Soyoung Kang
101 Great Minds on Music Brands and Behavior
Soyoung Kang, Chief Marketing Officer, eos Products
Soyoung Kang is the Chief Marketing Officer at eos Products, the iconic beauty brand that has sold nearly a billion lip balms worldwide and has over 9mm social media fans. In her role, Soyoung is responsible for driving the overall strategy, planning, and operations for marketing & e-commerce at the Gen Z focused brand. She has been named a Forbes CMO Next, a Campaign US CMO 50, and a Business Insider CMO to Watch.
Soyoung is a board member for Bob’s Discount Furniture and was previously an executive with Bath & Body Works, Victoria’s Secret, and The Boston Consulting Group. Soyoung holds a BS in Architecture from MIT, a dual MBA in Marketing and Finance from The Wharton School, and was a Fulbright scholar.
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“The level of resilience that a brand needs to overcome a crisis is highly dependent on debiting from the bank of the brand equity you have built over time …”
— SOYOUNG KANG, CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, EOS PRODUCTS
Uli Reese: Tell me a little about eos and the journey you’ve had so far in sonic.
Soyoung Kang: eos is a brand that’s rooted in music. When you look at where we first started, with a very limited marketing budget, it was through product integration in music videos, at a time when music videos were popular with our target demographic. We grew out of being in Miley Cyrus's We Can’t Stop video. That was the explosive moment, then J-Lo’s video, then Cardi B’s video. If you go back and look at where we've collaborated with influencers and celebrities, almost all of them were musical artists because it was a part of the DNA of the brand. I marvel at how smart it was that our small marketing team was able to connect the brand to popular music and reach out to those folks as being the most influential for a younger audience. But times change, so what we could do back then isn't what we can or should do today. Today's consumption of musically integrated or musically-driven content for a young audience is predominantly happening on TikTok, so it always made sense for us to shift into integration into TikTok videos because that's today’s behavior for a young audience.
Reese: How do you ensure that you’re speaking their language?
Soyoung: When we first started to look at a media strategy for TikTok in 2018, it was a slightly different kind of platform. It was predominantly lip sync videos, and a lot of the same content was being repeated over and over again – but it was still very much rooted in music. The thing that I found fascinating, even though the platform has become significantly more sophisticated than it was back then, was how the remixing and riffing behavior was core to the addictiveness of the platform. You’re always looking for people’s remixes, and you’re always looking at how people are adapting the original trend and making it their own. That fascinated us at the beginning.
We have a philosophy that you can try anything, at least once, and if you fail, it’s no problem because what you got out of it wasn’t failure; it was learning.
We knew that if there was any part of our brand campaign in 2019 that was going to be experimental, we were going to throw everything at it, and we were going to go all-in on it. It was a no-brainer.
Reese: Help me on why you guys come across in such an authentic way in your engagement because this is hard for many of your marketing colleagues who are looking to become future-proof.
Soyoung: It’s actually incredible to see how much we’ve evolved, even though it’s only been a short couple of years. Number one, you need recognition and appreciation for the platform from your team members, and I don’t just mean extended agency team members, I literally mean the people on the inside, who are the stewards of the brand. That's fundamental, and if you don't have it, you’ve got to get it. We prioritize hiring folks who understand the platform, and they have to show us what they can do so we feel confident that they’ll get it right in the moment. And there’s also a huge amount of value in bringing on outside partners who understand the ecosystem. We had partners we worked with who brought us [influencer] Charli D’Amelio. When they first spotted her, she had 400,000 followers; by the time we were looking to cast her, she had 4 million followers; by the time she launched our campaign, she had 9 million followers, and at the end, she had 11 million. Her rapid growth was astounding to behold (she currently has almost 126 million followers). Thank God we listened to our partners because they understood the talent and influence these creators had on the platform that we couldn't have possibly understood ourselves.
Reese: How do brands approach this with the license-driven behavior being so unsustainable?
Soyoung: I can give you an example from our history which supports the point you're making. As a start-up, they did something that nobody had seen before, which was taking a lip balm and turning it into a ball. They approached the original marketing plan and built awareness through these partnerships and integrations into music videos and partnerships of musical artists. The problem with that, though, was they built product awareness but not brand awareness. And the risk associated with that is that when the going gets tough, guess what, the artists get going. We had what is called a frivolous lawsuit in 2016, and that really took a hit on our brand because, at that point, we had borrowed the celebrities’ brands but hadn't built our own. The level of resilience that a brand needs to overcome a crisis is highly dependent on debiting from the bank of the brand equity you have built over time, and so our business took a massive hit coming out of that. That shows the risk, and every brand will have times of crisis at some point in their journey. Fast forward to today, and we have worked hard to build a brand that has its own relevance, equity, personality, identity, and connection with consumers. The best incarnation of those equities really does come through in the work that you've seen on TikTok.
It's authentic, and it also has a fallible, funny, human element to it.
That’s something we've heard consistently from our audience, and that's what they're looking for from brands in general.
Reese: What they really care about is do you actually give a damn as a brand, how honest are you, and do you really care about music…
Soyoung: The funny thing we've discovered over time is that often our best content with the highest level of engagement is our ASMR content. We do our own version of ASMR with our products, which involves just a sensitive mic and products literally being unboxed, and you can open it and hear the click when you open and close the lip balm. Those videos consistently outperform the sort of trendy music-related videos, and it's because it's audible for us as a brand. Our identity is highly sensorial and experiential. People talk about the click.
Reese: Taking this a step further, we have a lot of tracks that are built from the Mercedes Benz DNA that we created for them being used on TikTok. But we want to get the same recall sonically as it is visually. Do you think that will be relevant for eos one day?
Soyoung: In all candor, TikTok is one thing, but if I think more broadly at how we communicate with our audiences, we haven't unlocked that. I think it will be critical given the rise in sonic systems, and the amount of sonic content we’re ingesting.
Note: The interview took place in New York on the 25th of October 2021.
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