Breaking Taboos and Learning from Customers: The unconventional marketing journey of the Director of Marketing & Communications at Global Protection Corp. (podcast episode #108)

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Content Warning: On How I Made It In Marketing, we delve beneath the buzzwords of our industry to uncover the biggest lessons from successful careers. Our guests share detailed, hard-fought, in-the-trenches stories of how they learned these lessons and put them into practice.

Today's guest has spent a significant part of her career selling condoms. As a result, our in-depth conversation may involve frank discussions about sexual topics. If you are uncomfortable with this subject matter, you should not listen to this episode. You can explore our 107 other episodes.

Marketing can be perceived as a devious force, tricking people into buying things they don’t need and using services that exploit them. Ouch. I don’t want my life’s work to be that.

In a society of choice, marketing can also connect people with things that bring them utility and joy. That’s a better place to be.

Even better, I believe the highest and best use of marketing is to nudge people towards choices that benefit them in the long term, even if they’re less appealing in the short term, like healthy eating and exercise.

Our next guest markets a product that helps reduce health risks, even though it’s often more fun not to use it. Adding to the challenge, it’s a taboo topic. The product is condoms.

To hear lessons and stories from her experience marketing this product, I talked to Milla Impola, Director of Marketing & Communications at Global Protection Corporation.

Global Protection Corporation is owned by Karex Berhad. Karex is a publicly traded company on Bursa Malaysia. It reported 532 million Malaysian Ringgit in revenue in 2023, equal to approximately $117 million.

Impola manages a marketing team of 10 along with 50 contractors.

Listen 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

Here are some lessons from Impola that emerged in our discussion.

Force yourself to practice public speaking

When she was in college, Impola started to do sex ed workshops at other colleges around the country. She quickly learned that the best way to get over public speaking fears and being shy is to go in front of 300+ people and talk about how to properly measure a penis to help improve comfort and pleasure. She has had the pleasure of presenting all across the country, including the National Sex Conference, Harvard, various colleges, and more.

In the beginning, she would turn beet red right before the presentation (she lovingly called this phenomenon the ‘Milla Lizard’), but that would quickly fade once she realized how cool it is that she gets to present about something she really cares – and loves to talk – about.

She would submit workshops to all kinds of conferences. She was motivated by the acceptances and the rejections and forced herself to just get up on that podium and start talking. All that work over the years has helped her be more confident in her professional career.

The best way to learn your customers is to talk to them

When ONE® Condoms launched the MyONE® Custom Fit™ line of 52 sizes back in 2017, she signed up to do customer service because she really wanted to learn the customer base and what type of content their customers would find helpful around finding their proper condom fit. She is an educator at heart – tracing back to my college days teaching sex ed at University of Texas (Hook ‘em).

Today, she is officially a Senior Size Specialist and has talked to hundreds and hundreds of people about their penis, condom-fit challenges, and anxiety around size because of pop culture and the media. It was a really eye-opening experience, and these conversations from their Size Specialist team continue to inform their overall marketing and content strategy.

Don’t just think outside the box. Throw that box away and reimagine it as a glitter-covered bean bag.

Impolas loves that as a brand, ONE® Condoms is not afraid to start conversations. Education and customer engagement is at the heart of what they do. They send out a lot of surveys to ask their customers for ideas and advice. For example, they invented their now annual Measure a Penis Day back in 2020 because a lot of customers were seeking advice how to talk to their partner about condom fit in a positive way and how to make measuring a fun part of their relationship.

The advice is sourced from their customers, who have lots to say. (A reporter also once tweeted Impola’s press release about #MeasureDay was ‘ridiculous’ – which she honestly takes as a win. Being a little ridiculous is the spice of life.)

On 4/4/24, they participated in the annual Foreskin Day. (You can watch their staff TikTok video for inspiration.) Because they have very educated customer service staff who love to chat about condoms, many of their customers with a foreskin come to them seeking advice on condom use, how to measure and how to pleasure. These questions inspired them to participate in the Foreskin Day campaign to help close the Foreskin Gap – most of the advice and content was again sourced from their incredible customers.

Lessons (with stories) from people she collaborated with

Impola also shared lessons she learned from the people she collaborated with.

Mentorship is so rewarding and impactful

via Dr. Cristine Legare, Guli Fager, Elizabeth Toledo, and Davin Wedel

Impola has been very lucky and grateful to have a bushel of mentors throughout her lifetime that took a chance on her. One of many is when she was in college, she worked in a research lab for Dr. Cristine Legare, professor of psychology and the director of the Center for Applied Cognitive Science at The University of Texas at Austin. Over the years, Dr. Legate became an incredible mentor to her.

She also loved being a sex educator on campus in the Healthy Sexuality Peer Educators group led by Guli Fager. At that time, she thought the only career path in sexual health was being a sex therapist. Dr. Legare is the person that gently helped her question whether she wanted to be a therapist, which is some of the best advice she has received to this day.

She doesn’t have the personality for it, although she does envy those who do. Fager was the person that suggested she go to a Sex Tech conference in San Francisco her senior year, which is where she met her then soon-to-be future boss at Camino PR – and she moved to New York City the day after she graduated.

At Camino, she focused on PR for organizations focused on sexual health (she had no idea how to do PR when she started but they took a chance on her because she loved sex ed). Elizabeth Toledo, president & founder of Camino, was a powerhouse mentor and boss. NYC is where she started passing out ONE® Condoms as a volunteer at concerts around the city with a non-profit called LifeBeat: Music Fights HIV, and through the PR work she eventually ended up moving to Boston and working for ONE® Condoms as a marketing coordinator. Again, she had no idea how to do consumer product marketing when she first started – but her love of condoms lit the way.

