eos CMO Soyoung Kang: The most important brand building decisions ‘are not obvious to the outside world’

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eos Products CMO Soyoung Kang has FOMO just like the rest of us. She says her fear of missing out is triggered when she checks LinkedIn and sees one of her peers doing something new. A small voice inside her wonders whether she should be doing it, too. 

“The risk really is that you can't be everywhere,” Kang says. “And yet increasingly, your consumer sort of is everywhere. So how do you reconcile those two things?” 

In her case, you follow the mantra “focus and edit and test and learn.” 

“Focus and edit is saying, ‘We know the big things that move the needle on our business,’ and test and learn means you always leave a little room to learn something that can then get cycled into the big things,” she says.

It’s a saying she attributes to the leadership at Bath & Body Works where she spent 10 years, ultimately ascending to the position of SVP of Brand for personal care and fragrance brands. (If you’re not familiar with the cult following Bath & Body Works has, be sure to read this.) She says it was a masterclass in how to always think like a merchant (no matter where you sit in the business), prioritize growth and be disciplined in guarding your focus.

Now at the beauty and personal care brand eos (which stands for Evolution of Smooth), she’s tasked with expanding the brand beyond what it’s best known for: An egg-shaped lip balm that’s sold nearly a billion units. eos’s spin on the product design is a far cry from your typical pocket chapstick. It’s the definition of Instagrammable. It’s become a party favor (“It’s a boy!”) and there’s an entire market for it on etsy where people will bling, bedazzle and customize your eos. (Most enterprising are the people selling printable labels - balm not included.)

From a conversation with Kang, you get the sense that she loves the yin and yang of the “focus and edit and test and learn” equation. The self-professed “teacher’s pet” is big on experiments, investing money from her innovation budget early on in today’s hottest marketing channel TikTok. 

That money, despite not always being directly attributable to a return-on-investment, is what makes marketers smarter, she says. And in addition to deciphering what works, and what doesn’t, she says it keeps her “thinking about what's next and new...The reality is that none of us can be experts in a world that is evolving this rapidly.”

And that’s where the FOMO fuels her.

“Being on that steep, somewhat scary, somewhat exciting part of the learning curve is what gets me most motivated and gets me engaged,” she says. “One of the best parts of being in marketing is that you have to continue to learn. It’s almost innate in the job description.” Below she shares more of her story. 

1. What has had the most impact on your perspective as a marketer?

So much of who I am as a marketer - and as a person - is driven by my immigrant upbringing. I spent the earliest years of my life trying to understand and decode cultural norms and human behavior, so I love doing this work that trades in emotional connection and influence as currency. I had to master a language that was unknown in my first 5 years, so I think a lot about words and expression and deeply appreciate the craft of storytelling. And being the oldest child in an immigrant household comes with outsized responsibilities, so I honed an ability to adapt and take action despite uncertain situations or unknown areas, such important traits for marketers today. I’m proud that my struggles have become my strengths.

2. What’s changed the most about your job as a marketer over the course of your career?

 I haven't been a marketer for my entire career; I actually spent my first decade in management consulting, training that taught me the necessity of embracing change. And marketing has evolved in such exciting and fascinating ways! Where we once leveraged gut instinct and blunt-edged research tools, we now have endless data, insight, attribution. Where we used to push big-stakes, one-way communications created over long lead times, we now have marketing platforms like social media that facilitate two-way dialogues, co-creation, testing, and iteration in real time. Where in the past we were considered "creatives" with soft skills, our role today stretches across a wide range of disciplines, from driving growth and commercial success to shaping culture and purpose. This last one - the expanded leadership scope of marketing - has never been more clear than in the past year. As companies have reacted to the pandemic, the racial justice movement, and macroeconomic uncertainty, many marketers are now accountable to their internal stakeholders for business results and to their external audiences for purpose and actions that create positive change.

