In short
Value creation through “marketing as product” and “product as marketing,” orchestrating an end-to-end customer experience (not just campaigns). Laura Balazs defines value as meaning in people’s lives (benefits minus cost) and argues that every product/marketing decision either earns relevance or destroys value via “death by a thousand cuts,” especially through cognitive load, misaligned teams, and extreme motions (only one funnel motion).
Guest backgrounds
Laura Balazs is EVP and CMO of global marketing at Adobe. Previously: CMO and GM at Intuit; worldwide marketing for Amazon Prime; drove outcomes for Visa and Nike.
Key claims
Ship narratives/stories to create meaning; translate features into benefits by audience (pros vs consumers); orchestrate across the “orchestra” of marketing, product, customer success, and AI systems; use inquiry/learning rather than assuming you’re right.
Notable examples
Photoshop (precision for pros vs low cognitive load for consumers); Gap’s resurgence via cultural relevance; Johnson & Johnson/Tylenol crisis handling; Tylenol cyanide story; Nike’s DTC margin focus as an example of unexamined customer impact; Adobe Firefly/GenStudio and the “content supply chain.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VODefining Value in Marketing
0:00 to 0:12
Lara and Seth discuss the meaning of value in marketing and business decisions.
“Meet Klaviyo, your brand's new best friend.”
Defining Value in Marketing
3:13 to 3:58
Lara and Seth discuss the meaning of value in marketing and business decisions.
“And I'm wondering when I shared that, like, what was your first definition, like in your head, if you can remember, of what value meant in that context?”
Exploring Benefits vs. Costs
3:58 to 5:55
A deep dive into the nuances of benefits and costs in value creation for customers.
“Value is providing meaning in people's lives.”
Cognitive Load in Marketing
5:55 to 7:50
The impact of cognitive load on consumer decision-making and marketing strategies.
“something that you can hit from a benefit perspective.”
Marketing to Professionals vs. Consumers
7:50 to 9:29
Lara shares insights on the differences in marketing strategies for professional and consumer audiences.
“But as you were talking about just using Photoshop as an example, as you were talking about the features of Photoshop, sometimes for a professional audience, features are benefits.”
Frameworks for Value Creation
9:29 to 11:28
Discussion on common frameworks for creating value across different brands and industries.
“And, you know, that all hangs on a promise that you're making to the customer.”
Marketing and Product Connection
11:28 to 14:00
Exploring the relationship between marketing and product in building brand value.
“Or on the flip side, if they're all about quality and prestige, but they don't actually have the quality and prestige, and then that gets in their way.”
The Power of Collective Marketing
14:00 to 14:28
Explore how collective teamwork in marketing maximizes brand impact.
“The idea is when you work collectively with a massive team, which is your orchestra, you're making sure you're all on the same page with the same mental model.”
The Interconnectedness of Marketing and Product
14:28 to 15:11
Understand the relationship between product and marketing as interconnected entities.
“So it is the magic of all of these coming together.”
Reimagining Marketing as a Mindset
15:11 to 15:53
Learn how marketing should be approached as a fundamental mindset rather than a mere function.
“You know, we're all about building the brand at the end of the day.”
Show all 28 chapters
Understanding Organizational Patterns
15:53 to 16:45
Examine the common patterns in organizations that impact marketing effectiveness.
“That marketing's moving, at least the gist, if not the exact words, marketing's moving beyond a world defined by campaigns and channels into one that's powered by systems and orchestration.”
Orchestration in Marketing
16:45 to 19:40
Discover the importance of orchestration in effective marketing strategies.
“So first of all, this is where I think our craft is important, always will be, no matter what technology comes upon us.”
The Disconnect Between Product and Marketing
20:21 to 22:55
Analyze the reasons behind the disconnect between product development and marketing efforts.
“This is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.”
The Role of Customer Centricity
22:55 to 25:48
Discuss the importance of customer-centric approaches in marketing and product design.
“But we've been through it before and there's pattern recognition in that.”
Value Creation vs. Value Destruction
25:48 to 28:00
Examine the dual concepts of value creation and destruction in marketing strategies.
“And when we talk about the ingress points, a digital product often has ingress points, you know, from all over the place.”
Understanding Value Destruction
28:00 to 29:10
Explore the factors that contribute to value destruction in companies.
“have created different rooms for people with instruments, which leads me to a conversation that I'd like to have about value destruction, right?”
Lessons from Tylenol and Gap
29:10 to 31:35
Learn from case studies like Tylenol and Gap on effective crisis management.
“Look, I've said a lot about there can be death by a thousand cuts, right?”
Mission Statements and Brand Identity
31:35 to 33:56
The importance of mission statements in guiding a company's direction.
“So you just take, that's an example of a brand that over time did a lot of just transactional work where the orchestra wasn't humming.”
Balancing Cost-Cutting with Customer Experience
33:56 to 37:44
Understand the implications of cost-cutting on customer experience.
“Because too rare is the circumstance where a CFO or CEO or sometimes a GM of a region understands the implications of cutting costs, of cutting, reducing things that actually add up to the product experience, right?”
Avoiding Extremes in Business Strategies
37:44 to 40:18
Beware of extreme measures in business operations that can harm long-term value.
