Building Brands: People and culture matter a lot, mentorship matters even more, product matters the most (podcast episode #119)

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We recently published data on interdepartmental collaboration by marketing teams. More leading marketing departments had a strong partnership with the product team than with any other internal team.

But for the lagging marketing departments, strong partnerships with the sales team fell in the middle – 4^th out of 7 departments – and they had far fewer strong partnerships with the product team than leading marketing departments did.

I was working on the data for that chart article when a podcast guest application came across my desk with these lessons – People and culture matter a lot, mentorship matters even more, product matters the most.

To hear the stories behind those lessons, along with more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Yana Ernazarova, CMO, Edushape.

Tune in to the full episode using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.

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Stories (with lessons) about what she made in marketing

People and culture matter a lot

About 10 years ago, P&G was getting disrupted for the first time by DTC startups. Its bureaucratic corporate culture couldn't compete; it was slow, hierarchical, and just bad in terms of speed. Ernazarova’s team formed Pampers Startup – a team meant to disrupt Pampers and, later, P&G from within. They separated themselves from P&G in terms of processes, got alignment and separate budgets from top leadership (Board and CEO), and got going!

Results were astounding – faster digital product deployment, new marketing strategies, strong results.

Mentorship matters even more

What mentorship lessons have shaped your career? For Ernazarova, she went from Associate Brand Manager to a CMO in less than 10 years, and she couldn't do this without a few mentors who were ~10 years ahead of her in their career. There was one mentor in particular who made the biggest difference. He was in the P&G global team when she was still in a local market team and she was blown away by his charisma, never imagining he would even know her name.

In the end, they developed such a strong relationship that he helped her land several jobs and she is helping him with his investing work right now.

Product matters the most

In the end, you can't outmarket a bad product. If the product holds inherently no differentiation, consumers will sniff it out. Ernazarova is learning this lesson partially right now. Not that the product she is working on is THAT bad, but it is definitely undifferentiated, and this creates strong challenges with marketing. They are solving this through incubating much more interesting brands and ideas within the organization, but it is taking time and is risky.

Lessons (with stories) from people she collaborated with

Vision and culture are key to long-term results in large organizations

via Omer Sher, VP at P&G

Sher demonstrated proactive leadership by articulating a compelling long-term vision for Pampers and P&G. He excelled in identifying and inspiring stakeholders, emphasizing the need to influence decision-makers to secure resources and support for the team. His approach highlighted the importance of inspiring both subordinates and leaders to drive meaningful change.

Sometimes you should kill bad business ideas quickly, no matter how passionate you are about them

via Lauren Dickstein, EiR at Atomic VC

Dickstein emphasizes the importance of being data-driven and willing to kill ideas that don't work, even those you initially believed in. She demonstrated tough leadership by pivoting away from a business idea she was passionate about when data showed it lacked potential. Her ability to make difficult decisions, even at personal and professional risk, served as an inspiring example for Ernazarova of prioritizing meaningful change over attachment to ideas.

A marketing or business idea is useless until it's executed upon

via Pano Anthos, Founder & Managing Partner at XRC Labs

Don't be precious about ideas, be precious about learning as quickly as you can about what works and what doesn't.

Discussed in this episode

Enterprise Solutions Marketing: You can make a big career, and still stay human (podcast episode #99)

Marketing Mentorship: Direct feedback is a gift (podcast episode #98)

Product Quality: Marketing's job is to help the product win (podcast episode #97)

Creative Marketing and Advertising Campaigns: Hold the line & get a door kicker (podcast episode #84)

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Transcript

Not ready for a listen yet? Interested in searching the conversation? No problem. Below is a rough transcript of our discussion.

Yana Ernazarova: To explain what I mean by points of view is, sometimes you talk to people and they say, here's one side and here's the other side, and loves the side. And I think we as a leader, and as a marketing leader with so many options as well as to where you can go and so many things that are sometimes conflicting in the data we're learning really is beneficial to have a point of view and to say, well, this is those are all the things we're seeing, but this is where I think we can go from here.

And this is what I think the right next step is. So I think that the vision for me is one of the core, qualities in any leader and also in marketing.

Intro: Welcome to how I made it in marketing from marketing Sherpa. We scour pitches from hundreds of creative leaders and uncover specific examples, not just trending ideas or buzzword laden schmaltz real world examples to help you transform yourself as a marketer. Now here's your host, the senior director of Content and Marketing at Marketing Sherpa, Daniel Bernstein, to tell you about today's guest.

Daniel Burstein: We recently published data on interdepartmental collaboration by marketing teams. More leading marketing teams had a strong partnership with the product team than with any other internal team. But for the lagging marketing departments, strong partnerships with the sales team were number one product team fell in the middle fourth out of seven departments, and they had far fewer strong partnerships with the product team than the leading marketing departments did.

So I was working on the data for that chart article when a podcast guest application came across my desk with these lessons. People and culture matter a lot. Mentorship matters even more. But product or product matters most very in line with the data we were sharing. So I was excited to grab this person, get them on this podcast, and talk to them so you can share the stories behind those lessons.

