Soul & Science: Fast Forward Your Marketing Mind

Ciara Anfield’s Harvard MBA education led her into marketing roles at big companies like JP Morgan Chase and Johnson & Johnson. Now in her 15th year at Sam’s Club, Ciara serves as the Chief Member and Marketing Officer for Sam’s Club where she oversees a broad portfolio of responsibilities that collectively make up Sam’s Club’s end-to-end member strategy. In this episode you’ll learn: It may sound simple, but by putting the customer first, you can accelerate every other part of your business. Connect in new and interesting ways and meet your customers where they are. Carve out the time to be strategic and methodical in your thinking. It’s all too easy to let the urgency of a big project move you forward without deeper reflection. Have the audacity. Take risks. Be bold. Marketing is one of the few places in a business where risks are welcome. After all, you’d rather have your marketing team take risks than your finance team. Brought to you by Mekanism.

Nate Checketts is the Co-Founder & CEO of Rhone, a premium men's performance lifestyle company founded in 2014, and the entrepreneurial spirit has been with him since childhood. Before the age of 30, Nate had founded four companies, including one of the first iPhone apps Mangia, whose patents were later acquired by the San Francisco 49ers. Nate’s interests have always been broad and ambitious, and over the years he’s learned that there’s more than one way to be an entrepreneur. But when sales and marketing attribution gets tough to decipher, he reminds his team that it’s all about the brand all the time.In this episode you’ll learn: Curiosity and wonder are powerful. Good entrepreneurs, no matter their experience, are always full of questions. Use data to find out what crucial subsection is missing in your market, and do your best to fill that gap. Product quality is number one for new customers. Gone are the days when you could get away with great branding, great advertising, and a mediocre product. When you spend your ad dollars the right way, performance gets much more effective over time. Brought to you by Mekanism.

Jesse Bongiovi’s Hampton Water rosé is as much a lifestyle brand as it is a Wine Spectator darling. Bongiovi started the company with his Notre Dame college roommate, Ali Thomas, and the brand took off through spot-on social marketing that included Happy Half Hour livestreams during lockdown. There’s another co-founder at Hampton Water, Bongiovi’s famous father, Jon Bon Jovi, whose love of the “pink juice” during their Hamptons summers inspired the brand. A famous parent can help, but Bongiovi, who walked onto the Notre Dame football team, is determinedly building a bartender-referral network, innovating rosé cocktails and creating a year-round lifestyle positioning for Hampton Water. In this episode you’ll learn: Success is not owned, it is leased and the rent is due every dayAfter the launch year, you can’t ride the PR train so muchWhy marketers should figure out how to destigmatize traditional categories for new consumersNo one thinks they're 60 , everyone thinks they are 25Brought to you by Mekanism.

Before any consumer product or service comes to market, there is a history of B2B activity that’s already taken place. Supplyframe CMO Richard Barnett serves the full range of engineers, manufacturers, supply-chain experts and B2B brand leaderswith a continuous loop of online resources, such as Hackaday for engineers, business connections across manufacturing and supply chains and predictive trends that go on to imbue new applications. Rooted in a Stanford education in political science and international policy, Barnett chose globalization over academia. Now, at Supplyframe, he’s focused on fulfilling the individual’s need to connect, learn and grow. In this episode you’ll learn: Sometimes, what you choose not to do is as strategic as what you choose to do. It’s important to be transparent with your team about the roles they play in the grand mechanism of the business. When everyone knows where they fit into the machine, they will be empowered to succeed. Keep it simple. Richard and his team tell each other “Piggy Doggy Bunny” as a reminder not to overcomplicate things. Brought to you by Mekanism.

Magnolia Bakery is a popular destination in New York City, and it's common to find residents and tourists lining up to buy perfectly iced cupcakes and other sweet treats. Now, CMO Eddie Revis is helping turn Magnolia Bakery into a global D2C brand. Magnolia’s Breakfast Loaves video, a remake of comedian Liam Kyle Sullivan’s early YouTube hit, Muffins, went viral, immediately landing with millennial targets. Revis does it, in part, by daring his creative teams to pitch their craziest ideas. It’s no surprise that his career spans agencies, starting with a high-school internship, and big brands, such as Chobani. In this episode you’ll learn: If you have an idea that could be unstrategic but it’s wild and awesome, share it anyway The great thing about the agency side is you get to focus on impact As a client, you think about impact and the repercussions that making that decision is going to have across the business If you really want to learn about the company as a new CMO, share an office with the CFO Brought to you by Mekanism.