And 10 years later, she is now leading a team of amazing people, working in an industry she loves, and talking about condoms (and lube and sex ed) for a living. CEO and founder Davin Wedel has taught her so much about entrepreneurship, branding, and consumer marketing. She is grateful for all the experiences, and now hopes to find ways to be a mentor herself.

Find a job you love

via collection of new friends and strangers asking what she does for a living

Impola would like to take this opportunity to thank every stranger who asked her “What do you do for a living?” – not realizing a tornado of a sex ed lesson was coming their way. When people ask her what she does for a living, she sometimes just doesn’t stop talking. She loves this job. She is babbling about custom-fit condoms, lubricant options, ad restrictions in the condom category, and why glow-in-the-dark condoms are great for Star Wars themed evenings.

To her, it’s no different than talking about her favorite band or cereal. From them, she has learned how hungry people often are to talk about sexual health. And she sure does love those conversations!

Find research-focused reporters

via Pam Belluck at The New York Times

What a phenomenal, research-focused reporter! She wrote the launch article of their MyONE® Custom Fit™ condom line (and even a follow-up about what it’s like to write about condoms), and the article regarding the FDA approving a new use of their condoms. It was a pleasure working with her for Impola, geeking out over condom data and stories.

Discussed in this episode

Marketing Pragmatism: Embrace ‘hand-grenade math’ over false precision (podcast episode #101)

Top HARO (Help A Reporter Out) Alternatives: How to find primary sources for business journalism and content marketing

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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.

Milla Impola: A lot of it is curated from customer questions, things we hear in customer service, and then we answer on the blog, or questions that people submit.

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 Burstein, to tell you about today's guest.

Daniel Burstein: Marketing can be perceived as a devious force, tricking people into buying things they don't need and using services that exploit them. Ouch. I don't want my life's work to be that. And in society of choice, though, marketing can also connect people with things that bring them utility and joy. That's a better place to be. Even better. I believe the highest and best use of marketing is to nudge people toward choices that benefit them in the long term, even if they're less appealing in the short term, like healthy eating and exercise.

Our next guest markets a product that helps reduce health risks, even though it's often more fun not to use it, frankly. So adding to the challenge, it's a taboo topic. The product is condoms. Here to share lessons and stories from her experience marketing this product as well as her entire career journey, is Mila and Paula, director of Marketing and Communications at Global Protection Corporation.

Thanks for joining us, Mila.

Milla Impola: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here this morning.

Daniel Burstein: We're excited to have you. So let's take a quick look at your background so people understand who I'm talking to. You've been a research assistant at the cognition, Culture and Development Lab. Mila has been an account manager at Camino PR, and for the past nine years, she's been at Global Protection Corporation. But what Protection Corporation is owned by Bear Heart?

Kirks is a publicly traded company on Bursa Malaysia. It reported 532 million Malaysian ringgit in revenue in 2023, equal to approximately $117 million. For Mila, she manages a marketing team of ten and 50 contractors at Global Protection Corp.. Okay, before we roll into this, I just want to read a content warning to our audience. This is a marketing and business podcast.

They might not be used to hearing this and for the wrong people, I don't want them to. So on how I made it marketing. We delve beneath the buzzwords of our industry to uncover the biggest lessons from our careers, our guests. Your detailed, hard fought in the trenches stories of how they learned these lessons and put them into practice.

Today's guest has spent a significant part of her career selling condoms. As a result, our in-depth conversation may involve frank discussions about sexual topics. If you are uncomfortable with the subject matter and prefer not to listen, you should turn off this episode right now. You can explore our other 107 episodes, which may be more suitable for you. All right, now that we have that out of the way.

I felt kind of bad about reading that, but you say that that's part of a part of my role.

Milla Impola: Okay. Restrictions. You know, you work in sexual health and condoms. You're used to all kinds of restrictions and content warning. So I get it.

Daniel Burstein: Okay, good. Well, give us a sense. What is your day like as director of marketing communications?

Milla Impola: That's a great question. So I will say, and I'm sure you've had guests say this before, but it's truly no day is like another day. But it always starts with we have the slacks, right? I work fully remotely. The emails, the slack, we just click up for project management. And I personally and the queen of sticky notes. So I always have my little sticky notes that I make in the morning.

I said, if you do these four things today, it's already been a great day, right? No one can argue that I am the queen of sticky notes. That's how I've kind of known even across the company. but overall, a day in the life of a condom marketer is thinking about the challenge of how do you make condoms something that people want to wear, right?

As you said earlier, it's often a lot more fun not to use one. We get it. Condom is a barrier. A lot of people don't want to use them. But that's the great challenge of working in condom marketing. How do you create? We create programs that bring people into our brands like one condoms because of global protection. We have a host of a variety of different brands, from our Satin Dance to Trust X to Atlas, but one of our main brands is called One Condoms.

And through there we do a lot of programing. We do condom wrapper design contests, we do project condom wear. The it's a fashion show where all the garments are made at a contest. It's not a fashion show. People wearing condoms, which is the first question I usually get was the launching a college ambassador program. And we work with fans on a lot of customized condoms so they become safer sex advocates at their concerts.

So it's that is how do you develop programs and educational content so that people know about condoms, they get excited about condoms and they want to pick up the condom at an event because it has a funny beaver or street art by your favorite street artist, right? Marketing. But then you have to also do the product development. How do you make sure condoms are something that people want to actually wear once they try them?

So as a brand, we've always because we're a manufacturer and a distributor. So we focus a lot on bringing new materials, like we just launched a condom enhanced with the wonder material graphene last fall. We have the 52 condom sizes that we'll get into in a little bit later. So then actually looking at the experience of wearing a condom and is that a positive experience that somebody has so that then they want to keep using condoms as well.

Daniel Burstein: Well, great. I mean, there are some challenges that are probably unique to your industry, but I think there's a lot we can learn from, especially having to sell both the category and the product. But let's take a look at your career as a whole and see what lessons we can learn. I like to say that I've never been in any other industry.

I've never been an auditor or a podiatrist or something, but I feel like we get to make things as marketers, right? And that's that's a really nice thing. So let's take a look at some of the lessons from some of the things you made. Your first lesson, you said is force yourself to practice public speaking. How did you learn this lesson?

It seems to come very naturally for you already, but let's see how did you learn this lesson?

Milla Impola: It's definitely a lifelong lesson. It might shock you to hear that I was incredibly shy as a kid, incredibly shy, and we moved from Finland to Texas of all places when I was 11. And that that sweet, gentle teenage years, you know, moving to Texas was already a culture shock. And I don't think I talked in school for at least the first six months where people wondered if I could even talk.

That's how it was. So if you would have told that teenager at the time that one day I'd be standing in front of 300 people talking about how to properly measure a penis, to make sure you get a condom that fits right, to help you have better, safer sex and sex in general. I feel like as a teenager I would have just said, nope, that's it.

I'm never going to school again. I'm just going to stay inside for the rest of my life. Like that is how I was. But then I loved sex ed so much when I got to college that I just wanted to start talking about it, start teaching about it. So it was first I did sex ed lessons in school, then I just started.

I worked with, one of my friends was an alumni at a fraternity, and then he always invited me to go talk at fraternities in college. And then I just started as when I worked at a PR firm, just started to apply for different conferences and got to go talk at them and when I would get up there and it still happens to me to this day, like, even if I'm mentally ready, I call it the Mirror Lizard, where just my body, like, starts to shut down completely.

but I always found one helpful tip is you make fun of yourself at the very beginning of your presentation. One thing that I used to do is I used to write on my hand like three little notes, and I was pointed out to the audience and say, look, sometimes my head gets completely jumbled. That's why I have to write things on my hand.

or some ways to like, just poke a little bit funny yourself. I'm laughing, they're laughing. And then it just kind of sets the tone like, yes, I'm here to teach you and we're going to have a great class, but it's okay because it's also a topic about sexuality and condoms. So it's okay that we have a chuckle every now and then.

Daniel Burstein: That is a great tip for public speaking. I mean, that whole joke with public speaking is public speaking as a Jerry Seinfeld joke. Public speaking is the number one fear in death and number two fear. So people at a funeral would rather be in the casket. Think of the speeches. So that's a great tip with writing on your hand.

What I've also very introverted and so public speaking didn't come naturally to me. But the thing I learned was the reason I would have a problem is because I'm focused on me. So if I don't focus on me and how am I doing if I focus on the audience, I think, hey, here are 300 or 1000 people I could help today and do a better job.

Milla Impola: Right?

Daniel Burstein: But I like.

Milla Impola: Making it engage. Like if I'm in a smaller group, especially like I would have people like get into groups and think about some kind of question or literally measure a demonstrator with our ticket measuring tool or have a conversation like, what challenges do you have in your community talking about safer sex or condoms? And then they'd come back and present.

So making it interactive. So you're all presenting, not just me. I've found that's also helpful if you do tend to be a person who's introverted.

Daniel Burstein: Break down the third wall and get them engaged. Yeah, instead of putting on a show. I do want to ask you two, though. You mentioned here, for example, about speaking at the National Sex Conference. Right. And so given your topic, given what you're selling, it's kind of a niche topic in a sense. And I wonder, how do you get past not just the audience that will be comfortable and familiar with hearing what you are, what you're, what you're offering to getting to an audience that you know might not be comfortable with it right away.

Right. Might not. I mean, that's really how we grow our brand is moving beyond our niche and niche, you know, audiences. So, for example, you know, when I first got this application, honestly, we got a lot of applications. And I was like, this seems interesting, but probably not a fit for a business and marketing podcast. I don't want to offend anyone.

But then I got thinking, the thing that actually tipped it for me was like a day or two before I got your application. I read Doctor Ruth's obituary. Doctor Ruth had just died. And I mean, she had led such a life of bravery or I don't know the right word. I mean, she was a child survivor of the Holocaust, an orphan.

She fought as a as like when she was, like, 17 in the Israeli War of Independence and really hurt her leg. And it wasn't till later in her life that she became famous for being a sex educator. And one of the things I kind of questioned, if she it worked so well for her is because, you know, she was like kind of short and a grandma and like, okay, so she could, you know, mention this taboo topic.

but it's a hard topic to break through in certain areas. So I wonder, is there anything you do as a marketer to get just past your certain niche? When we all have audiences who are already kind of, I mean, for lack of a better word, preaching to the converted, how do you get past that audience to kind of spread this word and spread your product?

Milla Impola: Yeah, a lot of the conferences, you're right, that we go to are related to sexual health. But throughout my career, whether it was teaching sex ed in college or passing out condoms with like being in New York City, I've just become the person often in my life that is the person that people come ask questions about sex too, right?

So even through customer service or the work at Global, I know as many sex educators do, that people have questions about sex, right? And they don't often know where to go ask those questions. So even if you are in a group of people, like when I taught at Harvard, for example, kind of an education at Harvard, and they can be a little bit nervous at first, like, what's this topic about?

the people have questions about sexual health. So yes, I can impart some knowledge about safer sex, but that's why I always make sure that there's questions as part that get people thinking about their own life or how it applies to their own life. The lesson? And then make sure that there's a Q&A at the end of the session, because it's just a topic that a lot of people are curious about, but don't often have somebody to ask those questions to.

So that is like, while it's a challenge because it can often be a taboo topic, because it is taboo, it gives you a lot of opportunities to connect with people in a unique way and answer questions or, or have a bank of resources like, you know what? I don't know the answer to that question, but here's like some sex therapists or an online app where you can ask what sex questions, or here's a podcast that I trust from this person.

So, the taboo nature of it. I've always seen more more of an opportunity for education and connecting with people.

Daniel Burstein: When you're talking about talking in person, but also is there anything you do online or otherwise? I mean, the benefit of online is like the chance for it to be a little more anonymous. Like you mentioned, people getting to ask questions, which I guess which is great. But we also talk about introversion. I'm an introvert. You're an introvert.

Not only do I not like speaking on stage, but asking a question in the audience about math is hard, let alone, you know, this topic. So is there anything? Do you use any online or digital platforms to help guide that education and back and forth, but in a more anonymous fashion?

Milla Impola: Yeah, we have we do a sex education blog on one condoms.com, which a lot of it is curated from customer questions, things we hear in customer service. And then we answer on the blog or questions that people submit. But we also have a program through on condoms called momentum, which is our loyalty slash advocacy platform where people get points for doing challenges related to sexual health.

So we might say, go take a picture of our new product at Walmart or send us a picture of you handing a condom to a friend, or send us your question about our products, or safer sex or sexual health. So yes, people can put their real name on there, but a lot of people have pseudonyms, right? There's a forum where they can actually talk to each other, which is fun to manage.

so that as a tool and as a platform online is a great place where people can go ask those questions and then we answer them directly.

Daniel Burstein: You talk about answering customer questions and customer service. Your next lesson here is the best way to learn your customers is to talk to them. So how do you talk to your customer? How'd you learn this one?

Milla Impola: First way for me personally was when we were launching the my own custom fit line of 52 sizes was I wanted to do the customer service part of it. So it was because I wanted to learn. As a marketer, this is a whole new concept for condoms, right? People know that condoms are typically the same size, or there's the regular and the extra large.

How do you convince people that 52 condom sizes matters, right? How do you convince them to rethink the whole process of how they buy condoms? Usually you go online or you grab the first thing on the shelf in a store, but when you have a customer, the economy, you have to measure your length and your girth, and then you get a sample and then you test it out.

Maybe you measured wrong and you sample again, it's a whole new commitment. so I wanted to kind of learn what questions do people have so that we can funnel that into our marketing, our ad creatives. And at the end of the day, when people hear 52 condom sizes, what most people say, some people said, what do you use this product?

Why would you need that many sizes? I can fit my whole foot in a, in a condom. Like, why would you need different sizes of condoms? Well, then that's where a lot of our educational and even advertising creative to this day is is answering that question, why 52 sizes? And you can do that through customer testimonials. We we even share them once a week.

across our staff because they're hilarious. They're amazing. They like, really remind you why the logistics of carrying 52 sizes is really worth it, right. so we do a lot of customer testimonials and we focus on the facts. Right. Regular condoms are seven inches long. They're too long for 91% of people. That's a way too tight for a lot of people.

The snuggies size. So the shortest and tightest out of all 52 is our number one seller. Because a lot of condoms cause slippage for people, or they're just so tight that they cause instant erection laws. So it's also normalizing that, yes, the standard size fits a lot of people around the world, right. But there are a lot of people who just cannot fit into a standard size but want to practice safer sex and are also tired of being called a liar when they say condoms don't fit me because most people are aware that penises come in different sizes.

And if we had one size pants or shoes or bras, most people would say that is silly. We need more sizes because there's different sizes of feet. So if condoms are the same way, so from all that talking to customers, you can really upgrade and enhance your Com strategy because it's based on the types of things that people want to hear, that people want to learn about, about your product, about your brand.

Why should they try your brand over somebody else? What kind of language should you put on the packaging? So when it's on a shelf in a retail setting, they say, yes, this product is for me.

Daniel Burstein: So I like the idea of the 52 sizes for two reasons. One, there's, as far as I know, a pretty conclusive value proposition. I haven't heard that before. Maybe it's out there. but the other thing too, is it's it's giving your customers options, which tends to be a good thing. Right? So I wonder how did you, as a company, come up with the idea to launch that?

Because the downside for a company is you mentioned logistics. It's a lot harder to have 52 sizes and to have one size. We've had heard a lot of supply chain issues. and I'll give you one quick example. While you're thinking of that, I have a case study coming out with a compression sock company, which, it's not public while we're recording, but it's going to be public, I think, before we, let this, release this episode and the compression sock company.

Compression socks also tend to be one size fits all, but they learn from their customer service. You know, they were getting like a 50% return rate and people were complaining in the return rate that, you know, a lot of people that wear compression socks, whether they're pregnant or they have diabetes or they're older or certain things have wider calves, and then they need it for medical reasons.

And so then they launched a wider calf version of the compression socks. And it was really successful and they sold a lot of them. But again, they learned it from staying closer customers, customer service, looking at their return rate, understanding that. So a product like condoms where you cannot try it on ahead of time, right? I mean, a lot of online companies have sizing, issues shoes, clothes, whatever.

