David Axelrod on How to Rebuild the American Brand

Zoe Scaman on The Unseen Source of Value Destruction

For this episode, Seth sits down with strategist Zoe Scaman, who has spent two decades working inside and alongside companies like Droga5, Lego, Netflix, L'Oreal, Tesco, and with Mark Cuban and Luka Doncic. Their conversation covers a lot of ground from why brands don't create meaning but rather create the conditions for it; why misaligned incentives are the single biggest source of value destruction; why she believes executive leadership is good at spotting what could create value but almost universally unwilling to examine what's destroying it; and Zoe’s perspective on why the current race toward AI adoption is hollowing out what she calls the heartwood of organizations, the accumulated culture and knowledge that took decades to build but can't be regrown on any reasonable timeline. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices [https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices]

Kraken's Mayur Gupta, on Creating Value When Product Isn’t Enough

Mayur Gupta is an engineer who spent eight years writing code before he ever touched marketing, and that beginning shapes everything about how he thinks about value. Across 26 years at Spotify, Kimberly Clark, Gannett, and now as Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Kraken, he's lived the same inflection point repeatedly, the moment a product-led company that grew to enormous scale without traditional marketing finds growth slowing and has to build a function the enterprise never needed before, justify the spend to people who have evidence they can grow without it, and prove that every dollar creates value on top of what would have happened anyway. In this episode, Mayur and Seth dive into how everyone in an organization owns the brand, why growth and marketing are never separate functions to begin with, and how to stop your company from destroying value the moment your product-led momentum hits a wall.  NOTE: The book Seth mentioned during the interview is "Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves" by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices [https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices]

Qualcomm's Don McGuire, on How A Narrative Shift Created 89% More Value

In Silicon Valley, value can be created or destroyed with every new technology and product innovation. Over his career, Don McGuire, EVP and CMO of Qualcomm, has seen waves of value creation and destruction. From Don’s POV and experience, the most significant destructive force in tech comes from complacency – companies wary of disrupting short-term profits trot out the same gameplan quarter after quarter. As a result, they stop innovating, fail to adapt outdated product strategies, and miss critical technological inflection points. Former industry leaders like Blackberry and Nokia are case studies in how market dominance can slip away, and value can be destroyed.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices [https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices]

Adobe's Lara Balazs On Orchestrating Value Creation

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices [https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices]

Paulie Dery on Why Every Decision is a Brand Decision

From Yeti to Uber and now as CMO of global wellness company AG1, Paulie Dery has built value for companies whose products could easily be commoditized, but weren’t. Having started his career on the agency side as a copywriter, Paulie understands that to stand out in a sea of competitors, you need a strong brand and creative, to maintain customer trust and to instill pride in the building. A strong brand allows performance to take care of itself at a much lower investment. And failing to maintain the brand destroys value, diminishing the product, and diminishing the pricing power. From Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram or TikTok @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices [https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices]