Feather CMO Jinal Shah on learning to embrace healthy friction

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Feather CMO Jinal Shah’s love for storytelling began with a poster. It was on the school bulletin board, inviting aspiring writers to pitch a local publishing house.

The 12-year-old Shah called the publisher, where someone encouraged her to come in and share her work. They rejected her ideas, but that didn’t slow her down.?

Shah’s father had encouraged his children to adopt a problem-solving mindset, she says. After every setback, the family would digest the feedback together. She continued to pitch ideas, and at 15, her book, “The Unexpected Gift & Other Stories,” was accepted and published.?

It was a lesson in perseverance, she says, and the benefits of naivete. She never questioned her ability to be an author despite her age.?

“My dad's philosophy, ‘You lose every opportunity you don't try for,’ is just ingrained in me,” she says, adding that her publishing experience created an “amazing bridge between wanting to do something and what it takes to actually get it done right.”?

“That was me marketing myself, pushing for my point of view and understanding that, sometimes, perseverance, consistency and persistence are what it takes to drive change.”

Shah began her career as a journalist, where she refined her ability to sell her ideas. She’s since held roles at the ad agency J. Walter Thompson and brands like S’well. Now, as CMO of the furniture rental company Feather, she’s responsible for telling the company’s story and oversees its growth, brand and creative.?

She says an important part of learning to be a great marketer was growing up in a large family and learning to embrace “healthy friction.”?

It’s a principle she says is essential to marketing: “Where there is healthy friction, there is always a spark of creativity.”

Moving past friction, she says, is about asking, “What possibilities live at the intersection of those two opposing ideas?”??

Below, she shares more of her story.?

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

This quote by the Greek philosopher, Thucydides, shaped my perspective as a marketer.? “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”

I stumbled upon this quote in my early twenties, and it underscored the importance of diversity in thought and experience and the criticality of learning how to both think strategically and execute flawlessly. It made me extremely aware of the kind of marketer I wanted to become and pushed me to continue to value diversity as my center of gravity.

Growing up in Mumbai in an extremely large joint family, I learned how to embrace friction and weave differing viewpoints into my worldview very early on. Also, through sheer dumb luck and perseverance, I became one of India’s youngest published authors at age 15.

And then, during my early undergraduate experience as one of the very few Indians in Temple University's school of journalism, often the only one in classes, I always found myself on the fringes. My professional experience (in America) was a layered cake - a journalist, a product manager, and a global digital strategist.

Doing and learning new things became the golden thread of my narrative and kept me in a continuous state of discomfort. It also gave me an extraordinarily flexible mindset helping me develop conviction in both my strategic thinking ability and my ability to get stuff done.

In the end, it is both the diversity of my lived experience as a polyglot immigrant and my professional experience that taught me to hold wildly opposing ideas and constructs in balance. It has made me curious and empathetic to the totality of the human experience. I’ve learned that there is no singular way to look at a problem or a consumer and that there is an undeniable connection between cultures, people and business.

Diversity of thought and experience brings positive and healthy friction to a situation. And in my experience - where there is healthy friction, there is always a spark of creativity.?

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

Marketers need a whole lot more humility to succeed.

In consumer tech, the environment that I am in, merchandising, UX, data, product and even customer success teams have deep fluency in specific but very important slices of the consumer behavior. So it is preposterous to think that a marketer can own the consumer.

Where marketing can drive impact, though is by taking the onus to drive unity and disciplined prioritization of actionable insights across the consumer journey. Marketers must sieve these behaviors through their growth lens and paint the picture of how and where these insights can unlock growth. It's easy for leaders and companies to think of marketing as the sprinkle and the magic I'm going to add on top. Marketing has to consistently show that we are thinking about everything from a growth lens.

My success is so interconnected with my counterparts across these teams that without being genuinely curious and appreciative of the diversity of their perspectives, my team and I would remain in a silo. Silos make you ineffective.