Along with many more lesson filled stories. As Yana Herren is a Roba, the CMO of Edu Shape. Thanks for joining me, Yana.

Yana Ernazarova: It's a pleasure. Hello.

Daniel Burstein: Well, let's take a quick look at Jana's background so you understand what I'm talking to. She started her career as a consumer goods team intern at TBWA worldwide. She moved on to be the global product Team lead and global growth lead, both at the same time for Pampers, at Procter and Gamble. And for the past three years, she's been at edgy shape.

I do shape has been in business for 41 years and sells its toys in 21 countries across six regions and is a rover leads marketing and online sales, including the PNL, managing a team in three countries the US, Israel and the Philippines. She grew edu shaped online business from close to zero to multi-million dollars in less than two years.

So Yanick, give us a sense. What is your day like as the CMO?

Yana Ernazarova: It's really fun. I would say, first of all, I love marketing. You know, I've been in my career in consumer goods for over ten years, and it's been a joy every day despite its challenges, ups and downs. Always love it. And my day now looks like first of all, I wake up very early because the team, as you mentioned, is global.

So a lot of the team sits in Philippines and Israel and they are ahead in terms of hours. So starting 6 a.m., I would usually jump on calls. And that's the beginning of the day. And then it runs until pretty late. The core of my work is, is really fun for me because it is very complex.

We have a number of channels that we sell through. So we do B2B marketing, we do B2C marketing, we market globally. You know, we sell part of our products wholesale and part of it. We go directly to consumer through marketplaces. We're also now incubating our own brand that will really increase our presence in the B2C space. So overall, I would say really fun, really varied.

And one of the core things I always have to keep in mind every day is how do I balance the short term tasks and the long term thinking? And that is really where I believe I bring a lot of value to our CEO and to the company because I tend to, think pretty long term. And that's also what adds a lot of fun to my daily job.

Daniel Burstein: Well, you tend to think pretty long term, but how do you get the daily fire drills out of your way? Because I find that that's a lot of problems. We have like a big Covey fan, right. And he talks about Stephen Covey. If you're familiar, there is an urgent and important and you know, his quadrants and all that.

So how do you get that those fire drills links. We have so many deadlines, those fire drills. How do you get them all the way to make sure you can focus on the long term? Right. Then you have some of that time.

Yana Ernazarova: I think that's where the team helps. I think I really try to, understand what are the strengths that everyone has. And, you know, what does everyone bring to the table? And I'm fortunate that a few people in my team are really good at putting out fires. And they also said in Israel or Philippines, which is fantastic because by the time I dial in, a lot of the fires have already been identified and put out by them.

So I'm just very fortunate, I think, to have a strong team. And I always try to do to assign tasks based on strengths, and my strength just happens to be thinking, what? What are we doing in the next few months and the next quarter and the next year? So that's where I like to spend a lot of my time doing a lot of consumer studying and data analytics and interviews, consumer interviews.

While the daily tasks, of course, I approve things and of course I pay attention to them, but I trust my team to carry out a lot of that, as well, on their own.

Daniel Burstein: Oh, you mentioned that team. And that ties into the first lesson, that you were telling me about. You said people and culture matter a lot. So how did you learn this lesson in your career? Originally?

Yana Ernazarova: About ten years ago, very early in my career. I started it at Procter and Gamble. And at the time when I joined, the incumbent brands in the industry were being disrupted by all the direct to consumer brands that started coming in. So really it was at the cusp when the Warby Parker just happened in the US, and then everyone was looking for how can we disrupt all the brands?

And so there were so many startups popping up left and right. And at the end, of course, the team paid close attention to that disruption. And I was specifically working on Pampers, which is a very big and important brand in the company. And we had to really understand, you know what, how do we keep up? And the challenge we faced at the time was while the team to to give you a bit more context, I was in the global strategy team.

So I was kind of sitting really at the core of thinking, what do we do with this disruption that's happening? And what we realized is while the team globally is very strong, and everyone is a strong contributor, we were not functioning together well enough in an agile enough way in order to respond to that disruption. And this was a lesson that I had to learn quickly.

How do we leverage, again, understand the strengths of people and leverage those strengths in order to respond to that level of disruption? So specifically, what we had to do is to create an organization that was called Pampers Startup. And, the whole model behind the team was we have to act like a startup, no matter the reasons why we came to this corporate environment, no matter how many years we've been in it, we want to really operate in a way as if we are in the day one of a company, and we had to change everything from the incentives, you know, how do we how do we assess what success is?

How does leadership look at that? How do how does that translate into the day to day? And also how does marketing work with the other organizations, whether it's I.T analytics or anyone else, in order to act swiftly? And so the lesson here was, that, yes, people really matter, but so does the structure in which you, put the people and everything around it.

And once we put the right systems in place and kind of reassign some of the people, and it really worked perfectly and P&G noticed. And then actually later they reapplied this from Pampers to all the other teams globally as well.

Daniel Burstein: So I like to say, you know, the status quo is tenacious. Like change doesn't just happen. Things don't want to change. That's the natural state of things. And so I'm not going to pick on Procter Gamble specifically because I don't have any insider knowledge there. But big companies in general, and I've worked with them personally. Other people work with them.

