Advertise on podcast: Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins

On day two as Starbucks’ CEO, Brian Niccol published an open letter saying "there's a shared sense we've drifted from our core," and Tressie Lieberman, who Niccol hired to as Global CBO after the stock had dropped 38%, has spent the time since rebuilding what this drift cost them—and their customers. In this conversation with Seth, Tressie's extremely candid about how it happened, which wasn't through any one catastrophic decision but through convenience becoming so dominant that the craft, community, and connection that justified the brand's premium receded until the experiences felt transactional and the soul of the company was hard to find. Seth and Tressie talk about what it takes to get this back at a global scale that finds half of America walking through your door every year, why she thinks endlessly about integration and cohesion and all the little choices that can come and bite you, why the two-question test she's used since Pizza Hut is still the most honest filter she knows, and why her answer to what she'd create with all the power in the world, connection, and what she'd destroy, loneliness, aren't two answers but one. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Seth’s guest is streetwear legend Jeff Staple who, in 2005, designed a Nike Collab—the Pigeon Dunk—that caused a riot, resells for thousands of dollars 21 years later, and gets the credit (or blame!) for bringing sneaker culture to the masses. It’s also a moment Jeff says opened a Pandora's Box he's still reckoning with. In this conversation, Jeff draws a line from the Pigeon Dunk to Nike falling off the S&P, arguing that the moment sneaker culture went mainstream, the brands that fed on it started asking the wrong people what they wanted, and stopped creating and innovating for the ones who'd made them great.  It’s a great conversation that gets into why the bread-and-butter, Monday through Friday business is what actually builds a brand that lasts 30 years, why you can't buy your way into culture no matter how big the check, and why 40 hours of meetings a week and none of them about what the customer actually wants is the most common way he sees enterprises destroy value. And when Seth asked him what he'd destroy with all the power in the world, he said “likes and comments,” because if they'd existed when he started, he never would've made the next thing. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode Seth sat down with his friend Noel Mack, Gymshark's Chief Brand Officer, for a conversation that became a masterclass in what it means to turn down money in service of meaning. Gymshark is one of only two bootstrapped unicorns in UK history, built by a pizza boy with a sewing machine and a hundred British pounds. The strategic discipline that runs through everything Noel describes, from refusing to make yoga pants because other brands do it better, to pulling product they were selling out of because they were making it less special, to canceling every order and refunding every customer when bots hijacked a product drop because the community deserved better—all are versions of value creation that runs entirely counter to how the market rewards most enterprises. Seth and Noel talk about why focus is limiting and why that's exactly the point, why he'd choose social sentiment over every other metric, why the moment he opened Gymshark's homepage and saw a soccer player and an NFL draft pick he knew the brand had lost itself, and what Rory Sutherland taught him about the foil on a San Pellegrino can that he had to sit in a dark room and think about for two weeks. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Seth Matlins talks with Amazon Web Services CMO Julia White, who’s spent 25 years inside enterprise tech, including a 20-year tenure at Microsoft, where she led product marketing for Office 365 and Azure, leaving to become Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer at SAP. Twenty-five years later, Julia says the features and functions she spent years believing were the most important things, actually don't matter if you're not hitting the deeper human need on the other side of the product and B2B desk. And this shift in her thinking, from product truth to human truth as the foundation of value creation, runs through the entire conversation – from why B2B decisions are emotional ones made by humans not "businesses," why she believes an earnings call is one of the most important brand building or brand destroying moments an enterprise has, despite most companies treating it as a financial reporting exercise, and why the way companies store and govern customer data is a marketing decision that nobody making it thinks of that way. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lululemon Chief Brand and Product Activation Officer Nikki Neuburger has been inside three enterprise realities that couldn't be more different: Nike at its peak, where brand was the business and everyone knew it; Uber Eats, where she helped build a brand from scratch inside a three-sided marketplace during a trust crisis; and now at Lululemon, where she's lived through both extraordinary revenue growth and significant value erosion. In this conversation she tells Seth something every CEO and product leader needs to hear, which is that the best product doesn’t always win, backing it up with a career's worth of evidence about what actually creates value when the product alone isn't enough.  Nikki reveals why a crack between leaders at the top becomes a crater by the time it reaches the frontline, why proximity to the customer is an executive's ultimate power and what gets destroyed when that proximity disappears, and why she believes AI-driven search is about to make every business decision visible to consumers in ways that will fundamentally change how brand value gets created and destroyed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Entrepreneur and author Eric Ries wrote the seminal book "The Lean Startup" and spent years teaching founders how to build companies, before realizing he'd never taught them how to protect what they built. In an economy where profit and value are often conflated, too many companies allow what Eric refers to as “the ghost of the public markets” to sit in every strategy meeting, trading long-term customer trust for short-term stock price bumps. Seth and Eric dive into the themes of Eric's latest book, "Incorruptible," examining how shareholder primacy became an economic orthodoxy that can destroy enterprise value, how product quality can get sacrificed when quarterly targets drive strategy, and what exceptional companies like Costco understand about building a governance fortress that protects sustainable growth. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Q425, Duolingo's CEO told the Street the company would accept slower revenue growth and lower profitability in order to prioritize growing the number of people who use the product every day. This is a strategic decision that runs counter to what most enterprises do under pressure from analysts and investors.  In this conversation, Duolingo's CMO, Manu Orssaud, walks Seth through why the company made that bet and what it reveals about where value actually comes from. They also talk about why brand consistency and brand sameness are two very different things that most companies confuse; why 40% of Duolingo's growth in China can't be explained by any attribution model and the company's strong conviction that what they're seeing is brand momentum; and why, after building one of the most irreverent brands in tech, Manu's now wrestling with how Duolingo evolves without letting shock value become the brand. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Early in his career as a social media coordinator at Burberry, Musa Tariq spent six figures to livestream a 2008 Burberry fashion show that, despite hopes of reaching one million viewers,  delivered only 673. While it looked (and felt) like a failure and the end of his job, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts recognized it as a first of its kind that needed time to grow.  For him, this was a defining lesson in resisting short-termism that’s guided his work and career from Nike, Ford, Apple, and Airbnb, to his tenure as CMO of GoFundMe. Now as co-founder of the consultancy Science and Story, he is working to bridge one of the most expensive divides in business: the one between brand and business strategy. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LVMH’s Mathilde Delhoume-Debreu spent 30 years at Procter & Gamble before becoming the Global Brand Officer across the luxury behemoth’s 75 independent Maisons, which means she's navigated a spectrum of value creation across categories and has come to deeply understand what separates brands that drive value enduringly from those that don’t. In this episode, she and Seth dig into how repositioning Pampers from functional superiority to a higher-order insight about baby development (without changing the product at all) tripled brand revenues in only three years; why creativity without coherence and craft without culture are two of the most reliable paths to value destruction; what LVMH's model of 75 independent Maisons teaches any enterprise about the difference between cannibalization and complementarity; and why the balance between the short and long term isn't a strategic preference but what determines whether a company survives its own success. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Having previously led marketing at physical-product giants like Kellogg, PepsiCo, and Toys "R" Us, JPMorganChase CMO Carla Hassan offers a unique perspective on what changes when your product becomes completely intangible. When 84 million customers entrust an institution with their savings and financial futures, trust isn't built on a retail shelf, it’s created or destroyed in the quiet consistency of 320,000 employees and 5,000 branches executing every single daily interaction. In this episode, Seth and Carla discuss why brand reputation relies on human connection in physical branches and seamless enterprise alignment,  the dangerous trap companies fall into of shipping their internal org structure to the end user, and why category leaders can never afford to get comfortable, even at the top of their industry. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some of the Italian luxury audio brand Sonus Faber’s speakers are made with a window on the top so buyers can see every detail of their handcrafted interior. Because as Jim Mollica, CMO of Bose and President of the company’s Luxury Consumer Audio division puts it, everything matters and everything communicates. This conviction, that what a company chooses to care about when nobody's watching compounds into pricing power and trust, and is the thread that runs through this entire conversation.  Sixty years into building the Bose brand, he's its first CMO, hired after the company learned the hard lesson that better products don't always win. We talk about his time at Disney, Ralph Lauren, and Under Armour, why decisions about Italian leather sourcing and climate-controlled hand delivery of a $250,000 audio system are brand decisions that compound whether they’re measured or not, and why his time at Viacom taught him that asset allocation is the number one predictor of whether value gets created or destroyed. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jonathan Mildenhall has spent his career believing that brands can be bigger than their categories. In a storied career, he helped create “Open Happiness” at Coca-Cola, which became the brand's most profitable platform in its history; at Airbnb, he wrote a white paper for Brian Chesky and the Board titled "The Business Case for Building an Iconic Brand," and four years later he’d proven the case and was managing a marketing budget that had grown from  $25 to $750 million during his tenure. Now as the first CMO of Rocket Companies, he's helping people on their path to prosperity by romancing the American dream through homeownership at a time when every macroeconomic force is working against the premise.  Seth talks with Jonathan about his argument, one every CEO needs to hear, that the single biggest destroyer of brand value is the erosion of belief inside a company; about why so much marketing never transcends its category; why he's replaced the traditional funnel with a model called priming and proving that treats humans and machines as two distinct audiences, and why the two questions he asks every CEO before taking a job are questions every marketing leader should be asking.  Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / Threads / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LinkedIn CMO Jessica Jensen calls herself a "painter with an abacus"—which might just be the most perfect shorthand for what a modern marketing leader should be. She grew up writing advertising jingles at the kitchen table with her father, a creative director at DDB, and her mother, a speech and language teacher. This unique combination of rigorous quantitative training and a deep passion for artistic expression runs through Jessica's leadership journey across six massive companies—BCG, Apple, Meta, Booking Holdings, Indeed, and LinkedIn—and informs every part of this conversation. Jessica observes that the fastest path to value destruction is losing focus, that fiefdoms kill more enterprise value than bad creative ever will, and that good strategy cuts like a knife. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gary Vaynerchuk was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Coinbase, and Uber, founded VaynerMedia, and is one of the most recognizable voices in marketing and business. In this wide-ranging conversation, he and Seth get into what Gary has learned from sitting across from hundreds of founders about the patterns separating value creators from capital destroyers (including the answer he rarely gives publicly about what connects every investment decision he's ever said yes to), what nine years of stagnation at Twitter reveals about how enterprises destroy value, why Apple's run under Tim Cook is both a masterclass and a cautionary tale, and why the single biggest gap in Fortune 500 marketing isn't what most people think it is. And on a personal level, Gary gets into what growing up as a Soviet immigrant taught him, and why '80s pop culture shaped his instincts as a consumer strategist just as much as anything that happened in a boardroom. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For this episode, Seth sits down with strategist Zoe Scaman, who has spent two decades working inside and alongside companies like Droga5, Lego, Netflix, L'Oreal, Tesco, and with Mark Cuban and Luka Doncic. Their conversation covers a lot of ground from why brands don't create meaning but rather create the conditions for it; why misaligned incentives are the single biggest source of value destruction; why she believes executive leadership is good at spotting what could create value but almost universally unwilling to examine what's destroying it; and Zoe’s perspective on why the current race toward AI adoption is hollowing out what she calls the heartwood of organizations, the accumulated culture and knowledge that took decades to build but can't be regrown on any reasonable timeline. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices