What is Marketing? Part 2: Marketing is Poetry with Kory Marchisotto [Uncensored Renegades]

12:43Jon:Which is why people have aha moments in the shower. Yeah.

12:46Kory Marchisotto:Yeah.

12:46Jon:Yeah.

12:47Kory Marchisotto:Yeah.

12:47Jon:It's a moment where you're actually vulnerable with yourself and you're not thinking about anything else. And it's, it is a truism. I actually had the aha moment of Elf and Chipotle needed to do a collaboration in the shower.

13:03Kory Marchisotto:So talking about this poem, are we going to hear it?

13:07Jon:Do you want to hear it? I'd love to hear it, yeah. So put your seatbelt on. Buckle up. Relax. Get comfortable. Because it's going to be a few minutes. Marketing is poetry, a craft of fluidity. So, John, are you ready to flow with me?

13:25Kory Marchisotto:Already.

13:27Jon:Shaped by the tension of opposites, my very being is a composite. The power of friction between a bull and a unicorn, the ignition of those sparks is where I was born. My father a bull, a realist of no nonsense, his feet on the ground to charge at this life thrust upon us. My mother a unicorn, a halo of fairy dust, her head in the stars, in magic she trusts. My feet on the ground, a herd of bull's thunder, my head in the stars, a parade of unicorns wander. Prancing in dreams, a spirit of abundance, bellowing upstreams, a force of resistance. Within those clashing currents, a silent sway shimmers, weaving the dynamic fabric of my nomadic.

14:17Jon:We are all made up of stars we collect along our journeys. The foundation for exploration, the vibration of creation, the festival of imagination is a constellation in the making. My collection of stars, I shine at full wattage, the raw energy of a celestial body glowing, reveling in the knowing of its growing. A compilation of stories needs not an interpreter, but rather a marketer, an enchanting storyteller. Come ride through the stars with me on the rocket ship of my career journey. It all begins at Givenchy, my amuse-bouche in the beauty industry, a business in the dealings of meanings, breaking ceilings by appealing to feelings, far more than any lipstick or lotion is our devotion to the art of emotion.

15:16Jon:Jean-Paul Gaultier attuned his purity, praying at the altar of anti-conformity, and why not? The enfant terrible proclaims, there is nothing tame in the fire of his flame. Issymiaki, an innovator's innovator, taught me to seek that which I do not know, for infinite curiosity is the pathway to audacity. Narciso Rodriguez quoted Mies van der Rohe. Less is more is what he had to say. I follow his rigor to this very day. Orange blood in my veins from Hermes what reigns, whimsical storytelling with a poetic aesthetic, encounters, explorations, and celebrations of sensations is how you capture hearts for seven generations.

16:08Jon:Digital domination following words like a flurry, not synonymous with luxury unless you work at Burberry. Don't miss a beat on the runway replete. Harness the power of technology, embedding it as an ideology. Scaling one-to-one relationships, Leslie Blodgett created bare minerals, founded on the very principles of community signals. It is she who emblazoned the encyclopedia as the OG viral social media. Now, six years in, I can say for myself, there really is no place like ELF. Is ELF anything, if not the acronym of everything? Endless lines flow as we bestow what we know. Equality, liberty, freedom hath no spaces, between them, our legacy prevails by empowering legendary females.

17:03Jon:Now, some call me the wizard of elf or the chief mother elfer. As a bold disruptor with a kind heart, I alone play but a small part in the rhythm of the art we impart. Expanding limits fearlessly is the perspective of our renegade collective that inspires the imperative to make this world a better place for every eye, lip, and face. Now, please make no mistake, while I speak in stories and stars, it's really elfing hard, this creation of a constellation. No star is waiting from afar for the doubters and the naysayers. The star's gleamer for the believer and the dreamer, the magic-making, bar-raising, relentlessly restless, rule-breaking, tis the possiblest that bind, the brightest stars that shine.

17:58Jon:The genesis is you, honing your truer view fiercely in the mirror, holding yourself nearer. How bad do you want it really? And will you pay for it sincerely? How many hours is it worth on your phone? How many nights away from home? How many airplanes will you roam? How many cities will you comb alone? How many rejections can you ache? How many smiles can you fake? How many trees will you shake? And how many WhatsApp groups can you take? How many knocks will you take at your crown? How many times can you fall down and rise again in the burn and the churn, unlearning to learn, twisting to conform, hiding to perform, breaking the shaking to unlock the shock and unearth the rebirth.

18:54Jon:Do you have conviction in this contradiction that we are living in? Or is it simply too much? Or is it not enough? All this fuss, does it make you blush? Or is it a rush? The words we write, the blurbs we recite, distilling it tight till it fits just right. Our fame to claim is what we're living, what we're giving, who we're being, and what we're scheming. Optimizers, maximizers, fortune tellers, sales propellers, our haste traced in zero waste. I live for the opposing forces, their sources and discourses mostly would quickly toss what I use for polish and gloss? A fighter, a uniter, an unwavering unsubscriber.