“less or you come right back out of them.”
Introduction to Quantum Computing
42:01 to 43:03
Explore how quantum computing will impact industries and society.
“Data centers already have their own cooling infrastructure.”
The Dichotomy of Business Models
43:09 to 43:39
Discuss the balance between speed and security in business strategies.
“You're either all in on this model or maybe you're building with another.”
The Role of Marketing in Adobe
43:39 to 45:51
Insight into how Adobe managed marketing without a CMO for two years.
“All right, I got two questions for you before we bring this to an end.”
CMO Insights and Marketing Evolution
45:51 to 48:28
Understanding the evolving role of the CMO and marketing practices.
“What that then did was, you know, give him, by the way, such empathy for this job.”
Inquiry and Learning in Marketing
48:28 to 49:56
The importance of inquiry and continuous learning in marketing.
“And, you know, that gets back to the point of it's less about these set campaigns and more about the continued back and forth conversation that you have with customers.”
Creating Inquiry and Destroying Assumptions
49:56 to 51:16
The need for inquiry and the danger of assuming you're right in marketing.
“So, you know, the learners in us must come out.”
Value Creation from Conversation
51:16 to 52:02
Discussion on the value created from thoughtful marketing conversations.
“Well, amongst the things I've learned from our conversation, Laura Balazs, is that you ship story and that marketing is a product.”
Value Creation from Conversation
53:02 to 54:51
Discussion on the value created from thoughtful marketing conversations.
“And the overwhelming majority of everything else got filtered out as if it didn't exist.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Lara Balazs:Meet Klaviyo, your brand's new best friend. With all your data in one place, Klaviyo knows you and your customers. Its AI agents build campaigns from one prompt and answer questions 24-7. Always on brand, always with your OK. Go to klaviyo.com slash best friends. The world of business is constantly evolving, and Comcast Business keeps you in step, with secure, AI-backed networking in more than 100 countries, powering over 90 % of the Fortune 500 and millions of small businesses. And behind it all, thousands of experts answering your call at 2 a.m. like it's 2 p.m. One partner, that's it. Powering how business gets done for companies around the globe.
0:40Lara Balazs:When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast Business. Go to comcastbusiness.com slash enterprise to learn more.
1:27Lara Balazs:When good marketing happens, there's an exchange of value. So, you know, back to your value point. I will talk right past you if I'm just paying for clicks, you know, because attention is earned. Right. So I better be providing value, whether it's storytelling that that speaks to you. You know, it gets at an insight that you, Seth, have as a you know, I'm talking to you in a personalized way that that is value exchange and marketing is product. Marketing is product. Product is marketing. All of it is value.
2:10Anybody who's listened to my show or heard me speak over the last couple of years has heard me say that product is marketing. And over the past couple of decades, this has somehow become something of a hot take, especially in tech, despite it being an absolutely fundamental tenet, that all product decisions are ultimately marketing decisions. and every product decision either contributes to value creation or value destruction. But my guest today, Laura Balazs, who's EVP and CMO of global marketing at Adobe, said something that hadn't occurred to me and that I just loved. Agreeing, of course, that product is marketing, Laura makes the important points that one, marketing is also product.
2:49And two, you have to ship stories and narratives about your products to create meaning and relevance with your customers. I just love how she framed it. And this all comes from someone with a pretty heralded track record of driving massive enterprise growth, from her time as CMO and GM at Intuit, running worldwide marketing for Amazon Prime, and driving outcomes for iconic brands like Visa and Nike. In a world where marketing's long since moved beyond campaigns and channels into a craft and discipline powered by systems, Lara understands her job is orchestrating the many parts of the whole, so all parts of the system are performing as if they're just one.
3:29When you and I were sitting at dinner in Nashville, which is, I think, the middle of January already, and I told you about the new show and I told you the premise of the show was was rooted in the reality that any decision and every decision a business makes either contributes to value creation or destruction. It's not just the marketing decisions. And I'm wondering when I shared that, like, what was your first definition, like in your head, if you can remember, of what value meant in that context? How did how did you ascribe it?
4:00Lara Balazs:Yeah, a great question. I thought it was a great conversation. Value is providing meaning in people's lives. That was the first thing that came to my mind as a marketer, as a business person and really a business person first. I also went to the equation that value equals benefits minus cost, but you really have to take a moment on it because value is so broad when you think about it. And context matters. And the idea of benefits is massive. Cost is massive. So when you talk about benefits, what do you mean? Well, benefits, they are everything from emotional to rational benefits. And I, you know, I believe the best.
4:46To end user.
4:47Lara Balazs:Yeah, to the end user. So I'm, you know, and often your end customer target can be an enterprise. But even then, I better be, you know, offering value. And that value is everything from, hey, it's quality, it's convenience, it's status, you know, it's prestige. those benefits to great functionality, getting time back in your day, those are all benefits. The cost doesn't always have to be price, which is where you go in your head, right? The price could be clearly a key component. How much money are you putting down? But additionally, it's everything from, hey, did you make my life more complex?
5:31Lara Balazs:Did you add steps that I didn't need cognitive load. Those are all costs. So it's you just have to make sure I cannot handle any more cognitive load. I'm just saying exactly for myself. Well, and in today's environment where you have so much coming at you all the time, cognitive load is a real thing. So it's you know, it is definitely something that you can hit from a benefit perspective. I give you such a if it's a digital experience so beautiful, so personalized to you, it's without cognitive load to, on the opposite side, it can be a cost if you have a product that's hard to use or overly complicated for who you are as a customer, how you're using it.
6:19I'm really interested in what you're saying about cognitive load. It's a bit of a digression from where I was going to go next. But I'm wondering, do you think that business and marketers over-engineer what they're putting in front of people? Because we want to say everything, or at least we want to say everything they think is important, and we don't bear in mind their cognitive load and that nobody's giving us any real fucking time to begin with anyway.
6:48Lara Balazs:Yeah, and look, yes. I mean, generally speaking, and that's a broad, again, You have to understand context, category, all of the things that we as marketers are really good at in our craft. But generally speaking, unless you're at that point of a high stakes purchase, okay, some high stakes purchases with some product offerings do require more detail. So if you're buying an expensive car, you are wanting to get into the specifics of the key offerings of that vehicle. When it comes to our products, what we find is, for example, a creative professional who's been in the craft, they love it, they love the precision, they love the power.
7:37Lara Balazs:They're going to want Photoshop that has distinct, you know, layering effects, color gradation, all of those power and precision that might feel like cognitive load to me because I'm not a creative professional. I love to work with them, but I'm not one. So I want something that's light cognitive load, easy to use, but still creates things that are, you know, such that I can enjoy the art that I put into the world, the idea that was in my mind's eye and came out the other side. You know, you bring up a really interesting point and the distinction between marketing to a professional audience and marketing to a consumer audience, right, is amongst many differences is that the professional audience sees you coming, right?
8:20They understand the marketing. They understand the messaging. They understand what's involved. But as you were talking about just using Photoshop as an example, as you were talking about the features of Photoshop, sometimes for a professional audience, features are benefits. But for a consumer audience, and I'm painting with a broad brush here, you got to translate the feature into the benefit. So it's not that it's convenient. It's that it saves you time, or maybe convenient is a benefit. Actually, it is. But as somebody who has such a breadth of experience across so many, so many enormous businesses and brands, Nike, Gap, Amazon, Visa, Intuit, now at Adobe, having marketed to all sides of the marketplace, do you think there are certain frameworks for value creation, right?
9:11For creating the meaning that you talked about in the beginning that are common across and irrespective of what you're selling to whom?
9:19Lara Balazs:Yeah, yes and no. So first of all, let's just say, you know, we know value can be created. It takes time. It takes paying off your promise. All of the tried and true mechanisms of the craft, consistency, you do a really excellent job of defining your value proposition, the emotional benefits that are supported by rational benefits, and then ultimately your point of difference, the reasons to believe. And, you know, that all hangs on a promise that you're making to the customer. Of course, I do have this great fortune of working across so many different industries, so many different brands, you know, at Adobe and you do see pattern recognition on what happens when over a period of time of all of those items and how you go to market and the products you offer and the customer success you offer, all of those things.
10:23Lara Balazs:It's alchemy, really. You know, you're it's a blend. You're orchestrating. And when one thing isn't as, you know, grease the skids perfectly along with all the rest of what I like to think of as an orchestra, then you're not going to necessarily do your best work and provide value to that customer. So what, you know, this craft and when I think about Adobe and the vast product offerings we have from the biggest enterprises to an individual or student who just for them, it's I need a presentation that pops and it can give me the A plus in a class. what it's it's what i have seen over the all of that time that history i have across different brands is it's when you go way too far into one direction and forget about the orchestra and the alchemy because the alchemy is the art and the science and the magic coming out of the other side and so it's when a brand gets super transactional all the time gets in the most rational place that they will lose their way.
11:31Lara Balazs:Or on the flip side, if they're all about quality and prestige, but they don't actually have the quality and prestige, and then that gets in their way. So it's all alchemy and craft. And it's also, by the way, when we talk about generative AI and the fact that agentic AI is here and it allows you to automate more than ever, and we call it the content supply chain. We call it, we have GenStudio, which allows you to take from ideation to creating all of the assets to going to market, doing a lot of that automated, but optimizing and bringing that to a customer. You're still have to do it with value.
12:12Lara Balazs:You still have to do, you're creating meaning and some of the - Or you're not. Or you're not. And, but when good marketing happens, there's an exchange of value. So I'm, you know, back to your value point, I will talk right past you if I'm just paying for clicks, you know, that, you know, because attention is earned, right? So I better be providing value, whether it's storytelling that speaks to you, you know, it gets at an insight that you, Seth, have as a, you know, I'm talking to you in a personalized way. I mean, that is value exchange and marketing is product. Marketing is product. Product is marketing.
12:55Lara Balazs:All of it is value. I really, do you know what? In all my very, very many years, like measured in dog years doing this, I've never heard anybody talk about marketing as product. And I love that. And you're absolutely right. Product is marketing a thousand percent. But I've not thought about marketing as product. And I actually think there's a certain unlock in that, right, which is for an organization that doesn't always and oftentimes doesn't understand marketing, for them to think about marketing as product is really freaking smart. And I kind of love it. But I also maybe am interpreting it differently than you mean it.
13:37How do you mean it when you say it?
13:38Lara Balazs:I think of anything that touches a customer as, you know, the representation of a brand. And that's why, you know, they say brand is what they say about you when you're not in the room. is so I like that if for you, the mental model is product is is the brand, you know, and everybody has a different mental model. The idea is when you work collectively with a massive team, which is your orchestra, you're making sure you're all on the same page with the same mental model. But that idea that you're shipping storytelling and, yeah, we're at a place where we can automate a lot of this. And with our tools, you can have it with the brand standards and the guidelines that you deeply care about and that actually provide meaning to the customer.
14:34Lara Balazs:But through all of that, every single thing, it's like, you know, if you think back to brands that have had, you know, faults, it's because they got away from whether it's their marketing, their product, their customer success, all of it. So it is the magic of all of these coming together. So I like marketing as product and product as marketing. One of the things you and I talked about when we saw each other was, you know, is if marketing doesn't own marketing and if other parts of the company do, is it really marketing? And I say yes. You know, we're all about building the brand at the end of the day.
15:17Well, that takes me to the next question and really just nails the show's thesis, right? Which is, you know, the subtitle of the show is Reimagining Marketing. Because the premise is, as I shared up front, and sorry, audience, you've heard it too many times already, but that every and any decision affects value creation or destruction, which is why marketing needs to be reimagined as a mindset, not just a function. And it's really consistent with what you've been talking about. And I want to go back, and I love your word alchemy and orchestration. And you've written something recently. Tell me if I'm getting it right.
15:54That marketing's moving, at least the gist, if not the exact words, marketing's moving beyond a world defined by campaigns and channels into one that's powered by systems and orchestration. Reasonable representation?
16:07Lara Balazs:Yes. Yes. Okay, cool. So given that, and given the product is marketing, marketing is product, and every action has some influence on whether I am going to buy whatever it is you're selling or not. It kind of leads us to the place where a lot of organizations don't understand the implication of their decisions, oftentimes made in isolation, on that transaction or that relationship. And I'm wondering across all the places you've been and the seniority you've had, if there are patterns that you've seen or patterns that you can help others see that say, OK, this is where you're not understanding it's an orchestra playing together.
16:54Lara Balazs:Yeah. So first of all, this is where I think our craft is important, always will be, no matter what technology comes upon us. You know, the idea in the alchemy and the idea of getting the perfect choreographing of all the pieces, that is grounded in the fact that, you know, the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts. And that's a value prop. It's nuanced. It's done with precision and done with a deep understanding of what that customer cares about. And so it goes always back to the customer, which, you know, you and I have talked about sometimes you'll go to a conference and the customer is never brought up a marketing conference.
17:46Lara Balazs:And you're like, wait, that's that's why we're here. Yes, I have to deliver value for the enterprise and growth, but my customer is going to tell me or not tell me, but I know them, so I even know what they don't need. You know, what is going to make sense? Then it's my job as a CMO to orchestrate across the system. So there's system thinking. Now, you could say, well, hey, as you get to customer orchestration and we sell the tools that allow you to do that in an automated fashion and with precision and efficiency, so you get the return on investment, the return on ad spend, whatever you're optimizing for in order to drive that ROI, that marketing ROI.
18:34Lara Balazs:there's still though a brief a customer brief that is based on an insight right and there's still the piece of that insight that then gets translated to all the content that then some of it can get automated but you have to put the brand standards in and and you know again I feel lucky because I'm I am a company that I am customer zero. So I am using our tools to go to market, which allows me to give feedback to the engineers and the product people to say, hey, this product is not working that we're shipping. Yeah. Because I know myself using it, you know, it can be optimized in these ways in order for me to connect and deliver meaning to my customer.
19:27Lara Balazs:Meet Klaviyo, your brand's new best friend. With all your data in one place, Klaviyo knows you and your customers. Its AI agents build campaigns from one prompt and answer questions 24-7. Always on brand, always with your OK. Go to klaviyo.com slash best friends. If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed sponsored jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast.
20:08Lara Balazs:Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with possibility that big wireless hates you 100%. Now, over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices. Every plan to just$15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required.
20:52Lara Balazs:$15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms.
21:03So. I think inside what you just said is a is a truth in particular in technology companies, but not just where as you know, you've said it a few times. We've said it a few times. Product is marketing. The product and marketing, in particular inside tech companies, have become divorced. Right. in a way that in a CPG world 40 years ago, they weren't. They relate. Maybe they connect organizationally and, you know, have meetings together. But a product team isn't necessarily thinking about the customer, the consumer, the human at the other end of it. They're engineering. I don't actually know sometimes based on what, because we've all seen, not at your companies, of course, products that just have, they just land flat in the market because they're not for anyone.
21:56There is no product market fit. How have, why do you think that's happened? Which is really a way of saying, why is the customer not at the center of everything? Because even within consumer centric companies, they're oftentimes an afterthought and it makes no fucking sense to me.
