Rocket Companies CMO Jonathan Mildenhall, on The Business Case for Creating an Iconic Brand

Jonathan Mildenhall has spent his career believing that brands can be bigger than their categories. In a storied career, he helped create “Open Happiness” at Coca-Cola, which became the brand's most profitable platform in its history; at Airbnb, he wrote a white paper for Brian Chesky and the Board titled "The Business Case for Building an Iconic Brand," and four years later he’d proven the case and was managing a marketing budget that had grown from  $25 to $750 million during his tenure. Now as the first CMO of Rocket Companies, he's helping people on their path to prosperity by romancing the American dream through homeownership at a time when every macroeconomic force is working against the premise. 

Seth talks with Jonathan about his argument, one every CEO needs to hear, that the single biggest destroyer of brand value is the erosion of belief inside a company; about why so much marketing never transcends its category; why he's replaced the traditional funnel with a model called priming and proving that treats humans and machines as two distinct audiences, and why the two questions he asks every CEO before taking a job are questions every marketing leader should be asking. 

Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by The Wisdomous Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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