Rocket Companies CMO Jonathan Mildenhall on The Business Case for Creating an Iconic Brand

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1:42We don't need the glossy hair shot in shampoo commercials. And yet the industry is addicted to tropes that create a sea of sameness. And I am genuinely worried that over the next two or three years, We're going to find ourselves in the blandest period of creativity because of the application of AI tools, generative AI, and marketing tropes, which, of course, the models are reading. But I am very excited that actually coming out of this transition into a sea of sameness will get genuine creative disruption all over again.

2:27Welcome back to Create or Destroy. It's a business show. It's a marketing show. It's a show that argues they've always been the same thing. On this week's episode, I sit with Jonathan Mildenhall, the CMO of the Rocket Companies, who spent his career believing that brands can be, should be, and are bigger than their categories. Jonathan helped create open happiness at Coca-Cola, which became the brand's most profitable platform in its history. As the first CMO at Airbnb, he wrote a white paper for CEO Brian Chesky and the board titled The Business Case for Building an Iconic Brand. And four years later, he was managing a marketing budget that had grown from$25 million when he got there to$750 during his tenure.

3:09Now, as the first CMO of the rocket companies and their portfolio, he's helping people on their path to prosperity by romancing the American dream through home ownership at a time when every macro and microeconomic force seems to be working against him. I talked to Jonathan about the argument, one that I think every CEO needs to hear, that the single biggest destroyer of brand value is the erosion of belief inside a company. We talk also about why so much marketing never transcends its category, why he's replaced the traditional funnel with a model called priming and proving that treats humans and machines appropriately enough as two distinct audiences, and why the two questions he asks every CEO before taking a job are questions every marketing leader should be considering and asking.

3:56Let's get into it. So let me start here, right? Across the breadth of your career, from the Coca-Cola company, Airbnb, serving as a consultant with your own agency, now at Rocket Companies, you have marketed a portfolio of products and services. You've created some products and services along the way too, each of which has fundamentally different motivators and seeks different relationships with human beings. So I'm wondering, kind of in the pattern recognition part of the show, have you found that there are universal truths about, regardless of business, regardless of business model, how value gets created and, you know, as corollary, how value gets destroyed within an enterprise?

4:48Yeah, after a 15-year career in the London advertising industry, My first client-side job was working at the Coca-Cola Company, Vice President of Global Advertising. And I spent the first three months every Wednesday in the archive of the Coca-Cola Company. And the Coca-Cola Company archive is the world's most valuable commercial archive. I was there when it was donated to the Library of Congress. Oh, really? Yeah. Really? what an amazing collection of artifacts that actually plots, you know, the history of marketing. Coke claims so many marketing firsts, from sampling to couponing to branded merchandise, et cetera.

5:36But over the first 12 weeks of my induction to Coke, I realized that that brand had something that no other brand really understood, and that's that it could create such significant belief that could really, really change the way that the world feels. And so I started... Can I interrupt? Why did they have that and no other brand? What gave them the permission to be a business, not just a brand, but a business that could do that? It was just part of the culture. every single but this is in 2007 every single executive in the entire system 750 000 people believed coke was at the time the world's most valuable brand but everybody believed that it was the world's most powerful brand because it could actually and i genuinely believe this you know if you turned coca-cola's marketing off for a month at the time i think the world would feel slightly less happy because every single consumer touch point for Coca-Cola was promoting happiness.

6:49And I started to ride on the shoulders of all the men and women that had come before me for 120 years building that brand. And I truly believed that the Coca-Cola brand could do anything. And it's that belief that I took with me to Airbnb. It's that belief that I took with me when we started 21st century brand. And it's that belief that my team and I are now practicing at Rocket. And I believe that the most value creating brands are the ones that are driven by human beings that actually believe in the role of the brand and that being bigger than the category the brand occupies. You differentiated between valuable brand and powerful brand.

7:35And I really, I really love that nuance to you mentioned in 2007, it was the world, Coca-Cola was the world's most valuable brand. It is not today. Now, some of that is, I think, a function of methodology and how we, how we evaluate what quote unquote, a valuable brand is. But some of that is a function of change in the rise of technology and trillion dollar capitalization companies. But I want to use the point to ask the second part of the question, which is, what have you learned about what destroys value? Which doesn't mean it goes from X to zero, but what destroys value? What have you seen across your time with so many different clients on the agency side of your business through to today?

8:20And just as a student of of commerce and culture. The biggest destroyer of brand value, honestly, is correlated with the volume of belief that is inside a company. The most consistent brands in terms of brand power, cultural relevance, a disproportionate share of mind, a disproportionate share of category, are the ones where the leadership team everybody in the organization truly believes in the investment not the spend the investment behind the brand and we we see brands rise and fall in such an alarming pace now what's happened at nike over the last five years is as a as a brand driven creative marketer is devastating to me.