3. What’s the hardest part of a marketer’s job today? 

The competing forces of focus versus fragmentation. With technology creating ever-greater accessibility to information and goods, the old rules are increasingly irrelevant in today’s borderless, channel-less, frictionless world. As marketers, we strive to find focused truths about our brand, but have to deliver and activate them across a very fragmented landscape. Sometimes it feels like you have to be everywhere, all the time, and I admit to feeling marketing FOMO from time to time. But I try to alleviate that feeling by maintaining a steady stream of always-on testing initiatives, to help our team continually learn and assess future opportunities. It’s why we were an early adopter on TikTok, or how we created our microbatch limited edition product drops.

 4. Tell us about the marketing campaign you’re most proud of working on in your career.

In my two years at eos, we've introduced some great campaigns, including our brand reboot anthem Make It Awesome. But the initiative I'm most proud of is one that isn't an actual campaign. Last year, we introduced our product and giving platform called Shea Better, a multi-year commitment to donate infrastructure and economic development support to the shea harvesters - predominantly women - in Ghana and Burkina Faso.

This year, in the scary early days of the pandemic, we brought Shea Better into our own NYC backyard by donating our Shea Butter Hand Creams to frontline healthcare workers who were (and still are) enduring the effects of constant hand-washing and sanitizing. Our first donation phase was pulled together in less than two weeks, in partnership with NY metro hospital networks; in the second phase, we asked our social media audience to nominate healthcare heroes in local communities across the country. We received hundreds of powerful nomination letters, with stories like "she is the nurse you want at your bedside" and "she works 13-hour graveyard shifts." In the end, we donated $250,000 worth of products to tens of thousands of healthcare workers, and at various points, because of the overwhelming positive response to the program, we made the difficult choice to produce to donate rather than produce to sell.

When you're building a brand, sometimes the most important decisions you make are not obvious to the outside world. They're not a full-throated declaration in an ad; rather, they're threads woven throughout your organization, influencing product to supply chain to finance. And at a time when we were all feeling helpless and frightened, Shea Better gave our team the opportunity to take action for good. I think a lot of marketers would agree that when we look back at the brands we’ve led, it's not the ads or engagements or awards….what we remember most proudly are the positive impacts we make.

5. What’s a marketing campaign you wish you’d thought of and why?

Back to School Essentials for Sandy Hook Promise. Generally, I favor campaigns that make me laugh, but for a mother to school-age children like me, this campaign delivers such an important message in a stunning, visceral way. It’s terrifying – by the end, my heart races and I cry EVERY. DAMN. TIME.

6. What’s your must read, watch or listen for all marketers?

If I'm reading a "business" type book, it has to be a pretty entertaining read. Right now, I’m into a fascinating book called Loonshots that was recommended by a business school friend. It's about game-changing innovations from history that kept getting rejected – like the near-miss on radar technology during WWII – and why some organizations are set up to embrace and nurture wild ideas, while others aren't.

At the other end of my content diet, I also like to immerse myself in whatever my audience is consuming….and since I work on a predominantly Gen Z centric brand, it’s ok to spend many evenings reading YA novels, scrolling through TikTok, and watching Netflix teen romcoms, right? That’s what I like to tell myself, anyway.

7. What’s an under the radar brand you’re watching and why?

I’ve worked in the beauty industry for over fifteen years, and I love that there’s always something to discover. One unique brand I’m obsessed with right now is Buly 1803. It’s a historic Parisian brand that was forgotten, then reinvented in recent years by a chic French couple. They’ve meticulously reconstructed the beauty and glamour of old-world luxury retail with such attention to detail in the exceptional store experience and gorgeous product design.

 8. Name a product you can’t live without (that doesn’t connect you to the internet) and tell us why.

Coffee! More specifically, I’m a huge fan of the organic Sidamo beans roasted and sold near me at the North Fork Roasting Co. With small businesses fighting for survival during this pandemic, it’s so important to shop local when you can, and they ship anywhere!

 9. Finish this sentence. If I weren’t a marketer, I would be…

An architect. I actually did my undergraduate degree in architecture at MIT, and the training on balancing left-brain/right-brain thinking were the perfect foundation for marketing. 

10. Finish this sentence: The marketer I most want to see do this questionnaire is…

Minjae Ormes, who’s doing such great work as CMO at Visible and is just an awesome human being to boot.

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