22:15Lara Balazs:What do you really think, Seth? Yeah. So here I have a lot of theories on this because I, again, over the arc of my career, having had a time in CPG, which was the classic brand management training where you're right, the hub of the wheel, you're informing R &D based on the customer needs, you're informing, you know, all of it. But the entire, you know, was kind of you were the exactly that, the hub of the wheel. As tech started coming in and we got and it was, you know, again, we're in a profound time of change right now where there is a massive shift happening. But we've been through it before and there's pattern recognition in that.
23:00Lara Balazs:What we can't lose and what's always at the core is the customer. So where I think tech started to bifurcate the two were in a couple of places as where everything when it went digital and you always have your mental model of the purchase funnel from awareness, consideration to, you know, ultimately getting them trying the product, loving the product and staying in the product. that sort of awareness, what was called brand or demand creation is what I like to call it because it's less polarizing, but all the way to conversion and keeping retention. In a digital product, you know, what would happen is one, you see the quick ROI, the short term at the bottom of the funnel.
23:45Lara Balazs:So that started driving it. It's like you get an endorphin rush, but haven't diagnosed why you got it. Yes. Now, that's one piece of it. Then take on top of that in a digital offering, which technology driven offerings often are, we started talking about PLG motions and MLG motions. So marketing led growth and product led growth. And I still love the idea of that. So I need to, you know, my job and depending on where the company is, they tend to, you know, put a fine line as to marketing may be all about getting you to that product, getting you trying it, and then it's handed over to product to keep them to do beautiful in-product discovery, wonderful UI, UX, build the buttery experience or precision and control, depending on who you're marketing to.
24:38Lara Balazs:For us, Photoshop, you know, Firefly is an incredible AI model as well as an app that allows you to generate, ideate, to generate, to create incredible work that was from your mind's eye into something that you conversed. I'm a big fan of alliteration, and I like what you did there. Yeah, it's beautiful, and everybody should try it. And I say that because you can just even have fun with it as someone who's not a creative professional. And, you know, we're now applying it across to enterprises and, you know, as well as to the individual. But when we did that sort of MLG versus PLG nomenclature, and you know, words inform behaviors and behaviors, you know, inform actions, you end up starting to push things away from each other.
25:28Lara Balazs:And this is the pendulum switching or pendulum shifting that I was talking about a minute ago. And we go to extremes. And where the alchemy is, is often in the middle. And what I always say is, hey, my marketers are doing their best work when the product folks and the marketers are, they're finishing each other's sentences. And when we talk about the ingress points, a digital product often has ingress points, you know, from all over the place. How is that handoff? It's not really a handoff. It's one customer journey. And we, you know, have customer journey orchestration that we do as an offering.
26:08Lara Balazs:So I know this deeply, and I'm customer zero. I'm Adobe on Adobe for that. My teams are helping create those tools. That is where you get it right. And you kind of think about it as a symphony and an orchestra. And that's why we say customer experience orchestration. it's more about the experience and there's less bifurcation right so i think that that is what happened now it is easy for engineers who they are so talented and they've made you know their commitment to this craft and the understanding of code and it you know they're going to do great work if you are constantly telling them this is the customer if it's an individual and they now have democratization of creativity, which I love, I think it is the golden age of creativity, if they have that upon them now, because anybody can write in a conversational prompt in our tools, Firefly included, and they can get a beautiful piece of artwork or image or campaign or company plan on the other side, then you know what?
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27:15Lara Balazs:They just need an experience where they can write their thoughts more than some of the the toolage and so that just needs to be explained and unpacked that's just a new opportunity statement for an engineer but it has to be unpacked and it's i believe our marketers job to do a really good job of explaining that and then hey say let me pair you with the best designer who can do ui ux that you've never seen before and we'll marry those two things up and what we like to say it's like a creativity plus marketing plus ai equals magic because that alchemy or that magic comes out the other side. It's very hard to be an orchestra if everybody with an instrument is playing in a different room.
27:58And yet a lot of organizations have created different rooms for people with instruments, which leads me to a conversation that I'd like to have about value destruction, right? Which is, you know, because we've been spending a lot of time talking about value creation. And of course, we want the audience to get better at value creation. But to get better at value creation, you also have to understand what destroys value, right? What contributes to its destruction. And in the companies that you've worked with and for and alongside and seen, it's rarely any one thing, right? There's rarely any one catastrophic event, not never, but rarely, that leads to destruction, right?
28:38It's the consequence of a lot of decisions that probably seem to make sense to someone in a moment but they add up to be a shit stew rather than a good stew. Sorry, everybody, that was terrible. And I'm wondering if you were advising, if you were a consultant to a Fortune 500 enterprise, are there things you'd say, this is what you got to watch out for? These are the things that tear at the meaning you're trying to create, that tear at the orchestration, that make sure everybody's playing out of tune. Yeah.
29:11Lara Balazs:Look, I've said a lot about there can be death by a thousand cuts, right? And it does tend to accumulate over time. There is, of course, the Tylenol story of the early 80s that I'm old enough to remember, but it's a case study of, hey, I think in the Midwest there was cyanide and Tylenol. And of course, ultimately, you know, the value of the stock went down. They lost a ton of money. But then within two months, it recovered because of how well they handled the crisis. And I think just for what it's worth, communications and PR is among your best marketing and value creation because your earned storytelling is so critical to how you maintain trust and build attention.
