Today we’re looking outside a very familiar topic, exploring brand building that strengthens a brand’s equity today and sets it up for the future. We’re joined for this all-marketing chat with marketing rockstar, fellow podcaster, Founder of unmtchd.brands and former Puma exec, Oana Leonte.

Oana recently pivoted from a marketing career working to build some of the world’s biggest brands, including WB, Paramount and Disney, to building her own brand. Armed with a big ambition to make marketing a better place for marketers and in bringing the magic back into marketing, and with the goal of helping marketers focus on the most required skills for the future.

On this episode of Looking Outside we explore the intersection of creativity with marketing and what it takes to take a good brand to a great brand. Joining us is marketing and strategy leader, Juan Isaza, Chief strategy officer at DDB Latina, and Head of Brand and Social Media Strategy at creative agency 14.

Juan shares how his journalism background helps him in strategy; particularly in being resourceful and telling engaging stories that hook the audience. But equally in telling better stories about people, by discovering them in unexpected places. Juan says this ability to find the emotive connection with culture is the biggest shift in communication taking place, and is a fruitful space for marketing.

In this episode of Looking Outside, we’re exploring Culture and the role of brands leveraging or influencing it, with University of Michigan marketing professor and best selling author of For the Culture, Dr Marcus Collins.

On the show, Marcus explains how culture is shaped, defined and cultivated by people, to create uniformity and ‘normality’. Because culture is a curation process to find others like us and create synergy in commonalities, Marcus explains that the curation process evolves from the definitions of ‘how to behave’ that you’re born into (that are ascribed to you), through to the cultures to subscribe to once you’re older.

Marketing is often thought of as a creative field, in part because it leans into the art of negotiation to sell a product, but it must be done with rigor. In this episode, we explore that rigorous side of marketing, and the research that should shape its decisions, with Marketing Science research professor and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Byron Sharp.

Marketing science is at its core punk, or anti-establishment, and because of this Byron challenges any purist academic to ‘get out of the lab’ and the marketing bubble, and into the real world. There you must put aside your assumptions about what works based on isolated cases, or personal passions, and any snobbery you may hold about unglamourous categories, and seek out the patterns that form evidence. “Look and you will see,” Byron says, because most people don't bother to really look.

In Episode 19 we speak with marketing strategist and successful author, Mark Schaefer on the way to generate and leverage Influence, for both your personal and professional brands.

Author of nine books including Return on Influence and Cumulative Advantage, Mark shares his research and experience in the area of content marketing. He explains why it’s not enough to simply generate content; why you must rise above the noise with a ‘spiky point of view’.

To kick off Looking Outside we’re joined by talented and bold marketer Rose Jia, Head of Growth Marketing at Amazon Grocery.

Together Jo and Rose explore the tried and true practice of Marketing, and how organizations can stretch beyond familiar predefined pathways (and results) from marketing by employing a new mindset.