Change is hard. So how did you earn the trust to make such a disruptive change? You know, for example, when I interviewed Marco Mueller, the CMO of a Veba, on how I made it marketing, one of his lessons was trust is earned, not given. And he talked about that. Such a key lesson in his career. You can't just expect, okay, I want to do this.

People can say, you can do this. You've got to earn that trust over time. So Procter and Gamble legendary, legendary, legendary CPG company, but also a big company. And with big companies, any big organizations there's a lot of bureaucracy. Change is so much harder. So how did you earn that trust to get the ball rolling on this change?

What can we learn from that?

Yana Ernazarova: Absolutely. I do have to acknowledge part of it is just us being younger, a big part of the team that came in, you know, I think management, I think is very strong. And part of their strength is recognizing that the way they built their careers and marketing is no longer how the, you know, the new incoming generation is going to do that and know how, not how the market is operating.

So they just gave a lot of attention to what we had to say. And when, I was speaking to the VP's presidents and, the other people in management of Pampers and P&G, and reinforcing that we do need to pay attention to what's happening in the US and also globally in terms of the potential disruption they happened to land there.

You're partially just because of recognition that I'm even as a consumer, more aware of those trends when they might be second, bringing the relevant data. You know, at that point, we already could see some specific disruptions in other industries and also in other brands, the P&G, owned, you know, like Gillette being disrupted by Dollar Shave Club and Harry's, etc..

So we had some examples of, being able to sit down with men, to sit down with management and to say, let's pay attention. And I think, last but not least, conversations with consumers. I'm a big believer. And that is something that being you taught me, you know, you always have to go to the source and think, really based your decisions on based on consumer.

And it's in those conversations talking to the millennials and later Gen Z. Where we identify that their shopping patterns are now changing and they're different, and that we have to adapt and that online has to play a bigger role, etc., etc.. So when we were sitting down with management, it's all of those things coming together that really helped us convince them.

Daniel Burstein: Well, we'll hopefully get into some of what you do is, customer interviews at one point, because I noticed you mentioned that the opening. I'm always interested in that. But what I want to highlight what you said, boy pants leadership deserves a shout out there to know that because, I mean, and I think that's been a structural change in the marketing initiative.

Like I always mentioned that when I speak in colleges, like when I started in my career, I mean, I started with print advertising ads in the Wall Street Journal. And, I mean, the same thing had been happening for probably about 100 years. So I came in as a copywriter. I came in kind of entry level. Right. But the thing that I have noticed and more and more recently is that you mentioned like, like newer marketers, they've got a leg up.

Now, if you're coming straight out of college, if you're new in your marketing career, yes, you're coming an entry level, but you're coming in some times more knowledgeable than the people. You're gonna work for it again, I was less knowledgeable. Print had work. I mean, computers came in, some stuff changed, but I print and was a print. And for a long time then you got, you know, online, social, I mobile all this stuff that frankly, some younger people probably know better than, the people that are managing them.

So hats off to the PA team. And that also ties in to the next lesson you had. You said mentorship matters even more. And I like I want to call out something that Yana did in her application. And not everyone did her first three lessons. She tied them together. If you notice her stack first, people and culture matters a lot.

Mentorship matters even more. So how did you learn that lesson?

Yana Ernazarova: I learned that lesson by living it, and I was really fortunate because to be honest, I didn't do this proactively. It happened to me. And then I recognized that's why it was so important. So I went from as an entry level job to a CMO in less than ten years. And, yes, a lot of hard work and thinking.

And, you know, luck went into it. But a big part of it was also having the right people along the way who gave me the right opportunities, who guided me. I have a number of mentors, but one of them stands out in particular. I think we will talk about him a bit later on, for sure. But, all of those mentors, including him, they have been able to understand that, I had a lot of drive and that I had potential.

And what was really interesting is that none of this was artificial mentorship, where I just invited them for coffee. We talked once and I call them a mentor, put it on my LinkedIn, and I move on with my life. Now, all of this was organic relationship that we developed because I was truly interested in their career path and, asking questions out of authenticity, not, you know, as a plan because they picked up on it.

Then, what I found is that people, especially who are about ten years ahead of me in their career, I, by the way, I found that that to be a golden rule of thumb for mentorship, not just in my case, but in others, because people who are about a decade out have already seen a lot of the things you're about to see in your next steps and can get advice.

So I've, I've gotten a lot of tips of what jobs are opening up, whether it's within TNG or what opportunities are there. I was really fortunate to move, a number of markets, so I went from, a job in Kazakhstan to a job in Russia to a job in Switzerland. I switched assignments in Switzerland. So all of that was really someone opening doors for me.

And giving me timely advice about an opportunity that's happening. And then, of course, last but not least, it's about them giving advice of how to take, how to do your best in the current role that you are in as well. You know, how, how can I use the marketing methods that I don't know yet, but they've already tried, you know, and, I think all of this advice, whether it's career or technical advice around marketing, has been, really life changing for me.