30:07Lara Balazs:So let's just say, like, they did a great job of using their heritage, Johnson & Johnson in this case, but coming out of that. So, but, you know, and that is the extreme, right? Unforeseen event with controls in place that happened. Now there's the, hey, over time, you stopped listening to the customer or picking your head out and getting outside in provocations to see what the world is changing, what's going on. Like, you know, I had the good fortune of working at Gap when Mickey Drexler was there, and that was a great time. There was quite a bit of momentum in terms of tapping into the zeitgeist culturally of, you know, everybody in.
30:55Lara Balazs:And, you know, there was the idea that khaki swing was cool and khakis became a thing, and Gap helped pioneer that despite being, you know, a denim brand. And, you know, I lived through that. I also lived through other periods. You look at Gap right now and they're having a resurgence because they really went back and said, hey, clothing is a badge. There's lifestyle. There's cultural relevance there. And so brought in a designer, Zach Posen. He's also, you know, quite a prolific cultural zeitgeist individual. Killed it at the Met Gala. Yeah, exactly. So you just take, that's an example of a brand that over time did a lot of just transactional work where the orchestra wasn't humming.
31:48Lara Balazs:You might think something looked cute online, you go in the store, you get it, and the quality isn't there, right? And everything had changed around the company. So it's those signals. And often, Seth, you know, most of us have brand trackers and we see the attributes and we see the competitive set coming in or the category changing. Often in our space technology, you have to create the category, but that still comes from outside in provocation. In our case, you know, the creativity category, we created it. That doesn't mean we can't stop looking out and understanding what has happened around us and democratization of creativity.
32:31Lara Balazs:So one just thread to pull on here is, you know, one thing that you want to do is have a mission statement, right, that is long lasting. In our case, as we got really into the space of our enterprise side, we had the mission statement of, you know, changing the world through personalized digital experiences. Now, hey, that's good. It works. But for me coming in to motivate a company and a group of marketers who, look, I've got the best creative people in the world outside of my office and in our four walls. And it's magic. But I want them to be excited and motivated every day. So, you know, that's where I worked and rolled out the with a great group across the company, a new mission of empowering everyone to create.
33:28Lara Balazs:And that has magic and it's big. I can create a company. It's also more of a true north. It tells you what to do internally to connect externally. And I should note, this is this is the second episode where Gap and Fabi's work has been brought up. Second name check for Fabi Torres, for those who don't know, the CMO of Gap. But I want to ask you about finance as an example or ops as an example. Because too rare is the circumstance where a CFO or CEO or sometimes a GM of a region understands the implications of cutting costs, of cutting, reducing things that actually add up to the product experience, right?
34:18I'm sorry, to the customer experience. And I'm wondering if there's a watch out for based on your experience that you'd offer to the CFOs in our audience on when to, how not to lose sight of the customer end user and also importantly, the prospective customer and prospective end users experience and the expense of cutting some expenses?
34:43Lara Balazs:Yeah, well, first, you know, and I, it's been said, but it can't just be on paper or something we say, but you really have to understand the business, the levers of the business. And I mean that, like, how do you drive top line and bottom line? You gotta be great friends with your CFO. I love my, our CFO, Dan Dern. He's also heads up our technologies He acts as our CTO. And, you know, we spent a lot of time together and still do, especially at the beginning of my tenure here. But the idea, like one thing that marketers get wrong, and I'll say this because it often already puts you on the wrong footing with a finance or ops person, is our goal is not to spend more money.
35:32Lara Balazs:It shouldn't be. In fact, if I am doing my job really well and using our tools, I am not going to spend more money. I'm actually going to potentially spend less depending on, you know, where I sit in terms of the health of the business. where unpacking that with your finance person already gets you in a better place, right? Then you're defining that funnel that I talked about earlier. And you're talking about, and I've been able to put the math around how creating value that's more, and again, I haven't been calling it brand, but demand creation because it's palatable for a company. that top where you're you're it's longer term that you get the benefits so you see that in outer quarter okay results which reduces your need yes spend cat goes down while ltv goes up yes and we have proven that out right so in and and a company can easily get tied to the short term adrenaline fix to use, you know, a version of what you said.
36:41Lara Balazs:And if you can get patients to say, we're going to have you, we're going to instrument this, but we're ultimately going to show you what we can call it is headroom when you talk about performance and the CAC piece. And then it's like, wow, I can overall spend less because I've been able to do this value creation at the top. And we've been doing that here at Adobe. We've been doing that here. It's one that takes education and proving out. And I'm the first to say, listen, let's set up tests to prove it out. Because if there's something that I know for my career is if you learn that it's not working, you adjust and you pivot and you do that in real time.
