Merit's CMO started in social media
Aila Morin on why the marketing funnel doesn’t work, creating the campaign before the product, and the importance of understanding the internet.
When I started this newsletter five years ago, I joked that I would never interview a CMO. It came from a place of frustration—traditional media would often feature quotes from executives about campaigns that I knew were built by social teams. Of course, it wasn’t true across the board but it served as a strong guiding principle for how I made editorial decisions. Today I am breaking my own rule.
Below you’ll find my conversation with Aila Morin, the CMO of Merit. She’s one of the rare marketing executives who comes from a social media background. She got her first job by creating a hundred-page document analyzing a brand’s Instagram. (This was before analytics tools existed.) She later joined Mejuri as the first marketing hire. When Merit launched, she was doing all of the social media.
When I talk to social media managers about why they leave jobs, it’s often because they felt their boss didn’t understand what they do. It’s hard to deny that Merit’s impressive social media output is, to some degree, a direct reflection of what happens when your boss has done the work before. Last year, I asked Link in Bio readers to share one brand account that exemplifies “great social”—Merit tied at number two, right behind Duolingo. I wanted to learn more about the infrastructure that allows that work to happen. As Aila shared, “We guide campaigns off of social instead of retrofitting it into social.”
We talk about why the marketing funnel doesn’t work, creating the campaign before the product, and the importance of understanding the internet.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rachel Karten: I’ve joked before in this newsletter that I don’t interview CMOs. But through reading interviews and talking to people on your team, I get the sense that you really understand this world. In your role right now as CMO, what is your relationship with social media?
Aila Morin: I think what’s quite different for me is that my career started when these platforms were coming out. I was coordinating influencer marketing deals off of YouTube before there was even Instagram. When Instagram launched, I started doing social marketing. I had the fortune and the timing to start my career at a time when all of these platforms were coming out.
When Merit launched five years ago, I did all of the social. For me, not only is the work not far away but it’s also formative to how I was taught marketing in the first place. To this day, I am in every single social review. I don’t believe the delusion that social media is done by one manager, which I think is one of the most damaging things that executives believe about social media. We invest in it. We take the time to really think about how a story rolls out. We guide campaigns off of social instead of retrofitting it into social.
RK: When you zoom out to marketing as a whole—what would you say your philosophy is?
AM: For the last 15 years, marketing got diluted to a funnel that we all know doesn’t work. But it was a philosophy of CPM views into CPCs into traffic into conversion. Everybody forgot about sentiment and retention, which is actually so much more important than your funnel can ever be.
My philosophy is very much focused on telling tangible stories that people remember and that evoke emotion because then it’ll have a positive sentiment. It’s very simple and streamlined, but if everything doesn’t come from that and doesn’t come from building something from a position of a pain point and fixing a problem and telling the story around that problem, then it’s not marketing.
You can see a photo without product in it and know that it’s Merit because we built a brand, not just product marketing. It’s something that a lot of brands are still missing today because they think that every single post needs to drive revenue immediately.
RK: Obviously I look at social media for a living, but it feels notable how I am able to recall Merit posts from years ago. The Solo Shadow thesis video comes to mind. They stick in a way that a lot of brands aren’t able to accomplish. What role does resonance play in your strategy?
AM: Merit develops product in a not-so-linear way. We actually develop campaigns before we even develop a product. To use Solo Shadow as an example, the thesis existed before the product existed. I knew what we were going to say. I knew what the product had to do.
The video from this campaign, where we read the thesis out loud, wasn’t actually planned. We had our whole campaign ready and then a retailer told us that they were going to launch 10 other eyeshadows on the same day as us. So we had planned this entire campaign around Solo Eyeshadows and we were being launched in an animation featuring palettes. We had never made that internal-facing thesis public before but we felt we had to say the why so it’s clear what the intention was behind this new product. That ended up becoming a step change in our marketing because it was the first time that we had publicly put forward the why or the problem that we’re solving.
I would also say that we didn’t design that to go viral, nor do we design any of our content to go viral. We’ve done many similar videos since that have not gone viral. It’s always a mix of timing and sentiment and what else is going on in the world.
We used to try participating in TikTok trends. My theory though is that why would you even want that to be the content that goes viral? Because it’s probably not the best representation of your brand. And is that what you want people to remember? Not only are we not fast enough for it—nor are we very good at it, to be honest—it’s never really driven anything for us that’s been of value. That viral video is actually the only one that I think drove value for us because it also was about the brand ethos.
RK: You’ve talked about this concept of being relevant and rooted in previous interviews. What does that mean to you?
AM: I think brands spend a lot of time talking to themselves or looking at what other brands are doing.
Rooted for us means marketing in a way that is honest to the brand and coming at it from a direction that hasn’t been done 50,000 times. I also don’t keep social media on my phone and that is a very intentional decision.
Relevant means that it serves a purpose in people’s lives. Otherwise, why do I care?
