Brand is the moat a rival cannot copy. Creators are business partners, not channels. Build something so essential to culture the community tells your story.

Chin was inspired as a kid watching Eddie Murphy play an ad executive in Boomerang, drawn to the idea of making beautiful ads that sell and drive brand love. She did not go straight into brand marketing. She began as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs in the communications, media and entertainment group, working on mergers, acquisitions and financing deals. She calls it the best education, but she knew it was not her long-term career.

Across P&G, Diageo, the Jose Cuervo business, Proximo Spirits and Pepsi, the discipline ingrained in Chin is consumer centricity: knowing all the data on your consumer, but also what motivates them and what problem your product solves in their life. At Logitech G, where consumers are gamers and creators, an insights team spends time understanding play styles and motivations.

A practice called Designed by Collaboration brings esports pros and creators in at the very start of product development, co-architecting products alongside engineers and designers. Chin points to the Pro X2 Superstrike mouse, built by hooking sensors to pros' hands to study grip and click behaviour, as breakthrough technology rooted in real consumer insight.

Chin treats creators as business partners rather than marketing channels, partnering over long periods with deep human relationships and daily contact on a Discord server. That closeness makes them authentic advocates and produces incredible user-generated content. It goes beyond products too: the brand has provided free professional mental health services because burnout is a big crisis in the creator community.

A long-standing initiative, Creators for BIPOC, addresses the barriers disproportionately affecting creators of colour. When Black TikTokers were striking over their dance moves being co-opted, Chin's team worked with choreographer Jaquel Knight to help them legally copyright their moves so they could own and monetise their IP.

Chin argues the biggest error is overengineering it. The data shows 58 percent of Gen Z trust a creator recommendation more than an ad, yet brands want to hold on, worry about brand safety and drive more of the message, when creators are the ones tapped into their audiences. The answer is to pick a creator aligned with your brand and values, give a great brief, and let them run.

You do not want to feel you are losing control, she says, but reframe it. The goal should be to build a brand and products so essential to culture that the community and creators do the storytelling for you. She calls that a win-win.

Mountain Dew had some of the biggest fandom Chin has seen, from people sending pictures of their tattoos to fans bathing in Baja Blast. When one woman messaged that her husband had a bottle in every photo and that she was getting married, the team made a custom wedding cake topper in their likeness. She used it, and her first ever TikTok post about it went viral.

A stranger selling window replacements recognised Chin's G Hub T-shirt at her door because he competes in the Logitech McLaren G Challenge every year, a sim racing competition in Forza her team runs for millions of players, with winners visiting McLaren's headquarters. Everywhere you go, she says, you find real fans of your brand when the marketing is done right.

If you do not have a brand, what do you have? Chin calls brand the competitive moat that sets you apart. In an era of dupe culture, competitors can knock off your specs and industrial design, but they cannot replicate a brand quickly, and that connection with the consumer is what drives growth.

Storytelling is paramount, right up there with consumer centricity: know your consumer, then find the right way to connect. She cites Coach, which built a campaign on the insight that Gen Z love stories and read more books than ever, made book-shaped bag charms and inspired the community to tell stories, turning the brand into Gen Z's most desirable first luxury bag.

The talk faded after the start of the pandemic, then people realised the power of partnering with creators to build brands. Part of the inflection was big brands like Unilever publicly moving budgets from traditional media into creators, and others following suit.

The change has been fast. Six years ago on Mountain Dew the vast majority of the media budget was still broadcast television. Chin's two teenage sons watch zero broadcast television, living on TikTok and YouTube, with the older one exclusively there, and they use Snap to talk to friends more than they text.

Beyond standard engagement and sentiment metrics, Chin watches how work translates off the platform. Share of search is a key signal: when a message resonates, people search to learn more, share of search spikes, and that interest carries down to conversion on the website. Choosing creators aligned with brand values, and who are genuine fans, is the first step, because people can smell inauthenticity from a mile away.

Alongside an annual brand health tracker, Logitech G tracks AEO visibility through a partner called Profound, with a dashboard showing citations, visibility and the queries people put into ChatGPT and other platforms. Chin found that around 85 percent of the share of voice comes from editorial and earned media, so when PC Gamer drives visibility and citations, it changes the strategy. Go-to-market runs on a glocal model, global strategy set at the centre and execution at the region level.

Chin's advice for newcomers, which she says applies to senior leaders too, is to have the self-awareness to understand what you need: the resources to succeed, the skills to reach the next level, and what it takes to inspire your team. Marketers spend a lot of time looking outside themselves for cues, and turning inward to focus on what unlocks your best potential is what she advises. And, walking the Cannes work, she reminds herself that brand marketers often overthink it.