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

I believe marketers can have an exponential impact on some of the biggest challenges our world is facing today. We are in a post-purpose world where brand purpose should dictate the desired behavior change or new behaviors we hope to see in the world. And because marketers have been adding to their skill sets and finessing their adaptability, I believe we are most suited to take on even more ambitious roles. So, the hardest question for a marketer today is, what problem are we going to choose to solve that can make the world a better place??

At Feather, I am building a new behavior in a category that is extremely nascent. And with good reason. 20 billion pounds of furniture end up in landfills every year. That is the same amount of plastic that ends up in oceans every year. I’m waging war against fast furniture and trying to show a specific customer that renting is the better alternative at their life stage. My perspective and influence are helping shape not only our value propositions and ad strategy but also our business model, our consumer offering, the company culture, and the trajectory of our growth. Marketers are increasingly being tapped to take on these types of roles and that is incredible.?

The other hardest part of a marketer’s job is to hold on to humility. Keep learning. Keep growing. And constantly think about how we can cultivate the next generation of marketing talent.

What Musa Tariq and you are doing with The Marketing Book Club, what Jabari Hearn and Sari De are doing with the Monday Night Mentorship Collective, what my friend Kim Mackenzie does with Ladies Who Strategize and Lindsey Slaby with Sunday Dinner Slack Channel -? all these collectives are extremely critical to developing next-gen talent. These exist only because of the generosity of these leaders with their time and energy. Each of these collectives is home to a range of diverse voices from diverse backgrounds - I find the dialogue and the exchange of perspectives to have had a multiplier effect on my own thinking.?

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

In my early twenties, I was part of the extended agency team that worked on American Express's Small Business Saturday. It is still the work I’m proudest of because it became a movement and eleven years in, it is still going strong. This is an example of how marketing can create lasting behavioral change and impact.?

Right now I’m also proud of the campaign we just launched for Feather to help normalize furniture renting. I’m proud of the campaign but also how we got to it. I worked with an independent woman-owned agency and the majority of the team that worked on the campaign were underrepresented minorities.?

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

Imagine the Possibilities from Barbie.?

Barbie is one of the rare legacy brands that has found its way back into relevance and has culturally connected to a new generation of children. When I worked in the agency world, I spent a ton of time working with legacy brands that were seeking relevance again. It usually was a challenge larger than marketing. For Mattel to have overcome their internal hubris and find the courage to retool the entire Barbie business towards a new era --? wow, that is impressive. I have deep respect for the leaders that made this possible. That is the kind of work and legacy I aspire towards. It transcends marketing.?

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

Because I’ve been immersed in the world of behavior change, I highly recommend all of Dan Ariely’s books and even Matt Wallaert’s "Start at the End." They are brilliant thinkers and practitioners and I obsessively follow their work.?

Another person, I highly recommend is Prof. Daniel McCarthy. His Linkedin content is gold. He takes a statistical approach to evaluating marketing’s impact on growth and his work challenges my thinking.?

Other recommendations include some excellent Substack newsletters: Not Boring and Margins.??

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

I’m a mentor with Pharell’s Black Ambition, and I’m obsessed with my mentee’s businesses. I’m excited about Avec Drinks, one of a kind brand that makes delicious alcohol mixers.?

Teaspressa is also extremely unique - the founder, Allison Devane has invented a new way to brew tea and has patented her approach. Her sugar-cubes are a constant sell-out. And there’s also, Kendall Miles Design - one of the only luxury footwear brands with a Black founder and creative director. She has a very strong point of view and I’m bullish on her success.?

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

I don’t know if there’s anything I can’t live without…..but I do have a few favorite products that bring me joy. Topo Chico sparkling water (the recyclable glass bottles only, please), my S’well x Liberty of London water bottle (I helped launch this specific collaboration so it is even more special) and like Musa said in his Marketer Must Read, I’ve been a die-hard Le Pen fan for decades.??

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

Right now, I want to be both a marketer and a published Webtoons creator. Luckily, our world isn’t so linear anymore. And if the golden thread in my career holds - learning to do new things is only going to make me a better marketer.?

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

Karuna Rawal of Nature’s Fynd. She’s someone I’ve admired from afar for a while. She’s leading fascinating work in food innovation and also building new behaviors.?

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