9:18And the only thing that has changed is the belief inside the company. Yeah, the belief inside the company, to the extent it's changed, I don't know, but is a consequence of strategic decisions a CEO made. And what's so interesting is Nike, I mean, every time we talk about value destruction on the show, almost every time Nike becomes the poster child. And of course, it's not the only one. but it's such a tragic example of what happens when you take your eye off of the customer what happens when you take your eye off of the consumer because they did both and what happens when you stop telling stories that connect with audiences and whether you have worked on nike or not nike He is responsible for attracting some of this industry's most creative, most powerful, most ambitious brand minded marketing execs and creators.

10:21And when Nike loses its shine, the industry feels a little less confident, a little less exciting. Yeah, I agree. It has been such a creative leader for so long. And it goes back to belief. In the power of X, right? And brands like Coca-Cola, brands like Nike, other great, many great brands along the way have provided that inspiration, which became aspiration for a community. That's exactly right. Seth, when we first presented, the Rocket restages only in its second year. We introduced the new Rocket core creative idea in Super Bowl 2025. the primary audience before we introduced it on super bowl was our own team members you know we've got a banking force of 6 000 people who are constantly on the phone with clients helping clients and so um we had 15 000 of us in little caesar's arena in detroit and before we presented the work audaciously we presented four iconic american brands with their core creative ideas So it was Apple Think Different, Nike Just Do It, Coca-Cola Open Happiness, and Airbnb Belong Anywhere.

11:40And we presented those four brands and we said, we ask you not to judge the quality of the Rocket work on Rocket's historical creative output. We want you to judge it against these iconic brands because that's the ambition. And arguably our purpose, because we are meeting each and every client exactly where they need to be met and nudging them on their journey to prosperity through the act of home ownership, arguably our purpose is more important than any of those other brands. So our creative work, our core creative idea has to have much more cultural weight. And, you know, I proudly use other brands to continue to set my own standard of excellence within Rocket, but with any brand that I've served.

12:33What's also worth noting for the audience, and in particular the CEOs and CFOs in the show's audience, is that every one of those case studies, those reference points, saw brand as a driver of business. And actually, that's a good segue to the second thing I want to ask you about. So you're at the Coca-Cola company and it is, you know, CPG is a broad category, is certainly marketing centric. It always has been brand centric and aware. The Coca-Cola company, as you pointed out, arguably as top five of the most marketing and brand centric businesses in the world. But then you go to Airbnb. be. And at the time you get there, a little bit less brand centric, brand awareness without perhaps brand meaning.

13:27And as I know from our chatting over time, one of the first things you did when you got there was you built a narrative, a presentation tactically, that if I'm getting it right, was titled The Business Case for Building an Iconic Brand. So you go from the Coca-Cola company to a place where you got to make the business case for building an iconic brand. Tell us a little bit about what was fundamental to that business case that is relevant to any business. And then I got a follow up. Good. When I was at the Coca-Cola company, I was a marketer. I was one of the highest marketers responsible for Coca-Cola North America at the time I left.

14:14And so therefore I was king of the castle because Coca-Cola is unashamedly a marketing driven company. And now I'm moving to this tiny little startup whose total valuation was less than my annual spend for Coca-Cola North America. Is that right? Yeah. Billion dollars value at Airbnb and a$1.2 billion marketing budget at Coca-Cola. um and i was nervous because i said to brian chesky the co-founder and ceo of airbnb during the interview process i said i know that should i join airbnb i'm no longer king of the castle i'm the stepchild and that's because tech companies other than arguably apple at the time this is back in 2014, a deprioritized marketing because they believe that the product is all.

15:12And I wanted to make sure that Brian's vision for the legacy of Airbnb was significant enough that it would create the space for us to build yet another iconic brand. and the ambition was to build the most influential travel brand. Now, you know, we were a tech company. Everything can be measured. And we have a bunch of financiers. We were a private company at the time around the board table. And one thing, Seth, that I don't think that CMOs take responsibility for is the urgent need to educate the organization about what marketing can actually do for the organization. Couldn't agree more. And it's a failure that affects everything from growth value, value of marketing within an enterprise, value of marketing to capitalization to global GDP.

16:13Yeah. If you're a new CMO and you don't take the responsibility of educating all stakeholders inside the organization, no matter how vast, no matter how complex, you're actually setting yourself up to fail. And so at Airbnb, we sat down to write the business case of creating an iconic brand. Brian Chesky wanted Airbnb to be an iconic brand. He feels it in every single cell of his body, but he's not a marketer. He doesn't understand the art and science of building an iconic brand. So I took it upon myself with the agency to write a white paper, the business case of creating an iconic brand. And we'd report out to the board on an ongoing basis, Airbnb's progress in terms of becoming an iconic brand.