But some of them, you can go in the store and try on, you can not try on ahead of time. It does lead to a challenge of okay, why should we sell all these different sizes? So how did you or the company like come to that understanding of like, yes, this is worth investing in. We'll try it out.

Or however you did that to understand that this was a successful approach going forward for your value proposition.

Milla Impola: I'm so glad you brought that up. Thank you. Because in our product development, right, we've been a condom manufacturer for 30 years. We always think about does this product solve a consumer need in the market. Does it make sense. Because condoms our medical device, even the flex graphene condom that we brought to market last fall took us ten years to bring to market.

So partners our medical device lots of regulation safety testing which is great because it means that you're getting a product that has been tested and is safe to use. and for years, whether it's research studies looking into this or consumer comments, we know that people have been complaining about condoms for decades. Either they are too big and they slip off.

Either they are so tight that they cause instant erection loss or what? So our customers so lovingly call the red ring at death. an economy so tight and it leaves that red mark on the penis after sex. So we knew that this is a is a challenge. But for our consumer base, it is a challenge for us from a regulatory perspective, because for years it there's standards how long and short and wide.

And then condoms can be because it has to do with the way condoms are tested for safety. Right. So even like the airburst test, which is how much how much air pressure should a condom be able to hold before it burst? Comes of all kinds of testing to make sure they're effective. That's one of them, not your condom.

A smaller condom isn't necessarily going to hold the same amount of air, so you had to have researchers and regulatory people decide, how do we change these, these testing standards so that the condom standards for sizing can change. So those got updated and they got updated in Europe a longer time ago. But then that happened in 2015, in the US.

So that then allowed us to bring this product to market and when we brought it to market, of course it's to test are people in the USA going to adopt it like they did in Europe? And yes, they did, because we're normalizing the fact and finally acknowledging, hey, for years you have been complaining about this or had a challenge with kind of it.

Now there's literally 52 sizes. Let's go see if this improves your experience. And I will say once people try it, at least our customer base, they rarely go back because it's the difference of having some, but something that's truly fitted to you, or is it something that's off the shelf and might be uncomfortable to wear so it solves a consumer needs?

That's what we're always thinking about. A global is how do we keep moving the condom industry forward, bringing new products to market, listening to customers, thinking about what we can bring to the market so that people want to keep trying and using condoms and have a great experience with them.

Daniel Burstein: That's great. Solving a consumer need is a great idea for product development, but then when it comes to marketing to our role, we got to get them to actually try it, right. There's a lot of times people say, I have this consumer need, but getting people to try something different is difficult. And you mentioned don't just think outside the box, throw that box away and reimagine it as a glitter covered beanbag.

So that's very descriptive. How have you done this in your career?

Milla Impola: Lots of different ways where I'm excited that where I work now, I get to think outside the box, like we have a corporate ish structure that a very entrepreneur, a way of thinking about things. So yes, we do the standard like Sexual Awareness Day and HIV Awareness Day. But even last year, through customer service, once again, we kept getting questions from customers like, I am blessed with a foreskin, like, how do I measure?

How do I use your measuring system? What condom should I pick? And then my amazing colleague, no, I started to really look into like, okay, well what educational resources should we provide to them? Because we do take our role as customer service seriously, as also like sexual health advocates and educators and realize there is a force and gap on the market when it comes to education around safer sex, foreskins, education, condom use.

All the condom demonstrators, or even depictions of penises typically don't have a foreskin, so we said, okay, well, that's cool. Then we also found out that four for 24 is foreskin day. So we said, okay, let's get ready and do a whole campaign around it. And that's then did a customer survey. Our customers love to share their experience and answer surveys.

So we did a big survey where 33% of people with a foreskin said that they had been treated differently. Unfortunately, by a partner, 79% said that they had difficulty using condoms. But they also gave a lot of tips like, here's how I figured out how what condom stores work for me, here's how I measure it. And all of that wonderful content then became our foreskin campaign, and it was very cool to just see how to create a campaign that's, you know, informed by your customers and what they ask about and do something that's a little bit different.

I mean, people in America, I'm from Europe, so we talk a lot more about foreskins in Europe, but in America, it's just a topic that a lot of people don't talk about. But because we're so pro body positivity and just talking about topics that people have questions on but tend to be taboo, we're like, okay, let's create a campaign around that.

It's a little unexpected from a condom company, and we got to have a lot of fun with it. I mean, we did a TikTok video where a lot of people on staff were just saying foreskin into the camera, you know? And that was great. So how do you do content that's unexpected is what I've appreciated working well, even Measure Penis Day is a holiday that we invented because customers kept asking us, how do I talk to my partner about measuring?

How do I bring it up in a conversation? Can you give me some stats or talking points and measure Penis Day, which I think is now coming up on its sixth year, February 1st, to kick off National Condom Month? that was another example of just doing things differently and creating something that's even at the time when I said the first ever measure of penis, a press release and reported tweeted that it was one of the most ridiculous press releases he'd ever received, which I take that as a win.

I think being a little ridiculous is is all good. it's the spice of life, but doing things differently, thinking about things differently.

Daniel Burstein: So I love that you're doing things differently. I love hearing that you're very responsive to your audience or cutting off content. But then I ask, what do you do? Or what processes do you have in place to not go over the line? Whatever that may be? Because one thing brand marketers really struggle with social media marketers, right, is they try to get engage in cultural conversations.

Sometimes political conversations, again engage their audience. They're trying to have fun. They're trying to be different. They're trying to stick out because there's so much darn noise. But, you know, sometimes they run into trouble. The brand did the wrong thing and it can blow up in their face. So do you have any processes in place? Or you mentioned you have a team of ten, 50 contractors.