And now I'm trying to also do the same for people who are either directly in my team or I see, around me who have potential.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. Let me ask you about that. You you mentioned ten years, and I can't help but notice you. You said, you know, when you're like, fermentor about a decade ahead of you, I couldn't help. I notice you mentioned it took you about a decade to become a CMO. You've been here three years. So that's about there's a group there now that you'd be good at mentoring there a specific tactic that you used to mentor that's worked well because, for example, when I interviewed, mentorship comes up a lot.

And how I made it marketing, episodes. And I interviewed Erica White, the vice president of marketing and communications at a firm. And one of her lessons was direct feedback is a gift. And she told the story of how she received unfiltered, actionable feedback from a colleague. And I will say as having, you know, being a manager myself, direct feedback is awkward.

You think you you, you like the people you work with, hopefully on your team. It's just a natural human inclination to want to give people positive feedback. But, you know, sometimes you've got to give them negative feedback and that's why I really like the way that she worded it, because if you think of it as going into that room or going and talking to that person and now you're giving them negative feedback, beat them up, being horror them, obviously that's something most people don't want to do, right?

But if you think about it as direct feedback as a gift, I'm giving them a gift. Wow. That's that's a very different way to think about it. So for you, you know, as you start to mentor people now, is there a specific tactic that you do that has worked well?

Yana Ernazarova: Absolutely. I really believe in strengths based approach to many things in life. Of course, feedback really matters. But and I think that there's time for that. But usually in the way that I interact with people, for future, I really care about, I try to understand deeper underlying dreams. So for me, building that organic relationship, even before we talk about what's the next step for them or, you know, how can they do their job better today?

Instead, we talk, you know, about what are what are they dreaming for ten years from now? 20 years from now? Ten, by the way, seems to be my favorite number. That's not a lot today, but really, it's it's about tapping into the true dreams that people carry with them. And sometimes it is professional dreams and sometimes personal and the better I understand that, then I try to remember those things and carry them with me.

And when I see opportunities for people who, you know, who, I think that they're fit for, then absolutely that that's where I try to kind of match the person who has spoken with me to the opportunity that I see. And to me, mentorship, of course, is about many more things than just opening doors into the next opportunity. But I do think it's a big one, and that's why I try to always match as authentically as I can.

The person who, the person their dreams and the, the jobs that I see out there or other roles, feedback I do believe is more of them managerial role. So I kind of assign it to someone else. Of course, in my team I do that. But when it comes to mentoring someone who is outside of my team, outside of the organization, I usually focus on the longer term.

Things, dreams that they have.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, I like that too. That ties into also what we do as marketers. Sometimes it's funny, we do things as marketers, but then we communicate individually differently, and the marketing sure butts parent organization is, Mack Labs and MC labs. It's probably best known for the MC labs conversion sequence juristic. It's a handed methodology to increase conversion optimization.

And the number one factor that we talk about with that is tapping into the motivation of customer. Right. That's the number one thing that's going to increase the probability of conversion. However, then we get to, you know, personal conversations like mentorship. And we forget these marketing skills. But that's a great example of that. I mean, when I mentioned before, speaking of colleges, when I spoke at colleges and, you know, some, other companies like Maryland or whatever going to speak there, they came in and talked about their for one case and all this stuff and telling how great the company was when I would go and I would just teach something, I was like,

here's something that could help you. And I would teach that conversion stick because I think it doesn't just apply to marketing, it applies to all the decisions and communications we make. And that's something we forget as marketers sometimes, that we're not just marketers. We're doing this right and we market to customers, but there's all these different other conversations we need to have in our career and in our, our lives.

Yana Ernazarova: Absolutely. I agree with you. I mean, I think people are people. And if anything, that's one of the core lessons I learned as a marketer is you have to remember that we are not always rational. You know, human beings and consumers definitely aren't either, because sometimes you change your color of a button and it goes up, you know, the conversion goes off drastically.

It's, you know, it's really just human psychology. And I do think, related to your point about marketing being about people, I think it's actually getting harder now that a lot of the marketing is digital and very quantitative. Seeing the people behind the numbers, the aggregate numbers that you're analyzing is an intentional step that we have to take. And I think we all try, and but that's why sometimes speaking to the consumers and kind of trying to understand again, what, what is it that makes them buy our products and how can we, cater to them or service them more effectively?

Really reminds me, you know, that actually there are people on the receiving end of all of this. It's not just a click on our website. And, you know, that dropped off.

Daniel Burstein: So no, I love that. It's so true. Every time I see database, I gotta think it's not data, it's people. But you were talking about product. So let's let's dive in there because again you you do the steps. People and culture matter a lot. Mentorships matter even more. That's great. But product matters the most. So how did you learn this lesson?

Product matters most.

Yana Ernazarova: I learned this lesson. I I'm learning it right now actually is what I would say. So in my current job, it is shape is a is a great leader. You know, for 40 years they've been working with educational, partners, whether it's early educational centers or special ed, whether it's specialty toy stores. So it has really fantastic history of solid business partnerships.