37:28Lara Balazs:Also, if you have the short-term hit that is, you know, some incident where, you know, you've had a bad customer service episode or something. If you've built the trust through the top of the funnel, those hits are less, you know, less or you come right back out of them. There's forgiveness. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, when I talk about, yeah, trust is one of the incredible benefits that you can deliver, by the way, is trust, right? And that is, for me, what I like to think about with trust and if in the luxury or lifestyle space it's being cool, those are net effects versus it's what you take away, right, from the product, the marketing versus, yeah.
38:21It's interesting. I'm looking at myself in the camera. I'm mostly looking at you, but I see myself in the camera and I'm wearing a Paul Smith sweats. Yes, I recognize the rainbow. Yes.
38:30Lara Balazs:Yes. Right away. Their e-commerce business is so atrocious. Their experience, you try to buy on Instagram from Paul Smith and I'm telling you guys, I love you. It sucks. You couldn't make it harder to take my money. And it frustrates me because I love the product, because I love the style, because I love the fit. I get past that horrible experience. You'd have more of my money, FYI, if you made it less hard, because I have abandoned many a time. But your point, Laura, is a great one. And that, again, is the alchemy and the magic, right? But there's not that many brands, products, categories in our life where we are willing to tolerate a bad experience over and over again.
39:18And so I'm wondering, not for Dan, who's a great CFO and CTO, but for the CFOs listening, is there something you can offer as a piece of advice that's beware the implications of X on customer experience? because if you're not, and Nike under John Donahoe, one of, you know, you're an alum, is a great example of this. Like everything he was doing, or at least most of it, it kind of made sense on paper, which is capture the margin, go DTC. Well, nobody thought to analyze the implications of what going DTC meant, right? So massive value destruction that Elliot and Nicole and others are, you know, working so hard to reverse.
40:09But is there a piece of advice you'd give a CFO on, you know, beware X because it's going to lead to destruction even longer term, even if it increases margin?
40:18Lara Balazs:Yeah, I think it's what we just it's the extremes. It's the extremes. You know, the world is filled with ands. Demand creation, demand, you know, conversion. Beware of extremes. And I would say to the CFO, if you start to see one motion only being used in this toolbox that is the orchestra, and if you don't ask and investigate and look for precision in that, you could find yourself with a mortgaged future. Yeah, love that.
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41:53Lara Balazs:I also want to emphasize that in the future, we don't envision everyone having their own quantum laptop. Quantum computers are going to live in a data center. Data centers already have their own cooling infrastructure. It's not going to be something that you have to learn how to install and work on a personal level. But that doesn't mean that the discoveries made with the technology won't affect every person. Quantum computing has the potential to touch almost every industry that you can probably think of. If you would like to learn more, you can do so at ibm.com slash quantum. Support for the show comes from Attio.
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43:49All right, I got two questions for you before we bring this to an end. And the first one of the two is perhaps a bit provocative, right? Which, well, I hope all my questions are, but, you know, this one may be more so. Which is, when you got to Adobe, you walked into a CMO role that had been vacant for two years, I think, right? And during that vacancy, the company survived, product shipped, the stock performed. I'm wondering if the enterprise can run that long without a marketing leader. What that tells us about marketing inside of Adobe and the other side of that, or companies more broadly, and the other side of that is what did they understand?
44:40Because they're like, oh, it's going okay. We don't have anybody. The search is going longer than we thought, but we're here. The opportunity that they implicitly understood about the role marketing needed to play, the role the CMO needed to play and could play in increasing value.
44:55Lara Balazs:Yeah. Well, first, let me say the CEO became the CMO. So he would play two roles. So Shantanu Narayan was both the CEO and by design and with intention, he said, I want to play the CMO role as well. We market to marketers, right? I need to understand this craft. It goes a little bit back to the CFO. Ask questions. And if you're not getting the answers, continue to do the inquiry. With Chantanu, he realized I have this unique opportunity to better understand this craft. And, you know, marketing still happened. We had a great team in place of great leaders who could continue to drive forward everything that we've been talking about.
45:51Lara Balazs:What that then did was, you know, give him, by the way, such empathy for this job. Because what he realized is, wow, it is, you know, the art and the science, the alchemy. He understands how our products need to better serve our customers because he felt it himself as the CMO. and then ultimately, actually, I would say, you know, knew more about where the pitfalls are, how you can go into a room and show a campaign and, you know, content and creative, and you need more content than ever now in today's economy, and realize that some people just don't like it. Well, why? Because it's on brief. And you see, like, someone maybe doesn't like the red color, you know, the red or the yellow.
46:46Lara Balazs:Like, that is not how you evaluate creative. But he on, you know, he could see that as the person owning the function. So that... Did it change the metrics that marketing gets measured by? Sorry to interrupt you. So there was a lot of great measurement in place, as you might imagine. When we do, we have these tools that allow every marketer to drive efficiencies and effectiveness. and now increasingly do that even more with lesser production fees because of the content we can create at scale that's really good because you can, you know, use your craft and put that into the tools. The where I think I was able to come in is with outside in provocation and see the pattern recognition I have for my entire career and talk more about the importance of the demand creation layer and some of the things that would ensure that we are future proofed.