It's a lot of people getting engaged. There may be directly social media, real time. What do you do to make sure that whatever that line is, you don't go over that line?

Milla Impola: That's a great question. We do a lot of team brainstorming. What what conversations should we be part of? What shouldn't we be part of? Often what we're part of is what our customers are part of, because we do have programs like momentum and social media where we're chatting with our customers, we work with sex educators and fans, so we're always kind of monitoring.

And then a big question for us is, how do we add to the conversation from our lens of expertise, like, how do we talk about condoms, or how do we talk about sexual health? And how do we talk about things that matter to us as a brand and to our customers? And how do we stay in the rails?

I'd say is we also, when we're planning some of these campaigns, we do really try to hold ourselves to like marketing checklists and go to launch checklists where we have buy in at the beginning of, okay, here, all the levers we can pull from press to influencer campaigns to all the ways that we can do marketing, what are we going to do?

Are we going to do video creative? Where are we? Are we doing Reddit ads? And what what are we doing so that we have team buy in at the beginning so we know how big is this project, what time of time commitment and what is truly the assets that we need to create so that then when we're launching the campaign, we're kind of all on the same page and we know all about what's going on and how do we all fit into the bigger part of the campaign.

Daniel Burstein: All right. Well, there are some lessons that we learned from Mila, from some of the things she made in marketing. In just a minute, we're going to learn some lessons from some of the people she collaborated with, because that's a great thing we get to do as marketers. We make things and we make them with people. But first I should mention that the how I Made It in Marketing podcast is underwritten by Mic Labs.

I the parent organization of marketing. Sure, but you can transform your marketing results with Mic labs. I the team has made 39 updates to Mic labs I since the official launch of the full featured version last month, including voice to text, image generation and the ability to create and link prompts directly from the dashboard. When you build your own custom experts and apps, you can start using Mic Labs AI for free.

At Mic Labs, i.com that's Mic Labs ai.com. All right, well, as I mentioned, we talked about some of the things you may. Now let's talk about some of the people that you collaborated with. your first lesson you mentioned mentioned SIP. Mentorship is so rewarding and impactful. And some of the people you mentioned are Doctor Christine Legare, Julie Fager, Elizabeth Toledo, and David Wedel.

So can you tell us, like, how did you learn about mentorship from these folks? I'm guessing they mentored you and.

Milla Impola: Yeah, I've been very lucky throughout my life to have really great mentors. So the first you mentioned was Doctor Christine Laguerre, and that's when I worked in college at University of Texas at the center for Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Texas. Essentially, it was doing, research in a children's research lab. And at the time, I also so I love research.

I loved my psychology degree that I was studying, but I was also doing, in Julie Vega's class, Healthy Sexuality Peer Education. So because I was studying psychology, I thought, and because I love sex ed, I thought the only thing that I could really do as a career path was to become a sex therapist. Right? It's not like you go to your career center at college, and there's not this whole realm of sexual health related to the career paths that they usually can recommend.

Maybe these days I can, but and so I said to Christine, like I said, I think I'm going to be a sex therapist. And she I will never forget how impactful it was to say, I don't think you have the personality to be a therapist. I'm sure she said it in a much nicer way, but really pointing out that, like, maybe like there's definitely other paths that I could take that isn't just being a therapist.

Not that there's anything bad being a therapist. I know now, looking back at my life, I would not have been a great therapist. I don't think, but lucky for me then Julie Fager, where I was working in with the peer sexual health education, recommended for me to go to a conference. Why lie which was used tech sexual health conference.

We actually ended up presenting a few years later as a full circle. And at the time, I couldn't, I couldn't if I could, I got the flight and then the conference was sponsored, but I didn't have a place to stay. So I put a call out to Facebook, and it was one of those. I stayed with my friend's grandma's friend in San Francisco, and I went to the conference, and that's where I met, Pablo, who ended up being my boss at Camino PR.

So day after I graduated, I moved to do public relations of all things, right? But because most of the clients were related to sexual health, LGBTQ equality, all kinds of things that I was very passionate about. Then they said, okay, we're going to take a chance on you. And again, I had amazing mentors there. Even though I had never written a press release, I didn't know what pitching was, but I was so hungry just to learn more and just to figure it out and to talk about sexual health, that all of a sudden I found myself in a career in public relations.

A day after I graduated college, I moved to New York City to do that. And Elizabeth was such a powerhouse mentor, teaching me all those things, those skills. She would throw me in to client meetings and say, go, you know, just do your best. Try, where people are really taking chances on me in areas where I didn't know what I was doing, but wanted to really do a great job.

And then that's how eventually I ended up at Globe Protection. One condoms is, we did a campaign together around street art and sexual health in New York City, and then I ended up moving to Boston to work for one condoms called The Protection. But again, now I was in consumer products pricing strategy margin calculations and said, okay, time to Google some stuff again, time to YouTube some stuff again.

Right. And I think that's the great thing about marketing is that a lot of skills you can learn on your own and go try like, don't pretend to be an expert in anything, but listening to podcasts or watching YouTube videos. You can learn a whole lot, but it is those mentors throughout my life that did take a chance on me that I am so proud and so proud that they took those chances on me and so thankful.

And that's what I hope to now do, not only as a leader on my team, but the team that I manage. But, also just trying to find other ways to mentor people because it's it's how I made it as a marketer is mentorship was a big part of it. And now I ultimately want to give back.

Daniel Burstein: There you go. Mentorship is how you made it. I like that, you know, sometimes I love that career journey. A lot of marketers, too. It's not like they expect that they started one place and then ended up here, but also, you know, when you kind of hear someone talk back on their her journey, it just sounds, for lack of a better word, so easy in such a straight line.