A post should either fundamentally trigger an emotion—with Whitney on the trampoline, we’re not selling a product, we’re selling a feeling. Or a post should sell a product—show the shades and the lineup, explain what it does, explain why it’s valuable.
Ultimately every post needs to have a purpose. I think so often you’ll see people post content because they’re still thinking in a grid. That era of social media is dead because people don’t consume like that. We’ve just gotten so much more focused on high-value content. We are posting a lot less. We were posting every day on Instagram. We’re now down to every other day, because you can’t expect teams to create 365 days a year of perfect content. It’s not realistic. We focus much more on quality engagement instead of quantity of posts that go out.
RK: Something I’ve been circling recently is this idea of a brand respecting their audience’s attention. Treating them like they are intelligent. Merit does a good job at this.
AM: It’s such a small thing, but we’re very clear on what we are and what we’re not. Right? Merit’s core consumer is Millennial and Gen X. We are 30 to 50-year olds. That’s who we serve. Gen Z is welcome to come join in. And it’s happening, but we know who we serve and we speak to her like she’s a grown adult and it’s such a subtlety, but I think it makes such a difference. I think if we were super trend driven, it would feel very asynchronous for the consumer.
RK: There is so much talk about “going analog” right now. Chatter about logging off and throwing our phones out the window. Does that conversation impact how you think about marketing at Merit?
AM: First, because I came up in marketing in the 2010s, I was very aware of what happens when you depend on one algorithm to make your business. So you put 90% of your bad spend at a Meta and then the algorithm changes and you’re screwed. At Merit, we have never invested more than 30% of our ad spend into any one platform. That strategy meant that we went offline in marketing very early—things like billboards, direct mail, podcasts.
We also have a consumer that is less online because the 30 to 50-year-old consumer spends way less time on social media. There’s many that don’t have it at all because they made the decision that it’s not adding value, which means you have to find a way to reach high value customers. And most beauty brands are looking at this tiny segment on TikTok of Gen Z and Gen Alpha because that’s who’s there. So I think if you look at our marketing as a proportional spend, we’ve always been investing offline.
When it comes to the ethos of spending more time offline, I identify with that so much. In our marketing for this year, for example, we are investing much more into community events. We’re continuing to push the budget into offline spend because, frankly, buying a billboard ends up actually being cheaper than a lot of digital marketing. We’re also continuing to invest a lot more in relationship building, very old school stuff. I think the movement away from the dependency on social media is only in the early stages.
RK: What keeps you up at night about the future of marketing?
AM: Many things keep me up at night these days on marketing. AI definitely keeps me up. It has pushed us more towards real content and stories. It has made me more bullish on not editing, on keeping things more unfiltered, on keeping things more emotional and less polished.
The recent Minimalist campaign that we just ran is such a good example of that. We were celebrating five years in business and everyone that I talked to was like, What product are you launching to celebrate five years? And then when you look at what we do as a brand, the whole point is that we don’t launch that many products. So to re-hero a five-year-old product in a campaign and expect it to work is kind of crazy because nobody does that. So how do you take something five years old and tell a new story and make it relevant and make it move units? The Minimalist was an example of us being able to do that. It keeps me up at night to know, can you continue to do that over the years? Can you continue to market core is a very hard question to answer, and not many beauty brands have done it.
RK: So much of what people react to when a brand has “good social” is simply newness. Some brands are releasing new products what feels like weekly. How do you find a balance?
AM: This is such a deep cut, but there’s this column called LaineyGossip that I used to read in the 2010s. She had a phenomenal sociological lens on gossip. One of the things I always thought she was so right about is if you think of celebrities, sometimes they need to be quiet for a little while for you to fall in love with them again.
There is a mystery to brand building. If you launch something once a week, it’s irritating. Brands can ebb and flow. Sometimes we can be in your face, but right after we do a big campaign, it’s very intentional that we get really quiet. You have to know how to read the room and give people breathing space to miss you to then come back with a new idea.
RK: Finally, how important do you think it is for a CMO to understand the social media landscape? Can you be a good CMO and not understand what’s happening on social media?
AM: 50% of our sales are online. Sephora is a proportion of online. The majority of our sales happen on the internet. If you don’t understand how internet conversation works or how to drive a narrative or how to understand sentiment or when not to step in, I don’t know how you possibly drive a digitally-native brand.
The comment that every manager says about their boss when they leave, across roles, is that they didn’t understand my value or how I spend my time. There is a lack of understanding in the demands and nuance that are expected now of marketers and creatives.
Every creative is now essentially a marketer, and every marketer has to think like a creative. And you cannot expect that one person encapsulates all of those things because social media is creative, it’s analytical, it’s a sales channel, it’s a storytelling vehicle, it’s customer experience and feedback. To not understand that ecosystem is a huge disservice. I don’t think I would be effective at holding people accountable to their jobs if I hadn’t done their job myself.
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Cheers to Aila for saying everything that people who understand how to build a great brand know but that investors/boards don't like to hear. Wonderful interview.
so great !