Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.
Joyce Kim is the chief marketing officer of Twilio. Prior to Twilio, she served in CMO roles at tech companies including Genesys, Arm, and Wrike, and she’s also held positions at Google and Microsoft.
Favorite project you’ve worked on? During my time at Arm, we launched the Empowering Gen Z initiative to showcase the creativity, ingenuity, and future potential of young tech innovators. These were amazing kids, aged 10–14, who were all CEOs of their own startups based on their own inventions. We created videos highlighting these inventions and pitched the idea of having them do a keynote at the Mobile World Congress 2019. The session ended up a smashing success. The keynote speakers for the rest of the event mentioned these young leaders, making them the talk of the show. This was a high-risk, high-reward scenario, and it was incredibly rewarding to shed light on these amazing young minds and highlight one of the most important elements of marketing—human connection.
What’s your favorite ad campaign? At the moment, it has to be Nike’s recent “How We Do” series, which showcases young women of color in the athletic scene. It’s so, so important for these young women to be able to share their voices in a space that can so often exclude them from conversations.
One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I absolutely love cycling. You can always find me biking the Bay Area roads during the weekend. There’s nothing like a literal breath of fresh air when you’ve been spending the whole week working indoors, and it’s one of my favorite ways to stay in shape.
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What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Data is every marketer’s future, and activating real-time data needs to be the cornerstone of every marketer’s playbook. Data is the backbone of understanding what customers need, when they need it, and where they want to be engaged. When marketers embrace data, they create stronger experiences, accelerate business growth, and deepen customer engagement. Investing in getting the right data means deeper insights, and deeper insights mean a more accurate read on what isn’t working and where to shore up efforts.
As for the marketing trends I’m least optimistic about, marketers need to move away from ads without ROI. Most young customers are using ad-block extensions, and marketers need to be smarter and leaner with their data and stop spending money on ineffective campaigns. According to our recent data, 86% of consumers say that personalized experiences increase their loyalty to brands, and consumers spend on average 21% more on brands that personalize. Focus on retaining your customers’ loyalty by upleveling your personalized customer experiences—not wasting money on expensive customer acquisition.
What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? I’ve really enjoyed the movies Tetris and Air, both of which tell the origin stories of iconic brands. One other recommendation from me—though perhaps a bit biased—is our podcast, Good Data, Better Marketing, where we glean the most pressing insights from outstanding marketing professionals at the likes of PepsiCo, CVS, and Bloomingdales and discuss how they’re creating data-driven customer experiences that stick.