So I want to ask you, like, do you think of a specific example where in your career, like you had a no and you had to overcome it and how you did that? That's a key thing we have to do as marketers. for example, I interviewed Kira Kamsky, the vice president of global consumer and vendor marketing at the Not Worldwide.

And one of her lessons was resilience is a key to success and mental health. And we talked about how overcoming rejection is so key to the marketing industry. Right? I mean, one of the things we do as marketers is we put ourselves out there, we put our ideas out there. I like to call my babies right. Here's my idea.

Let me put them in the world. And then we have to make sure whoever's business leaders approve them so we get the budget or our client's approval more or, you know, most important of all, our customers are proven because they're actually successful. And that's why she was talking about the importance of being over evil to overcome when things don't work.

So for you, do you have an example? Again, we've talked about your career journey. It sounds beautiful. It sounds like such a straight line. I'm sure that's not really how it was. And you think of something you had to overcome with that. Or like maybe just even a marketing campaign that got shot down and how you did it.

Milla Impola: Yeah, I think even when I first started. So going from public relations and PR into like true product marketing at Global Protection is and having a sex educator background, I wanted to focus and we do focus a lot on education or I wanted to do that event. Well, that's a great example where I wanted to go and invest in a big event or something and not really understanding like marketing budgets, right.

And ROI and saying, okay, well, we have this bucket amount of money we can't take like a quarter of it for one event, right? Or we can't. So really understanding budgets, was I'd say, a challenge over time because you want to dream big and do these things and but you have to also understand what the budget is and okay, well, if we're going to do this much in digital ad, this was an advertising.

So that was a thing that I had to definitely learn over time where sometimes I feel like early in my career it's like, well, they're shutting down my ideas. I don't think they're good, but it's more like, no, we have to. Also, we think outside the box, but we also have to live within a budget right.

Daniel Burstein: How did you learn that? I mean, I've talked to marketers who would just get buddies with the CFO and sit down and learn everything and get them onboarded. You also mentioned just podcasts and YouTube and kind of the do it yourself way, like how did you learn how to do that budgeting. Right?

Milla Impola: Combination of both. So Davin, the CEO of global is a wonderful CEO like he is my boss, but I talk to him every day and really like, again, a global took me under his wing and taught me all about content marketing, why certain things have worked in the past 30 years, why certain things have it, why we've spent budget a certain way.

so it's a combination of learning online, but really, again, having a mentor like Dave and at global to be able to talk through those ideas and say, okay, maybe we're not investing that much in this event, but what if we do have and then we do for smaller events or things like that, where you bounce off ideas and as as you bounce off ideas and you understand why, then you don't get so you don't get like your feelings hurt because somebody doesn't take your ideas right.

And I feel like beginning of a career, at least for me in my career. you feel a certain type of way of somebody shuts down your idea versus then you work in marketing for long enough and you realize, no, there's reasons to this. And it's not because your ideas are bad, but there's often things happening in the background like budget, timing, resources, all that stuff that lead into the decision about why you're going to do something or not.

Daniel Burstein: All right. So we saw that career journey got us to today. And you say find a job you love. You learn this from a collection of new friends and strangers asking what you do for a living. So, tell us about this skill. Us and find a job you love. What? What advice would you give to other people?

And, you know, how did you, come to embrace it so much?

Milla Impola: Right. I think I'm, I consider myself very lucky that I do get to have a job I love. And it's not so easy because sometimes you can't turn a passion to into a career. But I am excited that I get to work in corners every day, because that's what I've been passionate about since I was a teenager. but it is interesting when I talk to strangers and I often wait for the question, like, oh, what do you do?

And I'm like, oh, let me tell you, I work in hot homes and I have some colleagues who are comfortable sometimes saying, like to a stranger, I work in columns and they'll say, I work in medical devices, but I very much love it and take all of those conversations and opportunities to talk about custom fit or glow in the dark comments or lubricants, or every Uber driver that's ever been trapped in a car with me now has a sex ed lesson that maybe they weren't necessarily waiting for.

But it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, is a lot of people want to talk about sexual health. So I because I was a sex educator for so long, the question of what do you do for a living can also just be a conversation about that topic in general.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. So I was thinking about your comfortability in this, and I thought, I think one reason and there are many reasons probably you mentioned you were born in Finland. There's a there's a different culture there. And it got me thinking. I saw on your website, you're in 24 countries, ranging from the Netherlands to the United Arab Emirates. And I wonder how you change your marketing or messaging if you do it all based on the country or the culture you're marketing to?

Because when I look at those, those are just two I picked because the Netherlands, at least to me, it seems like they probably have a more open attitude towards the topic. United Arab Emirates seems like it's maybe more of a conservative culture when it comes to this topic. So when it when you're looking at kind of like your broad portfolio of markets, you're reaching do you do anything differently to different audiences based on their culture or receptivity?

Milla Impola: Yes. One great thing about one condoms is we do have the round wrappers with all the cheeky artwork on it, the fun, interesting design. So even when we launched in more conservative countries, that's a talking point, right? You put something interesting on or around a condom and people get quickly over the taboo ness that can be about the topic, and then you're just talking about the picture on the condom, and then you want to take ten comments on.

So that's like the beauty of I think the brand overall, is that the product itself is a condoms conversation starter. So when we go into new markets and we're, expanding into Europe, that's a big focus for us right now. And just getting the product, IT product started to sell there. But now it is this year we just started our new fiscal year, starting to do marketing in different countries.