17:06Now, when I started in Airbnb, in 2014, my global budget was$25 million. That was for product marketing, PR, policy, brand, and performance marketing. I was investing$1.2 billion in North America alone. At the time, Booking.com was spending$2.4 billion. So every dollar of Airbnb's budget had to feel like$1 ,000 in the marketplace. The beauty of that is that it mandated audacious creativity. And whatever the category was doing, we actively rejected so that we could earn a disproportionate share of PR as a result of our spend. But writing the business case for creating an iconic brand educated the entire company to think of marketing Airbnb in a very different way.

18:04Four years later, the marketing budget that I was responsible for was$750 million. So four years from$25 million to$700 million. So clearly, the business case had been made. The flywheel started to turn. And when that flywheel at Airbnb started to turn, not only was the business case made, the confidence around the board table to pour more money into it was tremendous. And then Airbnb did something that no other iconic brand has ever done, declared that performance marketing was no longer creating value for the business. They turned performance marketing off. And now Airbnb is proudly a brand marketing iconic brand that doesn't rely on performance marketing because they realized that was just short-term gain.

18:50Now, Airbnb has become the generic for the category. That really helps. But it's through excellence in brand marketing that Airbnb has now been able to become one of the most efficient travel platforms. What were one or two of the points you made in that first white paper that said, here's the business case for their, you know, I'm assuming it was a balance of the quantitative and the qualitative. Do you remember anything in particular? Like, you know, consider this. Yeah. Disproportionate share of earned media, disproportionate share of consumer advocacy, disproportionate share of talent, and ultimately a disproportionate share of shareholder return.

19:31All of those factors can be found in the analysis of some of the world's most powerful brands. Is there anything as you look, that was 07, you said? Yeah. Is there anything as you look back? No, sorry, 2014. 14, 1407 was the Coca-Cola company. As you look back, if you were going to write that paper today, what might change? right now yeah of course at the time there was only one audience that you had to win against and that was the cuban audience today we have two audiences we have humans and machines and you can't gamify the machines there is a a way of ensuring that you show up as a primary recommendation within large language models that is not yet fully understood by the marketing community.

20:31But that's where things like community reviews, third-party endorsements, industry recognition. As a marketer, you have to understand the footprint of all of the pages, all of the platforms that LLMs will cite to make an instant recommendation on the trust and the validity and the authority of your brand. And so technology now has become a new audience that, as a marketer that's responsible for fully stacked marketing, you really, really have to think about the investment, the financial investment, to ensure that you get a disproportionate share of recommendation with the LLMs. Yeah, and evolving art and science, given that the technology is still so relatively new.

21:25Still so relatively new, but it is vast, and it has happened with unprecedented speed. I mean, it's trite to say it, but it's fucking crazy. It is. It really is.

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22:45This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com.

23:19I want to go back to something you said a few minutes ago. You were talking about, I think we were at the beginning of this conversation about kind of the difference between working at a CPG company, Coca-Cola, and working at a tech company, Airbnb. be. And you made the point that with the exception of Apple, a lot of tech companies, certainly at the time, thought product is all are the words you used. And I think a lot still do. And of course, even at the Coca-Cola company, product was pretty fucking important. So if product isn't all, there's no doubt it matters a whole hell of a lot. How do you explain to somebody who thinks product is the business, that it's kind of like, yeah, but, or yeah, and.

24:07How do you help them understand product's essential, but it's not everything? It's not sufficient. It really depends on the ambition. And I don't just mean the ambition for the CEO. I mean the ambition for the entire C-suite. I've never worked for a company that didn't have aspirations to become the definitive brand in category. And if you want to be the definitive brand in category, you need an idea that can transcend the category. And the product reason to believe is a stepping stone towards that. But the trouble is, Seth, you see so much marketing that just ends with product romance and doesn't actually step outside of the category.

24:55And so it's a very, very narrowcast brand narrative that appeals to a narrowcast bunch of human beings. And I've always believed, after studying the likes of Steve Jobs and Phil Knight and working for somebody like Brian Chesky, I've always, always believed that the role of a leadership team is almost to distort reality so that you can create a new space in the category so that you can create transformational shareholder return. I don't know, Brian, but you made the point he's not a marketer. But he's certainly a chief executive, to your point about turning off performance, who has come to understand and believe in marketing.