At the same time, the one critique that the organization also tries to, work on is that a lot of our products are core quality educational toys, but they're not highly differentiated from some of the others in the market. And that's something that we recognize that it's something that we hear from our partners. And we do see, by the way, the products that are highly differentiated are incredibly successful.

So that's where we see that there is a lot of upside in creating that. So for me, this, when I started noticing that our portfolio is not all the same, that their products that are less differentiated and some that are more, that's where I realized that, product is king. And, you know, honestly, marketing efforts really, they win or lose by the quality and differentiation of the product.

That's my belief. And I think it is true for both digital and physical product, because at being a lot of my products were digital, now it has shape. All of it is, most of it is physical. But the truth is, no matter how good you are at communicating the benefits or you know how disruptive your marketing campaigns are, it is the underlying product that when the consumer buys it, sees it and uses it, and then leaves a review, that's where you want to create that loop and that cycle of truly them seeing that the product is differentiated enough.

And that's key to long term business. Maybe you can sell ones to almost anyone, but selling twice and doing that over 40 plus years now that takes, quality but also differentiation.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, I agree with that differentiation. As I mentioned, Meg Labs Martin service parent organization patented methodology. Learn from 10,000 experiments. All that one of the key. There's four key elements of value proposition. And one of them is exclusivity. As you mentioned that differentiation. That's so important. Let me ask you about the product itself. We're going to product. How do you get feedback from customers to help make a product better and particularly know what to invest in?

Because, for example, I've heard this lesson before, like I interviewed, Brad Gillespie, the GM of Event Consulting, on how I made it marketing. And one of his lessons was marketing's job is to help the product win. Right. But when you're talking about something in the SAS industry, even services, there's just a different timeline of investment and speed of go to market and all of these things that you can do and experimentation you can do very easily when you're talking about like your product CPG, a physical good.

There's the manufacturing of the good, there's the supply chain, the partners, the export, the import, the retailers. It's so much involved. It's such a bigger I bet you have to make. And it's such a longer timeline. So you I kept noticing this conversation. Love you say in your day to day you talk about talking to customers about Procter Gamble.

You talk about customers. But can you take us into what specifically you do to help improve that product and to help make the best bet, so to speak?

Yana Ernazarova: Absolutely. I think a lot of my work approach goes back to even my initial answer about what my day to day to day is like. In terms of I always try to balance what are the micro, you know, things that I need to do and the macro thing. So to answer about the consumer conversations, when I joined it, a shape just a bit over two years ago, one of the first things I knew, because I realized that the development cycles are long, is that I, I carried out a very, long strategic session, or I should say a few months, so not so long, but, where basically all I did was

studying the data and talking to consumers, because I believe that that was really, really key for me to influence that product line up two years down the road. And I'm only now starting to see that a lot of the ideas we brought out of those conversations are now going to be entering the market. So I think, first of all, recognizing the timelines and for things that are physical and that need to impact other organizations like product development, I do think it's about, giving them that data as early as possible.

So I try to, speak with consumers, ask them, show them the portfolio, you know, kind of ask them what they're missing. And then I translated those insights in a way that convinced both the CEO and the chief product officer and others. Then, of course, in addition to the longer term, bigger thinking, I look at consumer data on a daily basis, you know, but those are the micro decisions and the micro optimizations that us as a marketing and digital organization can make on our own.

And that is another very important component. But I do think that that can only work if the long term is also taken care of through the larger conversations.

Daniel Burstein: All right. Well, thanks for sharing some lessons from some of the things you made, including a product itself, right. Or making the product. I think that's what we get to do as marketers is so great. We get to build things. I've never been anything else. I've never been an actuary or a podiatrist or anything. I don't think they get to build things.

We get to build things, we get to build them with people. And as Yana mentioned, she mentioned something specifically that she learned from a mentor in the second half of the podcast, we're going to talk about lessons she learned from the people she built with. But first I should mention that the How I Made It a marketing podcast is underwritten by Mic Labs.

I the parent organization of marketing Sherpa. You can get a three month free scholarship to the AI Guild and get conversion focused training from the lab that helped pioneer the conversion industry. Get your scholarship at join McLeod's ai.com that's joining Mech Labs ai.com courtesy of Mech Labs AI. So for all that long term planning and customer thinking, our big thing I do is brainstorm with AI now and so it know something I didn't do in the past to brainstorm an our director.

Now it's AI. But all right, let's take a look at, some of the lessons from some of the people you collaborated with, as you mentioned earlier. Omar Cher, VP at Procter Gamble. You said you learn from OMA. Vision and culture are key to long term results in large organizations. How did you learn this from OMA?

Yana Ernazarova: I learned it, by being in his team for a long time and seeing what his vision and like and cultural take, how much of a difference they make. So just to give you context, he was one of the people who was trying to make the change at Pampers and then at being together with me, and he was leading the way in many aspects of that work.

