Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins
Create or Destroy is a business and marketing podcast hosted by Seth Matlins. Each week he talks with influential thinkers in business and culture about the forces that create or destroy value. The conversations cover product decisions, supply chain, capital allocation, cultural and economic shifts, competition, technology, and internal structure. The show argues that business and marketing have always been the same thing. It is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomous Company.
Episodes
Streetwear Legend Jeff Staple on Why You Can’t Buy Your Way Into Culture
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
Gymshark CBO Noel Mack | Find Out Who You Are and Do It on Purpose
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,
Amazon Web Services CMO Julia White, on Why Earnings Calls Are Stories About Demand
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
LuluLemon CBO Nikki Neuburger | When Cracks in the C-Suite Become Craters at The Front Line
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
'Incorruptible' Author Eric Ries on Making Money But Creating No Value
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 cu
Duolingo CMO Manu Orssaud on What Gets Destroyed When the Street Decides Your Strategy
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 c
Musa Tariq on How Short-Term Growth Can Disguise Bad Strategy
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 d
LVMH’s Mathilde Delhoume-Debreu | From Diapers to Dior: Value Creation Across Industry
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 repositioni
JPMorganChase CMO Carla Hassan on What Happens When the Product Doesn't Speak for Itself
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 consistenc
Bose CMO Jim Mollica on The Number One Predictor of Value Creation
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 compo
Rocket Companies CMO Jonathan Mildenhall on The Business Case for Creating an Iconic Brand
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 a
LinkedIn CMO Jessica Jensen on The True Math of Value Creation
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 arti
Gary Vaynerchuk: Fighting Your Customer Never Creates Value
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 r
Zoe Scaman on The Unseen Source of Value Destruction
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 destruct
Kraken's Mayur Gupta on Creating Value When Product Isn’t Enough
Mayur Gupta is an engineer who spent eight years writing code before he ever touched marketing, and that beginning shapes everything about how he thinks about value. Across 26 years at Spotify, Kimberly Clark, Gannett, and now as Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Kraken, he's lived the same inflection point repeatedly, the moment a product-led company that grew to enormous scale without tradit
Qualcomm's Don McGuire on How A Narrative Shift Created 89% More Value
In Silicon Valley, value can be created or destroyed with every new technology and product innovation. Over his career, Don McGuire, EVP and CMO of Qualcomm, has seen waves of value creation and destruction.
From Don’s POV and experience, the most significant destructive force in tech comes from complacency – companies wary of disrupting short-term profits trot out the same gameplan quarter after
Adobe's Lara Balazs On Orchestrating Value Creation
This week, one of the central ideas of Create or Destroy gets flipped: namely, that product is marketing. Every single product decision is ultimately a marketing decision, and it either contributes to value creation or value destruction.
Lara Balazs, Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Global Marketing at Adobe, agrees with that thesis, but says we need to think of marketing as product too. And li
Paulie Dery on Why Every Decision is a Brand Decision
From Yeti to Uber and now as CMO of global wellness company AG1, Paulie Dery has built value for companies whose products could easily be commoditized, but weren’t. Having started his career on the agency side as a copywriter, Paulie understands that to stand out in a sea of competitors, you need a strong brand and creative, to maintain customer trust and to instill pride in the building. A strong
Soyoung Kang on the Architecture of Value Creation
Well before she was CMO, and now President, of eos Products, Soyoung Kang was an architecture student at MIT, where, she tells Seth, she learned less about buildings and more about how people move through space. She's been applying that same lens to building value creation systems ever since, across a career taking her from BCG to retail operations at Victoria’s Secret and Bath and Body Works, to
David Axelrod on How to Rebuild the American Brand
Fundamentally, a political campaign isn’t all that different from a business – it’s an enterprise where every decision either builds value with voters or destroys it, and the voters are customers who only get to buy what you're selling, on just one day.
This week’s guest is legendary political strategist David Axelrod, who was President Obama’s chief strategist and senior advisor. Currently he’s
Nick Tran on How One Marketing Decision Created More Value Than Any Campaign
Nick Tran has been one of global marketing's most influential voices for over a decade, from Taco Bell to Hulu and serving as TikTok's first Global CMO when it became Ad Age's Marketer of the Year. Now, as both President and CMO of the joint venture relaunching Cîroc Vodka and Lobos 1707, he's rebuilding a brand whose defining association became a liability while scaling another. For Nick, the val
Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins
It's a business show. It's a marketing show. Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing is the show that argues they’ve always been the same thing. Coming Tuesday, May 12.
Follow now on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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