Marketing like a Pro ft. VP of Marketing at Google, Marvin Chow.

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This week will be about VP of Marketing at Google, Marvin Chow.

Marvin Chow is the VP of Marketing at Google. He leads brand, product, growth and performance marketing for some of Google’s largest and most strategic products including Search, Gmail, Maps, News, Google AI, and many others. He started his career at Reebok’s marketing team where he founded Reebok Interactive. Prior to Google, he worked as the Marketing Director at Nike and Nickelodeon.

Professional marketing 101

In every business, marketing is the key. But where do you start? It all begins with a great idea and diverse life experiences.

Let’s learn how to do that with our interview with Marvin!

Parts of this newsletter are freely taken from our interview and adjusted for reading. Everything a person says in the interview reflects the guest's and host’s opinion, not the newsletter's or brand's.

GG: There are a lot of people who join the marketing team at important companies. How did you raise so quickly? What makes you special, and how did you get to where you are at such a young age?

MC: I think nowadays it's so different. Google is a very young company, and I'm constantly surprised by how bright, aggressive, and proactive this generation is. We often tell people not to be so focused or planned in their career, but a lot of the people we meet are very well-focused on where they want to be in three to five years. That's not me, and I don't think I would have gotten to where I am if I had that plan because I didn't take that path. So, I think it's important not to overly focus on your career but to think about how you can do good work and continue to learn. Soft skills and hard skills are both important, but I'm a big fan of leaning into the things that you're good at. If you're really good at certain things, don't try to always improve everything else. Instead, lean into what you're really good at because as you get more senior, that will be valuable. However, being well-rounded and thinking about soft skills like curiosity, leadership, and humility are also really important skills. As you develop your company and move forward, these skills will carry you. Because as you get more senior, it's not just about knowing your job or your promotional skills. It's also about how you work with other people, how people want to work with you, or how people want to work for you. A big indication of your success when you're older or more senior is how well you attract talent.

GG: Each company has its own unique opportunities, but on the other hand, there are very different industries, such as sports, entertainment, and technology. How can you teach yourself the necessary technical skills to prepare yourself to get into some of the most competitive companies?

MC: It's not just about getting into companies but doing well with them. Even early on in my career, I thought it was important that as a marketing person, you understand finance, how budgets are spent, how revenue happens. And this is very common nowadays, but when I was out of college, it was much rarer. My roommate at the time was a finance manager every Wednesday night, we would have “finance school”, he would pull out all his old books and he would teach me about margins, how ROI is calculated and incrementality and that helped me understand how the marketing gets used and how it gets accounted for and to be able to have a separate intelligent conversation with a CFO or a head of finance - and that was very intentional because it was something that I wanted to learn. For every company you go to, you have to learn about their industry. Having foundational skills and having the first principles of how you apply these things is important. Moving internationally, you have to learn other things like how leadership works in those countries, like how language works. You have to be more grounded in research and insights. If I ask you to market, you know, a new phone in America, you know how to do it, you know what kids watch, what channels they use, you know everything about it. But if I say “Market that same phone in Turkey.”? You have no idea, and that's what it's like. You have to be able to trust the research and the insights to come up with a plan, and you learn to not just rely on what you know inherently but to rely on what the data and the research says.

GG: How do you adapt these ideas when creating a marketing strategy with your team?

MC: I believe that jobs like these seem very glamorous, almost like the movies, where we sit in a room and come up with strategies. However, in reality, it doesn't work that way. Everything is much more fluid, organic, and chaotic. When you're having these conversations you have a diverse range of perspectives and experiences. The beauty of working at Google is that everyone is very curious and has a broad level of thinking. This means that when you sit in a room with colleagues, they come from different industries and have different points of view on business models, which makes for fascinating conversations. That creates the best possible outcome by utilizing the best of everyone's thinking. Occasionally, you may get a small stroke of inspiration. For example, you might read an article about something or see a new technology and suddenly it starts to click on how to apply these things to your work. So, it's not as formal as you might think. It's not about a bunch of people on a video conference bouncing ideas back and forth like "What about this?" or "How about that?" It's thoughtful and works well, but it's not like the movies or Mad Men.

GG: You have advised many startups. How do you pick the startups that you want to advise?

MC: I've learned that startup founders can come from all walks of life. Many of the ones I've worked with were people I already knew, people I had pre-existing relationships with. Occasionally, I come across someone more randomly, or something that I think it’s really neat, and then it's just about building a relationship with people and figuring out how you can help each other. If it's a good fit, you can continue working together and if it provides value in the long term, then you can formalize it into some kind of agreement. It all starts with a shared passion or idea. It's about identifying those opportunities and seeing where you can make a difference. A lot of it comes down to whether or not I can help them. Companies in the early stages often need leadership, marketing, and acquisition help. If that's the case, then I'm happy to lend my expertise.

GG: Do you have any advice for startup founders who are trying to market their startup?

MC: A lot of great startups have gotten by with not a lot of marketing in the early days. And I think that those startups that have good product-market fits, like Airbnb or Uber and things like that, don't need marketing. When you have a great product, marketing is there to help accelerate the second phase of growth. Startups that are using marketing just to stay afloat like it's artificial, I think are always a little bit dangerous. You have to ask yourself "are you spending a lot of money just to stay afloat or are you building something for the long term?" It's hard for tech companies to think about their brand in the early days, but at some point, the brand becomes very valuable. How you manage that brand and how you partner with it is important. In the early days, you're the startup, and you are trying to just make some deals and traction, so you have to do what you need to do to survive but at some point, it's important to think about what your brand is and what it stands for, especially in a space where the products are commodities. I often talk about how some companies are the "same product" most of the time. So what makes you choose Uber or Lyft, Coke or Pepsi? It's the little differences that make the big impact. It's also about the brand that you believe in and the value it represents. In many of my talks, I'll ask the audience who uses Uber and who uses Lyft, and then I'll ask them why they choose one over the other. Is it because of the company's values, the product, or the distribution? It's a classic example of a commodity product where the values of a company become more and more important when people buy similar products. People want to buy from companies that represent their values.

“Grace Weekly - Your weekly dose of business tips.”

What's the key takeaway from this? Marketing can encourage you to continuously learn and help you acquire new knowledge that can be applied to grow your business over time.

Lean into your unfair advantage.

Trust research and insights.

Collaboration is a skill.

Keep learning from different fields.

What values does your brand stand for?

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