And what I learned from him is that he was incredibly proactive about verbalizing what the brand Pampers and P&G could look like ten, 15, 20 years from now, if only we take action today. So I think not only did he have that vision, but he found it very important to find a compelling way to explain this to all the people who are decision makers around us, and that's a lesson I learned from him, really, about AI identifying stakeholders and communicating to them in a way that is, really inspiring because I think sometimes we we believe that it's the rest of the organization that kind of reports into you that you need to inspire and

forget that leadership is someone you need to inspire to for them to make those budget decisions for them to make, to give you more people in your team. And I saw Omer leave and Brees that. So not only was he very informed about his own vision, but as I said, very proactive. And it was it made all the difference, to be honest.

Daniel Burstein: Can you give a specific example of how you act on that? Because I think when I hear people in large organizations, they get frustrated. They feel like they they don't have a practical effect on the culture in large organization. Right. But we can't. So, for example, I mentioned interviewing Marco Mueller, the CMO with Veeva, on how I made it a marketing.

Another lesson he shared was you can make a big career and still stay human. And he talked about when he worked at SAP. He was leading the Russian market in the CIA's market, and the CMO of all of SAP came to Moscow to be with him for a series of meetings. And at the time, there was some big event going on, the crazy traffic jams.

They couldn't get a helicopter because that's against the culture of the country at the time. And so it's a little bit of a crisis. The CMO turns to him, says, what do we do, Marco? And he says, well, we could take the subway. He said, the Moscow subway. There's no air conditioning. It's very crowded. We have a security team.

We should be okay. We could do that. So it went around the city, all these meetings in the subway, and he kind of thought at the end of the day, like, I'm getting fired over this. But the CMO turned to him and thanked him and said, hey, this was great. Good job thing on your feet. We ended up getting it done.

We end up getting around these obstacles. And that to him showed, oh wow, that guy's got a big career, but he's still human. I can do this too. And now he moved on to being a CMO. So that's maybe one example. We're talking about these large organizations. You're saying that vision and culture are key to long term results.

Sometimes I hear people frustrated. The company is so big, I can't affect the culture. I can't I can't make these. I can affect things. So from your experience, what advice would you give? How would how did you actually affect that?

Yana Ernazarova: Well, I think first of all, just believing that you can impact that is already a big step, because I think that it's people who choose to speak up, and those are the people who will make the difference and make the change. And just to give you a specific example, even speaking back like about Omer and his contribution.

So one thing that we did as a team, with his leadership is, clarification of the roles between the global, regional and local teams at Procter and Gamble, because one of the challenges. But we also had one of the reasons we weren't moving so fast, even though, by the way, Procter Gamble is an incredible organization. But like any organization, they're things to always iron out and improve.

So that one thing that we identified was, you know, we believe that there was too much infighting going on between different teams who are working in the same brand, and that there needed to be clarification and really a step up where all teams felt like they were empowered to influence what they were best suited to influence. So really we did with his leadership and exercise where we thought, okay, well, what is the global team best suited to do?

Okay, well, global team probably is best suited to speak to the other global teams at meta at Google, identify that technology that's coming our way. Think five years from now, then what is the regional team best suited to do? Probably their best suited to adapt something that's global, closer to Europe or Asia? You know, in terms of the mentality or culture, and product portfolio, not the least.

And then what's the local team that's suited to do? And then kind of that's, that's how we continue this exercise. And then we found the right way throughout the right split, found the way to deploy this through the organization and of course, alignment with management and that to me was one example where it was about realizing, the reality that there is an improvement that's needed and having kind of the guts to create that vision for the leadership that this could be better.

And recognizing that that could really improve the culture for everyone. And by the way, it really made all the difference. And I think all the changes we made are still in place today, years later. So that's one example where being proactive about defining vision and communicating it. I saw how it, the day to day.

Daniel Burstein: You know, change management seems to be a common theme in your career. And I bring that because, again, that is very difficult change. Things don't want to change. The status quo is tenacious. And along with that comes risk and comes proactivity. And I wonder if some of what you learned goes back to your youth very early in your life when at 15, you moved from one country to another.

Because I know like how I made it. Marketing. We focus a lot on obviously our careers, those sorts of things, but I've learned to sometimes those lessons from way earlier in our lives and even outside the marketing industry, have a big effect on us. When I was eight years old, I was a paper boy, and I would have to go door to door and, you know, collect it.

It wasn't like, now it's so easy now if there are paper voids. I mean, they were very large, but it's all like a credit card. It gets automatically charged. I would literally have to go door to door eight, nine, ten years old and knock on people's doors and ask him for money. And boy, if you think that's easy, it is not.

And it taught me in life, in marketing you need to CTA. You need to make the ask. No matter how great what you do is, if you don't make the ask, you're not going to get the conversion. So for you gonna I mean, at 15 years old, moving from one country to another, that is some change management, that is some risk that must take some proactivity.

Is there anything you learn from that that helped shape your marketing career?

Yana Ernazarova: Absolutely. I mean, there's everything everything that I learned was from, I guess the pivot in my journey and my journey to date. So specifically, at 15, I moved from Kazakhstan to the US on my own. No one in my family has ever been to the US before, so I was really leaving into the unknown. I was fortunate to have the right people meeting me here and hosting me for, a year in high school, and then I stayed for undergrad, etc. but absolutely, I would call myself an entrepreneur by choice or by, by needs, you know, not even by choice.