19:46Jon:Isn't it remarkable that sparkle that ignites your lights? Your constellation is a golden fleece, your own magnificent masterpiece. And now my final advice to entice your next roll of the dice. toward the horizon runneth and when the tornado cometh grab your surfboard and ride it for anyone in marketing i salute you and the very making of your constellation wow that is epic absolutely

20:20Kory Marchisotto:epic well done that's beautiful absolutely beautiful and deep and true as well yeah so much

20:28Jon:in that so much is in that yeah tell me your the beauty of anything is especially in any form of art

20:36Kory Marchisotto:is the interpretation of the receiver yeah yeah i i put i wrote a lot down actually i think the um the things that hit me were in no particular order like the opposing forces i don't know we think in kind of linear terms that like you know we're just going in this direction but actually the different forces that kind of collide that shape kind of where we're going i think i thought that was really interesting and um the rejection that the the sort of i mean so much of what propels us forward is actually born in the difficulty and we don't give that enough credits do we or the respect it's due we tend to sort of you know either gloss over it or let it you know get to us but i just i mean so much i mean i think way more for me personally have i achieved has been through difficulty not through success you know that's the thing that's like propelled you and you know made you learn or made you think differently that kind of thing or ignites your

21:37Jon:fire yeah gives you the well we'll one day talk about the five p's but the first p in the five p framework is pissed. And if something pisses you off, either you can just sit in your anger and aggression, and that's going to take you absolutely nowhere, or it's going to take you to the bottom of the rabbit hole, or you can learn how to channel that energy into something good, better, brighter on the road ahead.

22:05Kory Marchisotto:Totally. Absolutely. I mean, even bringing it back to theory for just a moment before going back into the emotion of this, but I think there was, what was the study from great by choice i think they they looked at um i think i'm right in saying looked at the most successful 20 companies in the u.s over 20 years something like that yeah and the hypothesis was are they just lucky so somebody actually went and looked at good luck events versus bad luck events right and categorized them for the most successful and the least successful companies turns out luck happens to everyone both good and bad in equal measure there was no difference right again you could have worked that out right but they ruled out that luck what they concluded is it entirely came down to the response to either good or bad luck everything was all all success is determined

22:53Jon:by how you responded to a bad luck event or took advantage of a good luck event it was the response

22:59Kory Marchisotto:and this is what what you said that struck me is like you can allow circumstances to break you get you down tell you that you're not good enough and you can you know it can destroy you right Or you can choose. And it is a choice. It is a choice. You can choose to go, this is not going to be the end. This is going to be beginning. And I'm going to learn from this. I'm going to turn it around. So I'm going to, you know, do what I was always meant to do.

23:21Jon:Which takes a lot of mental fortitude. It does. It takes a lot of emotional regulation. It does. And I think this is the stuff that people don't spend enough time on. And when you think about people who train for sports, they understand the power of mental fortitude. That is part of the training. It is part of the journey. This is not just physical. It's also mental. I don't know why we don't train that enough in business because emotional regulation is so key. No matter what situation you're in, your automatic switch is going to be fight or flight. Either I'm going to sit here and I'm going to fight and this thing's going to escalate or I'm going to run.

24:01Jon:Well, what if you did neither? What if you took a deep breath, calmed the room down, did something like pattern disruption, and got everybody to a place where you could actually walk through the friction to get to higher ground. And I love what you said about the opposing forces, because I actually believe in the power of friction. And that is a place most people run away from. I run into because that is the place where the magic actually happens. You want magic to happen. You have to be in a zone of friction. It has to be high intensity. It cannot be rainbows and butterflies. So there is a tendency for people to walk away from that, to feel that tension and like, like an electroshock.

24:53Jon:No, I can't go back there. I can't touch that again. But if you can teach people how to walk into that, because on the other side of it, you're actually going to find something way more magical than you ever imagined then they become more attuned to being able to

25:08Kory Marchisotto:walk through that space yeah totally and is it you know you reference a lot of hard things and naysayers as well there's something i picked up on and i think you described the proper possibilist possibilist sorry possibilist the possibility i love because it's it's the old

25:25Jon:phrase whether you think you can or you can't you're right exactly and and i think that mindset

25:31Kory Marchisotto:when you said the genesis is you that's so spot on because it's it's so easy isn't it to kind of go to well basically to blame right oh it didn't work out because this circumstance or that person this this this you know this scenario but pretty much everything is down to you all of it 100

25:49Jon:people don't like to hear that so you and i are going to maybe be a little bit controversial in this episode because everybody thinks the person who's responsible for their promotion and their raise and their career is their boss. The person responsible for everything that happens in your life is you. And that if you can take that ownership and accountability on yourself, which includes how you speak to yourself, what you pour into yourself, if you are speaking negatively to yourself, people will speak negatively to you. That's an invitation. So if you pour into yourself possibilities, positive energy, optimism, confidence, then that's how you're going to show up in the world.

