Breaking Taboos and Learning from Customers: The unconventional marketing journey of the Director of Marketing & Communications at Global Protection Corp. (episode #108)

How I Made it in Marketing

Content Warning: On How I Made It In Marketing, we delve beneath the buzzwords of our industry to uncover the biggest lessons from successful careers. Our guests share detailed, hard-fought, in-the-trenches stories of how they learned these lessons and put them into practice.

Today's guest has spent a significant part of her career selling condoms. As a result, our in-depth conversation may involve frank discussions about sexual topics. If you are uncomfortable with this subject matter, you should not listen to this episode. You can explore our 107 other episodes [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/podcast].

Marketing can be perceived as a devious force, tricking people into buying things they don’t need and using services that exploit them. Ouch. I don’t want my life’s work to be that.

In a society of choice, marketing can also connect people with things that bring them utility and joy. That’s a better place to be.

Even better, I believe the highest and best use of marketing is to nudge people towards choices that benefit them in the long term, even if they’re less appealing in the short term, like healthy eating and exercise.

Our next guest markets a product that helps reduce health risks, even though it’s often more fun not to use it. Adding to the challenge, it’s a taboo topic. The product is condoms.

To hear lessons and stories from her experience marketing this product, I talked to Milla Impola, Director of Marketing & Communications, Global Protection Corporation [https://globalprotection.com/].

Global Protection Corporation is owned by Karex Berhad. Karex is a publicly traded company on Bursa Malaysia. It reported 532 million Malaysian Ringgit in revenue in 2023, equal to approximately $117 million Impola manages a marketing team of 10 along with 50 contractors.

Here are some lessons from Impola that emerged in our discussion:

• Force yourself to practice public speaking
• The best way to learn your customers is to talk to them
• Don’t just think outside the box. Throw that box away and reimagine it as a glitter-covered bean bag.
• Mentorship is so rewarding and impactful
• Find a job you love
• Find research-focused reporters

Discussed in this episode
Our team has made 41 updates to MeclabsAI [https://meclabsai.com/] since the official launch of the full-featured version, including:

• Shareable conversations
• Voice to text
• Image generation
• The ability to create and link prompts directly from the dashboard (when you build your custom experts and apps)

MeclabsAI is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa.

Marketing Pragmatism: Embrace ‘hand-grenade math’ over false precision (podcast episode #101) [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-pragmatism]

Top HARO (Help A Reporter Out) Alternatives: How to find primary sources for business journalism and content marketing [https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/content-marketing-2/haro-alternatives/]

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