So I always found myself in new circumstances. I always needed to understand what resources do I have available to me. Like, even when I just moved to Texas in high school and, you know, not only did I not do great English, but definitely in Texas, people didn't understand my accent very well. So it's just about understanding. But what can I bring to the table?

You know how can I build the relationships and how can I reinforce the resources around me? And how can I still be tenacious enough and resilient enough to to keep on? And, you know, build as well as I can with the resources that I have. So for sure that is my part of my immigration journey. But that is also a big part of my career journey.

So coming into the new space, not thinking that you don't belong just because you're new, you know, having a lot of respect for for the culture and getting to know the things as they're being done now, but also knowing that you can change them and that, by the way, you're expected to change them. And that's what leadership is about.

So for me, there's a direct correlation between my personal and professional journey.

Daniel Burstein: When you talk about that tenacity and a lot of ideas that you've tried to push in organization for change. But on the flip side, you mentioned this lesson. Sometimes you should kill bad business ideas quickly, no matter how passionate you are about them. You said you learned this from Lauren Dickstein that an entrepreneur at residence at atomic VC.

So you've pushed a lot of ideas over here. Okay, now, when do you kill an idea? How'd you learn this?

Yana Ernazarova: Well, I think that killing an idea is a very important part of change management. I really think we need to always, We always need to be data based. I think as marketers, that is one of our core jobs. We can't, bring too much of our own bias into decision making. And the same goes to not becoming too precious about any projects that we believe done at once, or at one point, if the data is not showing that there is potential, if consumers are not buying the product or are not using the digital product you're building or anything else that you're noticing, you always need to be honest first and foremost with yourself

and then having the guts to also stated to other people that, hey, I think we need to pivot. So the only way that really you can create meaningful change, is by getting rid of what's not working. And I understand that. I guess it's easier to step into an existing organization and say, well, you guys need change and let me drive that for you.

It is much harder when it's your own idea that you believed in, and now you have to say, well, that's no longer going to happen or that shouldn't happen. And I think those are some of the toughest leadership tests that we can go through. And the reason why I mentioned Lauren and I do find her very inspiring is because she had to do this with a number of business ideas that she was incubating at atomic.

She had to be ruthless. And, you know, one of the ideas, for example, she was, she just had her first baby, and she was really excited about the dual experience that she had, and she wanted to digitize that and make that, available virtually. It was right during Covid. So that was a perfect timing. But then some of the data was not coming in to show that that idea had enough, you know, legs.

And she was ruthless in acknowledging this. And, you know, she pivoted. And seeing someone live that out, even sometimes at a professional risk to themselves, being able to say to their investors, to their leadership that, hey, I think that we need to do something else now. I really respect that.

Daniel Burstein: To kill bad ideas. Yes. That's a hard thing we have to do as markers are creative. We're an idea industry, but an equally hard thing is actually executing on the ideas to begin with. Right. And so I wonder if you had an example of how you learned to execute on ideas. For example, when I interviewed John Reid, the CMO of I identify, I don't know how I made it marketing.

One of his lessons was ideas are easy, but making is a hard part. And he shared lessons from his friend at Yen's, who built the jerky brand, a soup brand. A wine brand actually made the things. I didn't just have the idea. I made the things for you. Janet. You mentioned a pano Anthos, the founder and managing partner at ZK labs, and you mentioned you learn from pano marketing or business idea is useless until it's executed upon.

So how do you learn this from Pano?

Yana Ernazarova: I learned this from from pano because that is what he lives and breathes in his daily, work. So he interacts with a lot of early stage founders and, you know, first time founders and early stage ideas. And he has seen that no matter how good the idea looks on paper, it really it's about getting the data to prove that there is traction, that there are people who will be willing to not just say they'll buy it, but actually buy it.

That's where the real test comes in. And, I've really embraced this in my daily work now, too. So, I one of the weaknesses, by the way. So I've been fortunate to, experience both corporate environments and startup environments in terms of marketing. And I do think something that the corporate environment can still learn from. The startup approach is not drawing the plans for months and months and months for two years from now until you then execute it on day one.

You realize that honestly, it's either no longer relevant or you should have been planning this differently. Like, I think that there's sometimes planning has a lot of value, but over planning can kill an idea because marketing has to really be, you know, we have to move fast. We have to use the data of today and the trends of today to make decisions, not just plan for a year from now.

And I think this happens still way too much in larger organizations. So in my daily work now, yes, I mentioned that I love to plan long term, but for me it's about vision that can be adapted, adaptable, can be adaptable enough, I guess, to the realities of whatever will be happening then. And I recognize that nothing can be data.

So it's the data that you need to be getting. And even if the idea is two years from now, can you talk to consumers now? Can you show them something close enough to the prototype of what you'll be launching to get something objective, on the table and not just theorize and philosophize about what could be.

Daniel Burstein: So you mentioned what large organizations can learn from smaller organizations. What about the reverse? What can small organizations learn from large organizations? Because one thing I see is, I agree with a lot of what you're saying. And with the pivoting, one thing I do see is sometimes we get this idea of agility. Small organizations pivot too quickly. So now I don't have a choice because I have the resources.