26:40Jon:And then that's the energy you're going to get back. And when you think about how many times, and I'm sure you've heard this a million in your career, you know, my boss won't give me a promotion. My boss won't give me a raise. Well, let's unpack that for a second. Sit down, look in the mirror, tell them, explain to me why it is that you deserve a raise. Have you stepped into the position? Are you acting in the frame of the position that you want? And when you start to dissect that and people start to take their own personal accountability, then they can actually accelerate way faster on the path that

27:16Kory Marchisotto:they want yeah completely agree completely i mean the other thing i've noticed as well is that you don't have to have all the answers as well because it because i think you know success follows when you back to the magic thing in a way we like to have it all mapped out don't we like to think this leads to that leads to the following sort of thing but actually you discover it as you go i mean there's sorry quite another phrase but the you know the jump

27:39Jon:in the net will appear type thing the jump in the net with a pair have you heard that one no

27:43Kory Marchisotto:tell me it's like jump and the net will appear something but because we're so full of our reasons why something's not going to work right yeah we're full of like oh this could go wrong that could go wrong and it's you have to jump not knowing all the answers okay hold on time

27:56Jon:jump and the net will appear okay i thought you said jump in the net with a pair

28:03Kory Marchisotto:this is this could be amazing the power of pairs right i mean this is a new thing i literally saw

28:09Jon:I'm like, jump in the net with a pear. I'm like, what? Okay, jump and the net will appear. I got where you're going now. Okay. Yeah. Yes.

28:18Kory Marchisotto:It's just this thing around naysayers, right? Because worrying about what other people are going to think is, I think, one of the most limiting things that happen. Because we sit there and we're more worried about what people think than whether or not we're going to be successful. And you will not be successful if we're worried about what people think. You know, the other thing that struck me, and you have to remind me who said this, but seek out what you don't know.

28:48Jon:Issey Miyake.

28:49Kory Marchisotto:Yeah, that's good. Because if I were to collect the one trait that I think I see in every successful CMO, it's probably that constant curiosity about the customer, about the business, about culture. and and you know it doesn't matter how much you know you just have this constant striving to kind of find out what you don't know and i think it's something very interesting and that includes

29:14Jon:really dissecting where and how you spend your time who are you in a zoom room with who are you around in the evenings what are you doing on the weekends if you are spending your time more often than not, with things that are foreign to you, you're going to be able to expand your horizons and increase your wingspan every time. So that simple line, and Issey Miyake was an exceptional innovator's innovator. He also created something called the 2121 Design Studio in Tokyo. And the idea of that is 2020 is perfect vision and your role as an innovator and a visionary is to see beyond that. And that's why he created 2121.

30:02Jon:And that philosophy of spending your time consciously in the things you don't know is also something people run away from, right? We fall in the pattern of the familiar, which is why things start to become a pattern. And then you have to break the pattern to step into the things you don't know. So that was an exceptional lesson. And it's really important that you don't just say the words, right? I'm curious. Well, what does that mean? Show me your curiosity in action.

30:37Kory Marchisotto:Now, where has your poem appeared? Is it a LinkedIn post? It hasn't. Has it been printed? Where's it going to appear?

30:46Jon:I don't know.

30:47Kory Marchisotto:Is this the debut of the poem?

30:49Jon:This is not that I mean, I did deliver the poem at the Hall of Fame.

30:53Kory Marchisotto:This is your AMA Hall of Fame.

30:55Jon:Yes, I did deliver the poem that evening as my not so speech speech. And that's it. That's this is the debut to the outside world.

31:04Kory Marchisotto:The public debut of your. Oh, wow.

31:06Jon:And then we'll figure out where it goes from there.

31:08Kory Marchisotto:It's amazing. It deserves to live everywhere. It's incredible and very inspiring. And like, what a way to talk about what we do as well. and the depth and nuances and contradictions and life lessons all wrapped in as well. It's amazing. We've massively failed to stick to our 15 minutes, by the way. That's another beautiful failure.

31:27Jon:And we're going to keep trying, John. We're going to keep trying. We're going to make progress with a capital P, not a lowercase p next time.

31:33Kory Marchisotto:But I do have an idea for our next episode. You just talked about innovation. Let's talk about innovation next time. I love it. So from Corey, Mark, so to myself, thank you so much for listening and watching Twinsense and Renegades. we genuinely, genuinely hope that you enjoyed this conversation. Now, we do have one little request. We would love it if you could leave us a review. Reviews are so important to other people discovering this show. So wherever you get your podcast from, go and drop us a review. We would really appreciate it. Thank you.