The key to groundbreaking marketing? Stay humble.

The Duolingo marketing team is a small group with very high output, and I am constantly amazed at what they are able to deliver.

Part of what makes this possible is a sense of true humility. We approach marketing challenges with curiosity and openness. We come in to work every day thinking that we might have to reinvent everything, because we don’t know everything.

It’s an important outlook that underlies all of our marketing initiatives, and lets us push the boundaries of what we may once have thought possible. Here are three ways that a humble approach drives our innovation and success.?

Fail again. Fail better.?

I love to fail. I told the team that one of my New Year’s resolutions for 2024 is: fail more.?

If you don’t let yourself fail and rely only on what you know will work, you’re not actually learning anything. And if you don’t learn, you don’t get better.

A quick scan of our team’s history holds the proof: All of our current success grew out of failure. A few years ago, our social media content, though clear and straightforward, wasn’t resonating with audiences. We weren’t driving conversations. Now, our social media marketing is one of our strongest levers. Another example? Our paid user acquisition used to be much less effective at driving user growth. Two years later, it’s driving a significant portion of our new user base and has become a lot more efficient.?

How did we get here? Through years of iterating on our failures. Seeing what didn’t work and trying something new until we knocked it out of the park. If you scroll through our TikTok, you’ll see older videos that are very different from what we post today—instead of doubling down on what we thought “should” work, we tried a completely different tack. Every single home run started with a failure.

That’s why I love to fail. We never discourage any experiment or new idea because it might not succeed. Instead, we say: Let’s take that swing; let’s try it. It’s only through failure that you actually find what’s going to work next.?

Throw out the playbook

It’s not easy to approach marketing with this sense of openness. A lot of marketers get stuck in the mindset of “I’ve got 15 years of marketing experience; I know how to run a campaign, and it starts with X, Y and Z.”?

Avoiding that pattern has allowed Duolingo’s marketing to be unique and successful. We don’t bring beliefs with us about what good marketing looks like or what the industry wants. Instead we say, “I’m going to leave everything I know at the door, and show up with a curious and open mind.” Every day, we reinvent the playbook and let it evolve organically.

As I’ve written about before, marketers are trained to believe that consistency is the foundation of a strong brand. If you’re consistent, people know what to expect from you. Your brand feels familiar; it feels safe. Many of the biggest brands of the day have done this well—Apple, for instance, is instantly recognizable thanks to its years of brand development.

But at Duolingo, we’ve realized that consistency can have a lot more nuance. Our brand is interesting because it allows itself to be more like a human. A person can be high-energy, hyper, and funny one day, and then the next day they might be a bit more mellow and calm. A brand that can borrow from these changing emotions within its own personality becomes even more relatable, more human.?

After extensive user testing, we found that our audience was smart enough to understand the different facets of a brand. They knew that the little green owl urging you on in a lesson was the same one vaguely threatening you on TikTok. We took a cue from how our audiences were organically using different platforms (after all, aren’t we all different on LinkedIn than we are on Instagram?). Our mission, ultimately, is to drive conversation and awareness. Whether we’re being adorable and empowering or bizarre and unhinged, the goal is the same: Do your lesson. If we’re top of mind, so is learning.?

By throwing out the traditional marketing playbook and building our own, we found our way to this new and more complex understanding of what a brand can be.

Up from the bottom

That’s why we barely have any hard guardrails on what we can do, what content we can write. I’ve never said to the team, “You can’t talk about X or Y.” When something goes wrong—and things do go wrong—that misstep becomes a guideline for the next campaign or brand moment. That’s how we figure it out, from the bottom-up.

At many companies, the structure of marketing is top-down: Executives dictate the five-year plan, the media budget, and the strategy for achieving success. That’s not how we do things at Duolingo. We figure out the path by walking it.

A bottom-up approach only works if everyone feels empowered to share ideas. I pride myself on ensuring that everyone has a clear opportunity to contribute and innovate. I remember all too well working at companies where the marketing environment was ultra competitive, with every marketer trying to claim as much credit as they could to score their own wins. We don’t play that game. We come together with a shared goal of figuring things out, of getting stuff done.?

In a sense, it is our past record of failure that helped us get here. Because it took us a little while to find our voice and show value, we became united by a feeling of responsibility and resiliency. Even through our current successes, we have purposefully held onto that sense of having to prove ourselves. We’re going to show them that we can do it. We’ll figure it out together.?

We approach each day with a lot of passion and care for what we do, but we are driven by a humble mindset. Practicing these three of these principles: being willing to fail, throwing out preconceived notions, and starting from the bottom, drives our marketing success.

We ask ourselves all the time whether we’re doing the best we can do, whether anything can be improved, pushed further, iterated on again. We hold ourselves to an extremely high standard, because we know that the journey to get to where we are now has been a difficult one. So we celebrate the wins, but we do so with modesty—which is the most important thing.