One thing large organizations can tend to do is with the right leadership. When doesn't changes, stick with an idea because sometimes it doesn't hit right away and it takes time. I remember interviewing how I made it marketing. I love, as you can hear, like to give my guests credit for the ideas and I it's escaping me now. I forgot who it was, but he mentioned that he was working at PayPal and it was whatever.

I didn't know they had the data. They thought this idea would work. I think it took like 2 or 3 years and they did, but it popped in a hit and it made they made it happen, but they had to stick with it. It just it wasn't going to happen right away. So that's one example for me of something.

I see that sometimes small organizations, they can pivot too quickly. It can be out of necessity, but large organizations, they have that stick to Itiveness what does anything you've seen in your career as working at both of something a small organization can learn from bigger enterprises?

Yana Ernazarova: Absolutely. I think, it is the correlates with the point that you made. My point of view is, startups and younger organizations can really learn to build long term assets better from corporates. And what I mean by that is brand is an asset. And sometimes, yes, you want to be data based about did this ad get enough.

You know, what's the click through rate and what's my final cost per customer acquisition. And that is important. But I've seen way too many early and young brands change everything about how they communicate based on data. That's sometimes not even statistically significant. So I really think corporate environments and specifically that's what being really ingrained in us from day one, you are always building an asset.

And by the way, you could also detract from it with your choices. And as a marketer. So how could you build something that is still $1 billion brand a decade from now, two decades from now? So that is what I think startups can be more intentional about. How can you be more consistent in the choices visually in terms of tone, of voice, in terms of the brand identity and personality?

And yes, even if the click through rate on that ad is not where you want it, how can you still iterate? But within certain guidelines? And I think I've seen way too many startup founders for sometimes for good reasons. And I can emphasize, you know, investors have really high expectations. You have to perform, but you can't just pivot away too quickly before you even see if there is a shot to build that, as something recognizable and to really build a brand.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. And two magic words, your center statistical significance. So that's something we've talked a ton about. Even if you don't look at our stuff, look at someone's stuff, learn what statistical significance is, because that is such a difference. Even if you don't run things to statistical significance that you understand that that methodology, like you said, you will make sure you don't pivot too quickly because I've you know, we do a lot of case studies.

A lot of times I've been on the phone to somebody, you know, they're so excited. They see a number in a platform and they're so excited. And then I remember like an email test, for example, they started a packet. Well, it's like, well, wait a minute, how many emails that you send and and wait a minute, what was the difference?

And then you kind of get into like, okay, you know, there's something in the world called randomness and that has a big impact on data. So yes, we want to be data driven, want to be database. But really I encourage you understand what statistical significance is because just because the number says something doesn't mean that actually reflects objective reality.

All right. You know, we've talked about so many different things about what it means to be a marketer from all the stories and the lessons you've told, if you had to break it down. What are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Yana Ernazarova: Okay. I believe that, an effective marketer and or an effective leader in marketing is similar to an effective leader in many other functions. And for me, this means, first of all, having your own vision. And if I put it even simpler, it's having a point of view, I think. And by the way, there's other things I'll touch on in a second.

But to explain what I mean by a point of view is, sometimes you talk to people and they say, here's one side and here's the other side and loves the side. And I think the as a leader, and as a marketing leader with so many options as where, as to where you can go and so many things that are sometimes conflicting in the data we're learning, really, it's beneficial to have a point of view and to say, well, this is those are all the things we're seeing, but this is where I think we can go from here.

And this is what I think the right next step is. So I think that vision for me is one of the core, qualities in any leader and also in marketing. Second thing is being good enough at decision making. And I specifically say good enough. So not perfect because I've seen way too many people spend way too much time trying to get it perfect.

But the speed in decision making really matters. And the higher, the bigger the title, the faster the speed of decision making needs to be in my point of view. So how can you get the get the data and get the gut feel to be good enough to, to make that decision as to where you're moving? And then of course, that comes along with clear communication.

So I need to state to all the stakeholders what it is that you're thinking and where you're taking the organization and being brave enough to accept the choices of your decisions. I think that is fundamental. And something that I'm seeing is that CMOs, I think statistically right now are struggling. There is a lot of churn. And I do think with that, everyone is becoming very self-aware of the choices they're making in this environment.

You know, profitability is an expectation, but so is the growth in revenue. And there are always trade offs. So how can you make decisions that where you're being brave enough that no matter the consequence, you will be proud of yourself to have made this decision? So, I think those are the qualities that I believe make a great marketer.

Daniel Burstein: I love this we've we've had a lot of how I made it marketing interviews. I don't think brave has come up as one of the calls. That was a good one. Well, thanks for sharing your point of view on it. It was so great listening to your career all your life. Those stories. Thank you very much.

Yana Ernazarova: Thank you so much, Daniel.

Daniel Burstein: And thanks to everyone for listening.

Outro: Thank you for joining us for how I made it and marketing with Daniel Burstein. Now that you've got an inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpas extensive library of free case studies at Marketing sherpa.com. That's marketing rpa.com and.