47:45Lara Balazs:But, you know, do I think he, you know, he had a better understanding of what, why I was trying to advance the org and actually do some of the things we were talking about earlier, which is the connective tissue between product and marketing, making sure that fluidity and that value prop is served. You know, one of the things that I have said when I came in was, look, we're Adobe, so we have to be the most, the best marketing org on the planet, modern, agile, no more waterfall planning. It's, you know, a system you're orchestrating. So it's constant iteration and pivoting. And, you know, that gets back to the point of it's less about these set campaigns and more about the continued back and forth conversation that you have with customers.
48:41Lara Balazs:He very much appreciated that having sat in the role. yeah yeah and and a lesson for companies enormous like you and small and a lesson for every ceo to model that that's a story i didn't know and and would love to spend more time on all right here is my last question for you which is how we end every episode right which is if all the power in the world were yours and this doesn't have to be about business you can answer this however you want what's one thing you'd create tomorrow and tomorrow's the important part right like don't look a year out from now one thing you'd create tomorrow and one thing you'd destroy uh i love this question uh i would
49:32create the need for inquiry and everyone being a learner and not assuming you're right.
49:46Lara Balazs:There is so much profound change and seismic shift in our craft, how marketing is being done. And so from a crack perspective, anyone who thinks they know the answer is wrong. So, you know, the learners in us must come out. Inquiry must come out. And, you know, I'd argue I would I think the world could benefit from that right now as well. Yeah. And destroying, you know, yeah, destroying is is, you know, the set idea that you're right. It's it. And by the way, at what cost to be right? There's a great line. I think it's Eckhart Tolle's. I'm going to butcher it. Would you rather be right or would you rather be?
50:38I don't remember how he ended it, but successful, happy. I think he said that. Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy? Yes. And I think, yeah.
50:47Lara Balazs:Yeah. And I still believe in, you know, the Henry Ford quote, which is whether you're right or wrong, you know, you're right. You know, I believe in that because that's confidence. It engenders confidence and belief. But to where we are now with the seismic change, the sea change around us, we have to ask questions. We have to be learners. Yeah. Well, amongst the things I've learned from our conversation, Laura Balazs, is that you ship story and that marketing is a product. Two things you said early on that I just absolutely have never thought about in that context. And I think they're lessons for everybody who's listening and watching, regardless of what role you have or the size of your enterprise.
51:40So you, my friend, have created some value, as I knew you would, of course.
51:45Lara Balazs:Well, you bring the value out. So I always appreciate your thoughtfulness and your incredible questions. And I am so glad that, you know, you're in my orbit and the orbit of this marketing community. I appreciate that. Laura Balazs, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you, Seth. Before we go, consider this. It's hard enough for a company, a brand, a message to break through and land in the cacophony of same bombarding all of us every day. Everyone wants our attention, but our brains can only process an infinitesimal percentage of the messages trying to reach us. To help and without our conscious buy-in, our brains filter almost all of these messages out.
52:29And this filter makes decisions about what it thinks we'll find relevant or not before we're ever aware there was something to notice. Think about this. You're thinking about buying a new car and suddenly it seems like every third car on the road is the one you're considering, even though, of course, their numbers haven't increased by a single vehicle. Or you're expecting a baby and suddenly you see pregnant women everywhere. You hear your name said in a loud, crowded room where you can't make out any other word anyone is saying. The world didn't change. Your brain just decided what was relevant and what to let in.
53:02And the overwhelming majority of everything else got filtered out as if it didn't exist. Now consider what this means when you're trying to build a company, a brand, grow a business, or create value for customers. Because your customers' brains are doing this every second of every day, sorting the world into what's relevant and what's not. And the vast majority of what your company does, says, makes, and market is landing on the invisible side of that filter. Not because it's bad, not because the product doesn't work, though some don't, but because the brain didn't deem it relevant enough to let it through.
53:33Which means relevance isn't just a marketing strategy, it's a biological prerequisite. It's the price of admission to being perceived at all. And every decision a company makes from the product itself to the way it's priced, to where it shows up, to how it speaks, to the experience it creates is either earning its way through that filter, or being silently, invisibly, permanently screened out by a brain that never gave you a chance. Today's episode was produced by Art Chung, Julian Villar, Jim Mackle, Manolo Moreno, Brandon McFarlane, and Ashley Futterman from the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomist Company.
54:25Lara Balazs:AI is moving fast across the enterprise. But without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over$1 ,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to consumeradvocate.org.
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From the publisher
This week, one of the central ideas of Create or Destroy gets flipped: namely, that product is marketing. Every single product decision is ultimately a marketing decision, and it either contributes to value creation or value destruction.
Lara Balazs, Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Global Marketing at Adobe, agrees with that thesis, but says we need to think of marketing as product too. And like a physical or digital product, you have to "ship" your stories and narratives to create true meaning and relevance with your customers. Lara speaks from a heralded track record of driving massive enterprise growth. Prior to Adobe, she was the CMO and GM at Intuit, ran worldwide marketing for Amazon Prime, and drove iconic brands like Visa and Nike.
In a world where marketing has long since moved past isolated campaigns and channels, Lara views the craft as a discipline powered by deep systems thinking. Her job isn’t just managing a department; it’s orchestrating the many moving parts of a massive corporate ecosystem so that every single piece performs as if it is one unified whole.
Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod
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