And even when we look at packaging, right, how does something like shaped for pleasure and pleasure plus translate? We have translation companies that we work with. But I always, always, always because in all these countries we have distributors are condom friends, condom world is very small and we kind of all know each other. you have to go ask somebody locally who understands condom marketing and their local language and say, does this joke or this tagline or this thing, how it's translated here actually translate?

Right? I'm from Finland. I've seen so many packages, even in Finland, where I see what they were going for, but it doesn't quite translate right. So you have to be hyper aware of that and take the time to focus on that, because then assume are very different than humor in the Netherlands or in the UK or in America, right?

Finnish people love dry humor. So if you do some of the same jokes, maybe in marketing from US to Finland probably isn't going to translate for them. So if you if you want to be successful in a in a new country, I think it is taking the time to make sure to talk to somebody locally and say, hey, does this content make sense for all?

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. So we've been talking about marketing, but our close cousin is public relations. And one thing you've learned is to find research focus reporters. And you specifically mentioned Pam, but like at The New York Times. So how did you learn this in general? How did you work with Pam specifically?

Milla Impola: Pam wrote, when we were launching the My Own custom Fit brand in the US. She wrote the announcement article for the New York Times, and I loved working with her. She had so many questions. We were, you know, talking research back and forth. so anytime she'd have questions about research, we'd send them to her. they sent somebody to our office to take photos.

It was very cool working with somebody who's a reporter, but also really cares about the research and the science and the data behind a product. And then when we years later, became the first condom FDA approved for anal use, she also wrote the announcement article for that asked us a lot of questions. How did we get there? Why did it take ten years, you know, how did the process work overall?

So working with her was just a great experience because I love to nerd about data around condoms, so it's always nice to work with anybody else who wants to talk to me about that.

Daniel Burstein: Well, everyone would love to get an article published in the New York Times for their product. So do you have any advice or tips on how to pitch reporters, how to get the PR out there? I mean, for me, I tend to be more on the side of being pitched on the ad marketing, sure, but like we're getting pitched constantly.

I think in this PR agency that you work with that pitched me originally on you being a guest. Now, one thing I've written about before, I used to use a, platform called Help Reporter out. That was like a journalist query service, and now it doesn't exist anymore in its current form. So I've written about like different alternative platforms that I use, and that's really helpful because it's not just getting generic PR pitches on the reporter side, you're actually putting out, hey, I'm looking for this specifically.

And then you can get pitched on what you're looking for. So now that works for me as a reporter, but as someone trying to get in the press, you got in the New York Times. Do you have any advice for audience and what any specific examples of what works for public relations?

Milla Impola: Yeah, we do. We try to follow them all on Twitter and social media and look at what they're posting about, share their articles. Right. we try to truly understand what they want to write about and then providing some specific data points or research, handing them stuff that's like, here's all the things we know about this. What sources so that they can do a little bit less pulling it all together versus reviewing the research and checking it.

Right. we also do quarterly ish buzz list mailings. So we have a set of reporter friends where every quarter. So we have a new beanies like, you know, we'll send them our dreamy beanie or we have a new lubricant launch and say, hey, can I send you something in the mail? We got some foreskin Division stickers. Can I send these, like, things where they get some because everybody loves mail.

You know.

Daniel Burstein: You're talking about actual postal mail, actually.

Milla Impola: Yeah. That's great. Right. And that's where the handwritten note. That's another thing for not just reporters but any. But I am a firm believer in a handwritten note when you send anything, taking the time to write something. Hey, I read that article about loved it or hey, a funny joke or something. A handwritten note goes so far, still, in this world.

Maybe I'm old school, but I will always vote for handwritten notes.

Daniel Burstein: So that's a great point. There's so much competition in the inbox is true. When I actually get something in the postal mail, it like sticks out. I'm like, wow, this is let alone with a handwritten note. I like that. all right. We've talked about so many different lessons and from your career and stories, if you had to break it down, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Milla Impola: It's planning ahead, which is often hard even for us. We have this new saying now we need to walk and chew gum at the same time, right? So we can't just be good at product development. We need to also make sure that we're marketing that, setting up those timelines and campaigns and the checklists ahead of time and also gives the team gives the whole tanks.

I liked it in marketing. We like to invite finance people to brainstorm. So we like to invite quality people to brainstorm because a lot of people have awesome marketing ideas. So if you're planning ahead of time, you do have time to involve why there's nothing you can do. All the ideas, but a lot of creative ideas don't just come from the marketing people.

So how do you involve others around the company and in, So planning ahead is a big one for me. Connecting to customer service. Because customer service team has a lot of information about what we could be doing better on the website for content and advertising content, all the comms content to make sure our customer's questions are answered.

Because if they have a question, most likely other people checking out your product have the same question. So connecting to the customer service team. The handwritten note for me is a big one, and one lesson that I've also learned over time is you don't have to be an expert on everything. I'm lucky I'm in a place where, you know, if we need some expertise to come to the team, I can go hire a contractor.

A story. One time we had been going, we were doing the big rebranding of packaging for one columns, and we had looked at, I swear, probably a thousand different fonts at this point. And I said, we need a font guru. And we brought someone in for a week and the font was decided. Right. So like, yes, you want to learn on YouTube and be an expert in a lot of things, but there are so many experts on so many topics.

So if you can utilize the expertise of others to bring them into the team, because it's really helped us a lot.

Daniel Burstein: All right. Well, thank you so much for your time you and sharing for all your expertise with us today. I certainly learned a lot.

Milla Impola: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me.

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 Paycom.