Pallavi Das

I'm fascinated with people and how people think, which is what makes me so successful with marketing. I like to find problems and sort of think of creative solutions around that. There's a lot of intrigue for me in terms of human dynamics, consumers, how people think, how people perceive the world, and then getting really deep into that. For example, if I go to a Starbucks and get a cup of coffee, I'm usually thinking about customer service, I'm thinking about how people brand and how people work. I'm very fascinated with people and how people think. I care a lot about consumer perceptions and making things exciting for audiences, and the ability to delight. How do you delight a customer, how do you delight a consumer? That always drives me. I really believe in delighting people and making things beautiful, creating things that people want and are excited about. There's a famous Maya Angelou quote where she says people will forget what they say and what they did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. As brand strategists, we really just care a lot about making sure people feel valued and heard and get products that they really love. I care a lot about creating aesthetically beautiful products and products that consumers will enjoy, and if they don't enjoy, getting into how do you make it better and problem solving. I care a lot about customer satisfaction.

I think it's really important to be resilient. I think it's really important to just keep on going and don't give up on your dreams. There's a reason why things work out and there are reasons why things don't. I think the most important skill in life is to build a tough exterior and to be able to just power through. I think it's also really important to have high levels of self-esteem. We have an entire generation today that's growing up on technology and AI, where they're spending a lot of their time talking to AI and speaking to it and things like that. But I think a lot of this generation requires to have the self-belief and conviction that they can make a difference in the world, irregardless of the speed of tech. I just believe that having confidence and being able to just be resilient and come back every single time is probably one of the most important skills. There are so many people who started their careers doing a certain degree and might not end up having that degree as their job. There are a lot of people who've made so many pivots in their life and changed, and I think that it's really important to never lose your spirit and to just keep going. I think resilience is very important.

Right now in the world, there's so much going on in terms of content where people are creating content which is not necessarily the most uplifting. Some content is sad or the news is upsetting, but for me, I really believe in delighting people. I really believe in making things beautiful, creating things that people want and are excited about. I'm very fascinated with global ideas. I grew up in India, in Malaysia, and in America, and I feel like the world is getting so much smaller. I'm really excited about creating ideas which can work geographically. There's so much potential for ideas to really just be scalable, where something that's worked in Malaysia might work in an American market, or something in America might work back in India. Today, for example, there's a large amount of an Indian audience that's consuming Korean content or consuming content that's coming from the West. So there's a lot of opportunity in terms of global communications. As a communicator, I think that's what I'm excited about, which is the bridging of these ideas, because that's where the future is for me.