careers. Hear all this and more on this episode of How I Grew this. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

Ian Moore is the Head of Subscription Growth at Verizon Media. Before joining Verizon Media in August 2020, he spent five years at The New York Times, where he was the Growth Media Strategy Director. As the son of a first-generation American, Ian’s educational path pointed towards medicine, but that wasn’t where he found his career passion. An Economics professor turned things around. His professor taught him about the power of persuasion. From there, Ian felt inspired to predict human behavior through incentive programs. Ian dives into the concept of codeswitching early in his career and how his mentality has changed as he’s become more confident in his abilities. He reminds us to let the work do the talking. Quality work is going to do the talking. A turning point for Ian’s career is when the CEO of the New York times shared with him some advice he'd never forget (you're going to have to tune in to hear what she said). This interaction and his experience of pioneering subscriptions at the New York Times positioned Ian as an expert in subscription growth. Hear this and how his tenure at the New York Times shaped his view on how to drive subscription growth, how he’s investing in an online company replacing physical optometry appointments, what it’s like to build consumer relationships with legacy products, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

Growth and product are a completely different beast when you sell physical products and not software. Despite those challenges, our next guest Ramneek Khurana has grown Lenskart to help India’s vision problem. Ramneek went to Georgia Tech and expected to go to a major consulting firm, but he took some advice that led him into physical products as he started his career at Michelin Tires. Since Michelin was the top tire brand, Ramneek made very marginal improvements and eventually got bored and wanted to solve a bigger problem. That led him to co-found Lenskart, an optical eyewear chain that produces over 300,000 glasses a month. They saw the large gap in the Indian market for a convenient, stylish eyeglass brand that also helped tackle the millions of Indians who weren’t able to get glasses. Unlike almost every other eyeglass manufacturer, Lenskart focused on mobile and digital from the very beginning, making it easier for customers and allowed them to scale quickly. Some of their best growth campaigns came out of COVID. They received tons of videos from customers to showcase they could still help people get eyeglasses even during lockdown and turned it into a massively successful TV campaign. Hear stories like this, how they won the award for Best Mobile Innovation at Branch’s 2020 Mobile Growth Awards, how Ramneek manages his time as the company grows and changes, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

Our next guest Matthew Moore started his career at GE before going back to school for management consulting to grow as a leader. He realized that growth during his time working for the Boston Consulting Group. Matt's journey into driving mobile growth kicked off when he became the first Chief Customer Officer of Yum! Brands where he oversaw Pizza Hut for Europe and UK, and he also launched Pizza Hut Digital Ventures. During his time at YUM Brands, he pivoted the culture towards building digital in-house as most of Pizza Hut's business was online already. After that, he returned to his motherland, Canada, to lead digital for the iconic Canadian brand, Tim Hortons. Under Matthew’s leadership, they have shifted heavily to mobile through various strategies, including mobile ordering, loyalty programs, guest personalization, and more. Loyalty programs have arguably been one of their biggest wins during Matt's time at Tim Hortons. Tim Horton's initially achieved a 30% adoption rate and eventually 50% once the program was fully launched. Hear this and how Matt used to travel 300 days out of the year, his philosophy on why you need to find purpose in your work, and his experience working all over the world on this episode of How I Grew This.

Caitlin Roman brings her collective experiences in consulting at McKinsey and Product at Linkedin & Medium to the world of sports news at The Athletic. Having come up in these subscription powerhouses, Caitlin has a potent combination of high level business strategy experience along with the tactical ability to work side by side with her teams to execute. All of these elements were crucial for a subscription business like the Athletic during a tumultuous 2020 in sports. Caitlin and her team released a number of initiatives during this time including different content formats like short format commentary and breaking news, and pricing strategies to keep users tuning in even when sports weren’t in play. If there’s a word we would use to describe Caitlin it would be resilient! Far before she was leading her team through the bumps of the pandemic, she had two keystone experiences that she shared on the show that shaped her. The first is her passion for media at a young age. Working as a newspaper editor in both high school and college, Caitlin sought out the challenge of the daily deadline for her daily newspaper. She talks about the late nights and stress but attributes this as the reason why she loves working in the trenches with her teams today, drawing similarities to product management. Before Caitlin found her way to Linkedin, she lived and worked in Ethiopia as a part of a Gates Foundation initiative in agriculture. During a solo trip in a gorge in Kenya, she fell and broke her back and had to self-rescue. After this grueling experience she recovered, but Caitlin didn’t only not fly home but continued her work at the time setting up microfinance systems for farmers. To hear more about Caitlin’s amazing story about how she found her way into product in subscription powerhouses, how she thinks about leading her teams, and her adventures in Ethiopia, take a listen to this episode of How I Grew This.

Today we talk with someone who has seen the very beginnings of mobile and has helped some of the world’s biggest brands learn how to adapt and innovate by going mobile. Our guest is Matt Hudson. From the early days of mobile at just twenty-one, he helped Rock Fish build their mobile app and strategy, and he’s gone on to the same for Sam’s Club, Charles Schwab, and now Belk. Matt shares several campaigns that drove an incredible amount of growth, like the “App Attack” campaign. To drive downloads to the app, they had stores compete to see who could drive the most downloads, and they ended up driving 1.5 million total downloads through that campaign. Hear this and how Matt was featured in the Washington Post by proposing to his wife via Words With Friends, how he got started in mobile, and why he believes there’s still so much opportunity for growth and more all on this episode of How I Grew This.

As marketers, we all hope that our efforts will transform a brand and have it become the talk of the town. Our next guest, Brandon Rhoten, has been able to do just this at several of the brands he has transformed. Brandon has worked at Wendys, Papa Johns and Potbelly and although his approach has differed with each challenge the results have been the same: transformational change. We learn that a company looking to adapt and evolve doesn’t need to hop on the hottest trend; it needs to isolate its market problem and find a solution that aligns with its brand’s positioning. In the case of Papa Johns, it was moving their advertising to digital channels from traditional ones. For Wendys, it was reasserting its voice with clever and funny ads on social platforms like Twitter to engage with a younger audience. In this episode, Brandon shares exactly how he approached evolving the marketing strategies at each of these companies to adapt to the times and ultimately get incredible results. Hear this and how they hired comedians for Wendy's Twitter account, whyPotBelly hired former professional football player Peyton Manning and why Brandon studies the financial news as much as anything else, all on this episode of How I Grew This.