Coworking with Joy Howard

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Joy Howard is chief marketing officer at Back Market, a marketplace specializing in refurbished tech. Previously, Howard has also served as CMO of both Lyft and Sonos, and she’s served in senior marketing roles at brands including Patagonia and Nike.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Launching Worn Wear at Patagonia is a huge point of pride for me. It was a controversial move at the time—even with the values Patagonia has—and admittedly a risk for the brand. Without the right framing, it could have denigrated the brand and caused a swirl of quality questions. Instead, we pioneered circularity in retail and shaped a consumer experience that has become not just commonplace but preferred. We did this by focusing on the stories that people were already telling—they were and still are proud of their decisions to repair their garments.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? At Back Market, my favorite work has been the Downgrade Now campaign. Through Downgrade Now, we challenged consumers to consider why they are upgrading when older models have all the features we love and can do everything we need through pithy OOH across NYC, Madrid, Paris, and London. We also launched Phone!, a mystery smartphone offer where we gave customers a random model (of the operating system of their choosing) to remind folks that quality and affordability matter most at the end of the day. It sold out within two hours in France and two days in the US, demonstrating that people care less and less about the bells and whistles or status symbols from upgrading. The best way to continue building trust for refurbished products is by using the media that consumers trust—and that’s why I’m so bullish on OOH for our brand.

Outside of our work at Back Market, my favorite campaign at the moment is Wendy’s decision to sponsor McBroken. McDonald’s McFlurry machines are to the repairability movement what charismatic megafauna are to the wilderness conservation movement. They’ve become a symbol for repairability activists due to their frequent breakdowns and complex repair requirements. These machines, made by a company called Taylor, are known for their malfunctions, which often require only minor fixes but must be handled by certified technicians from Taylor. This has led to high repair costs, long downtimes, and significant losses for McDonald’s franchise owners, who cannot easily repair the machines themselves. The lack of repair access has drawn the attention of activists like us advocating for "right to repair" legislation, which seeks to give businesses and consumers more control over the maintenance and repair of their own equipment. I think that the news coverage sparked by Wendy’s sponsorship and activation may have helped us score a legislative victory for repairability.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I was a touring musician in the ’90s. My shoegaze indie band was signed to Warner Music Group in the post-Nirvana indie label Gold Rush, and we toured extensively supporting bands like Modest Mouse and Cat Power. It was an incredible experience and taught me so much about collaborating on creative projects and the amount of work that goes into art behind the scenes before it reaches an audience. That’s certainly true in marketing, too.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? I’m happy to see the return of media mix modeling, and I’m an advocate of it in my work. It lends itself well to AI integrations and allows us to forecast more effectively, driving smarter investments and focusing our time and energy where it will have the most impact. I may be biased, but consumers are tired of being pushed to keep buying products that won’t last. People are being told they have to have the next best thing across every media platform they visit.

I’m least excited about campaigns that are contributing to this overall fatigue around purchasing and wish they’d switch their tone to better answer the question of why customers need whatever they are selling.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? As someone who used to work at Nike and has been at the forefront of the performance versus brand battles of the last decade, I couldn’t get enough of the “whistleblower” who went viral on LinkedIn about how Nike’s chasing after DTC had ruined its business. This episode from The WARC Podcast does a pretty good job of breaking it down.