It can feel impossible to express the human condition, so we look to great artists, writers and even advertising creatives to do the job. Pranav Yadav, Founder and Global CEO of Neuro-Insight, saw how inconsistent people were doing field interviews–one memorable study tried to find out why people gamble in Las Vegas. A more innate truth was to be found in neuromarketing, which measures neural signals by electrodes to track emotional responses. Yadav brilliantly reads the data and helps marketers, including TJ Maxx and Anheuser Busch, make ads that both stir emotions and hit the right pitch. In this episode you’ll learn: What neruomarketing is and how it’s innovating the way brands are built. What people say in the first hour of a focus group is different from what they say in the second or fourth hour and it really doesn't correlate to actual in-market purchase behavior. Creative is an idea that engages people, but an ad has the additional responsibility of associating the brand at the peak emotional moment. The beauty of life is that if you are open enough to learning, it teaches you everything you need to know.

Seth Matlins, Managing Director at Forbes CMO Network, was only seven years old when marketing claimed his future. He was transfixed by the founder of the Pet Rock, who had brazenly turned construction rubble into a viral sensation, the tulip mania of the disco era. Matlins’ first marketing job was to be part of the team that was turning another earthly resource–water–into the highly valuable, branded asset, Evian. His career spans advising some of the world’s most iconic brands and promoting civic ideals, such as voting and truth in advertising. At Forbes, Matlins markets marketing to marketers, as more than a byproduct of data but a role that is vital to a company's future growth.In this episode you’ll learn:. While data is important, interpreting that data is the real magic. Why each and every employee at a company is responsible for driving the business forward. To be a great brand, you need to be both differentiated and valuable. Differentiation is easy, but how you express the value of that differentiation is the challenge. Brought to you by Mekanism.

In this special edition episode of The Soul & Science Podcast, Jason shares his discussion with author, zen teacher and monk Koshin Paley Ellison during the launch event for his new book, Untangled. Untangled is a welcoming guidebook to finding expansive ease and joy through the Eightfold Path, one of Buddhism’s foundational teachings. In his book, Koshin, shares anecdotes from his life dealing with abuse and discrimination as well as the path of teachings from Eastern and Western wisdom traditions. Together, Zen teacher and monk, Jungian psychotherapist, and the co-founder of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, Koshin Paley Ellison, and Jason Harris, Co-founder & CEO of creative agency, Mekanism, discuss how to incorporate these teachings of untangling our suffering and the path of freedom in our everyday lives.In this episode you’ll learn: When unfortunate circumstances arise, rather than ask yourself, “why me?” ask yourself, “why not me?” Slowing your mind and becoming more intentional are key to living a fulfilling life. It’s important to confront your fears, not to be enveloped by them.

To this day, investor, founder and dreammaker, Bing Chen fondly recalls his first big-screen experience. It was “Beauty and the Beast” and the movie, along with the Disney brand magic to make dreams come true, have inspired Chen’s own prolific suite of businesses: AU Holdings, a family of companies that incubates and invests in creators; Gold House, a collective of multicultural leaders who bring equity to multicultural communities through strategic investment and promotion; and Aum Group, a premier multicultural film fund. True to this era’s version of dream-making, Chen’s early career at YouTube was to develop and market online creators–and he has gone on to build influential audiences and support global feature films. In this episode you’ll learn: The hardest thing in the world is to be a digital creator If you have a platform, you have a responsibility Let your managers run their own teams but align around strategy and run air-cover for each other The difference between achieving success and being truly successful is relentlessness Brought to you by Mekanism.

Ryan Serhant rose to fame on Million Dollar Listing: New York. Now running his own luxury real-estate company, SERHANT., he is the star of his own billion dollars in listings. From building a personal brand, de facto for CMOs, to creating a global business and writing best-sellers, Serhant is an intuitive marketer. “The greatest businesses of the next generation aren't going to be those that are disrupted purely by technology, they're going to be those that are disrupted by marketing,” he says. Forged by downturns–as a young soap actor, his character was killed off by 2007’s writer’s strike–Serhant became an agent, just as the mortgage crisis tanked the market in 2008. Starting SERHANT. on pandemic’s eve, his hedge-funder’s brain continues to find opportunities where others flee. In this episode you’ll learn:• How people are given amazing opportunities, but do jack shit with them• Be the best when everything (and everyone else) is the worst• Take care of the work and the work will take care of you• The 3Fs: Follow up; follow through; follow back• Expand and brand–focus on that every dayBrought to you by Mekanism.