Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins

Recorded live at Clios on Culture, this week's episode features Seth's conversation with design legend Debbie Millman, who’s hosted the Design Matters podcast for 20 years and more than 700 episodes.  Over the course of her brilliant career, Debbie’s designed the faces of more brands that have been on more shelves than perhaps anyone.

Their conversation ranged from why she doesn’t think brands have souls, on the difference between ugliness and vulgarity, why waiting around for confidence is a trap when you really just need courage, our shared belief that brands are manufactured meaning — meaning that only becomes real when enough people agree it does, and what David Lee Roth said that changed the way she walks through the world.

Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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This week’s show is brought to you by The Lighthouse, a part of The Whalar Group, and was recorded live at the inaugural Create or Destroy Sessions in Napa, presented by Live Nation. 

Seth talked with two guests – Walmart CMO William White and Waymo CMO Suzanne Philion – whose companies are completely different and yet whose challenges are strikingly similar. They discussed the differences and commonalities between Walmart, where 150 million people walk through its doors every week, and Waymo, who currently operates its autonomous, ride-hailing cars in just 15 U.S. cities. Both shared stories about why they need to keep earning customer trust and how trust is earned by everything the companies do and say.

They got into why meaning lives in the back seat of a car just as much as a checkout line, why perception lags change, and how a messy ride or a cluttered shelf destroys value faster than a bad ad ever could, what store design has to do with brand strategy, and why the Street is a marketing channel. 

Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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On day two as Starbucks’ CEO, Brian Niccol published an open letter saying "there's a shared sense we've drifted from our core," and Tressie Lieberman, who Niccol hired to as Global CBO after the stock had dropped 38%, has spent the time since rebuilding what this drift cost them—and their customers.

In this conversation with Seth, Tressie's extremely candid about how it happened, which wasn't through any one catastrophic decision but through convenience becoming so dominant that the craft, community, and connection that justified the brand's premium receded until the experiences felt transactional and the soul of the company was hard to find.

Seth and Tressie talk about what it takes to get this back at a global scale that finds half of America walking through your door every year, why she thinks endlessly about integration and cohesion and all the little choices that can come and bite you, why the two-question test she's used since Pizza Hut is still the most honest filter she knows, and why her answer to what she'd create with all the power in the world, connection, and what she'd destroy, loneliness, aren't two answers but one.

Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn.

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Seth’s guest is streetwear legend Jeff Staple who, in 2005, designed a Nike Collab—the Pigeon Dunk—that caused a riot, resells for thousands of dollars 21 years later, and gets the credit (or blame!) for bringing sneaker culture to the masses.

It’s also a moment Jeff says opened a Pandora's Box he's still reckoning with. In this conversation, Jeff draws a line from the Pigeon Dunk to Nike falling off the S&P, arguing that the moment sneaker culture went mainstream, the brands that fed on it started asking the wrong people what they wanted, and stopped creating and innovating for the ones who'd made them great. 

It’s a great conversation that gets into why the bread-and-butter, Monday through Friday business is what actually builds a brand that lasts 30 years, why you can't buy your way into culture no matter how big the check, and why 40 hours of meetings a week and none of them about what the customer actually wants is the most common way he sees enterprises destroy value. And when Seth asked him what he'd destroy with all the power in the world, he said “likes and comments,” because if they'd existed when he started, he never would've made the next thing.

Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn.

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This episode Seth sat down with his friend Noel Mack, Gymshark's Chief Brand Officer, for a conversation that became a masterclass in what it means to turn down money in service of meaning.

Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn.

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This week, Seth Matlins talks with Amazon Web Services CMO Julia White, who’s spent 25 years inside enterprise tech, including a 20-year tenure at Microsoft, where she led product marketing for Office 365 and Azure, leaving to become Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer at SAP.

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Lululemon Chief Brand and Product Activation Officer Nikki Neuburger has been inside three enterprise realities that couldn't be more different: Nike at its peak, where brand was the business and everyone knew it; Uber Eats, where she helped build a brand from scratch inside a three-sided marketplace during a trust crisis; and now at Lululemon, where she's lived through both extraordinary revenue growth and significant value erosion. In this conversation she tells Seth something every CEO and product leader needs to hear, which is that the best product doesn’t always win, backing it up with a career's worth of evidence about what actually creates value when the product alone isn't enough. 

Nikki reveals why a crack between leaders at the top becomes a crater by the time it reaches the frontline, why proximity to the customer is an executive's ultimate power and what gets destroyed when that proximity disappears, and why she believes AI-driven search is about to make every business decision visible to consumers in ways that will fundamentally change how brand value gets created and destroyed.

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Entrepreneur and author Eric Ries wrote the seminal book "The Lean Startup" and spent years teaching founders how to build companies, before realizing he'd never taught them how to protect what they built. In an economy where profit and value are often conflated, too many companies allow what Eric refers to as “the ghost of the public markets” to sit in every strategy meeting, trading long-term customer trust for short-term stock price bumps.

Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok @createordestroypod and on LinkedIn.

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In Q425, Duolingo's CEO told the Street the company would accept slower revenue growth and lower profitability in order to prioritize growing the number of people who use the product every day. This is a strategic decision that runs counter to what most enterprises do under pressure from analysts and investors. 

In this conversation, Duolingo's CMO, Manu Orssaud, walks Seth through why the company made that bet and what it reveals about where value actually comes from. They also talk about why brand consistency and brand sameness are two very different things that most companies confuse; why 40% of Duolingo's growth in China can't be explained by any attribution model and the company's strong conviction that what they're seeing is brand momentum; and why, after building one of the most irreverent brands in tech, Manu's now wrestling with how Duolingo evolves without letting shock value become the brand.

Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Early in his career as a social media coordinator at Burberry, Musa Tariq spent six figures to livestream a 2008 Burberry fashion show that, despite hopes of reaching one million viewers,  delivered only 673. While it looked (and felt) like a failure and the end of his job, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts recognized it as a first of its kind that needed time to grow. 

For him, this was a defining lesson in resisting short-termism that’s guided his work and career from Nike, Ford, Apple, and Airbnb, to his tenure as CMO of GoFundMe. Now as co-founder of the consultancy Science and Story, he is working to bridge one of the most expensive divides in business: the one between brand and business strategy.

Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod

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