25:46Based on your experience with Brian, what counsel would you offer the CEOs in the audience on like you don't have to be a marketer that's not their job but you do have to understand the efficacy of it its contribution to value creation what advice would you give them on on the marketing cynics in the audience on where to start with that journey yeah well the first thing I'd like to say is one of the most talented marketers that I've ever worked with is Brian Chesky. It was so interesting. When he first interviewed me, the first thing that he did when we met in person is he pulled out of his bag a sheet of paper and it had the Nike swoosh, the Disney signature, the Coca-Cola contour bottle, and the Apple logo, and then a question mark, and he said it was Airbnb.

26:38And he just put the piece of paper down on the table and said, what would you do so that Airbnb could become a peer of these brands? It was the most inspirational way of opening an interview that I've ever had in my 36-year career. So Brian is a marketer. He understands what he has to do to build an iconic brand, but I had to create the blueprint. He created the expectation and it was my team and my job to create the blueprint. And I think the first thing that really, really talented marketers do, we've mentioned this before, but you have to distort reality. If you stay in the present with the present playbook, it's just going to get to ever diminishing cycles of return.

27:30so how do you create a new playbook you have to create a vision that might be audacious we're doing this at rocket right now we're romancing the american dream through home ownership at a time when home supply home prices inflation and interest rates are all working against us now arguably you could say well actually you know isn't the most responsible thing to do is just kind of like focus on interest rates and retreat a little bit at this time. Well, under Varun Krishna, the CEO of Rocket Companies, it's like, no, now is our time to really, really set out the narrative of what the Rocket brand could be.

28:12We're focused on three things. We will build one of North America's most culturally significant brands, and that will translate into one of North America's most commercially successful case stories over the next few years. Now, Now, we've got macroeconomic forces that are working against us right now, but we are laying the foundation for when the headwinds turn into tailwinds and Rocket will have established itself as a brand that is an undeniable part of the American narrative. So you mentioned a second ago the role of the American dream in Rocket's commercial journey, which has its own challenges given that there's a whole generation now, I think two generations, who do not believe that the American dream is accessible.

29:01But we'll put that aside for the moment. At Rocket, you're selling a path to prosperity rooted in that dream. At Airbnb, you sold belonging. at the Coca-Cola for brand Coca-Cola, because your remit was across a portfolio. You sold the notion of happiness and open opening happiness, which is one of I have used open happiness as an example of a quote unquote purpose driven campaign forever, because I'm digressing, but everybody thinks purpose is about solving some massive societal ill. I was like, no purpose is putting a smile on somebody's face. Happy. And I totally agree. It's one of my favorite campaigns ever.

29:44For the audience, again, draw the line. And you just said it a moment ago. From culturally significant to commercially successful, right? Means and ends, objectives and strategies. When you sell belonging, when you sell the American dream, when you sell happiness, What's the connective tissue between idea, emotion, and commercial consequence and impact? People all over the world increasingly want to believe in something bigger and something better than their daily lives would suggest. we're yearning to be part of something bigger and brands that can offer a sense of community um a sense of ideology and a sense of belonging are the brands that are gonna earn a disproportionate share of consumer loyalty and consumer advocacy i i truly don't understand the marketing playbook that resides in product features, or at best, just an emotional benefit, the brands that define our times, the brands that are brave enough to either step into the cultural narrative or create a cultural narrative.

31:13And once you create a cultural narrative, particularly with social media being used as such an effective tool, you co-create that narrative. And what I really like about it is you actually kind of lose control of the narrative. And we did that with Open Happiness when Cher a Coke was conceived in Australia. And then all of a sudden, every individual on this planet believed that they could open up their own personalized sense of happiness through opening up a can of Coca-Cola or a bottle of Coca-Cola with their name on it. So here we had a universal truth. The world is yearning for more happiness.

31:56I'm pretty sure there was no Seth bottle. I bet there was. I bet we can find you. Actually, I think I did get, because they were my client, but I think I got sent one, but it was not in the marketplace. As long as your name had a set number of characters, we could get it on the bottle. But that is a fantastic example of a universal belief in happiness, a huge cultural narrative. I mean, you've got to remember that we introduced Open Happiness in 2008, the time of the Great Recession. I mean, the world was not a happy place, but we introduced it. And all over the world, people flocked to it. It became Coca-Cola's most profitable and award-winning platform in its history over the course of seven years.

32:45As consumers own the idea, they love the personalization of the idea, and then they created a whole load of content, a whole load of conversations that Coke lost control over. And it was a beautiful thing to be part of. It's the first I can think of example of what a lot of people talk about today in 2026, which is personalization at scale. And I'm getting very tactical with that reference, which is the names on the bottles. But the names on the bottles, even if there was no Seth bottle, and I'm pretty sure I'm right, they were an idea and the expression of an idea that, to a point you've made a handful of times, transcend, unite, and connect to commerce.