Coworking with Maria Vorovich

Each Tuesday, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Maria Vorovich is co-founder and chief strategy officer at research firm GoodQues. Throughout her career, she’s worked at companies including Air Paris, Grey Group, and sparks & honey.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? It is one thing to collect information about people; it’s an entirely different practice to connect with people, encouraging them to open up and share their truth. We believe research needs to be an active empathy practice. It is our job to foster understanding of people of different ages, life stages, geographic locations, ethnicities, interests, cultural backgrounds, motivations, and more—without judgment and with as little bias as possible. And if we can bridge the gap of understanding between big brands and their customers, we can create a better world where the brands become human-centric, existing to serve people rather than profits alone.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? The common misconception is that the sexier the category, the better the project. Many young people enter market research, marketing, and advertising hoping to work in beauty or automotive or luxury goods. The truth is that some of my favorite projects have been studying less glamorous topics such as spice cabinets, sexually transmitted disease attitudes, and opioid-induced constipation. The reason these projects stand out to me is that they were unapologetically human and radically raw, revealing people’s insecurities, hopes, fears, and even dangerous decisions that they might not admit publicly.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I remember the exact moment I decided I wanted to be in marketing, advertising, research. I was interning for an advertising agency in NYC named Berlin Cameron, and they were hosting either the production studio or the agent for the director of the Lexus “Moments” campaign (I can’t remember which it was!). But I will never forget the Lexus “Moments” commercial, The Pursuit of Perfection. I remember my eyes filling up with tears! To this day, it’s one of the most resonant campaigns I’ve ever seen, and I’m forever grateful that it brought me to the start of my career path.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile? I’m a Belarussian refugee! My parents and I escaped Belarus from religious persecution when I was 6 years old and landed in South Brooklyn. My memories of childhood are filled with lack of space, lack of money, lack of language, lack of comfort—but I think being a first-generation immigrant is what drives me every single day. And it’s something you can’t tell about me from looking at me or hearing me speak—years of ESL erased any accent. It’s why I’m so passionate to learn about people, understand the book beyond the cover, so to speak.

What’s one marketing-related podcast, social account, or series you’d recommend? I tend to gravitate toward culturally focused accounts. One that I digest religiously is After School by Casey Lewis. The Substack has an excellent viewpoint to aggregate the most pertinent stories impacting millennials and Gen Z audiences. It often fuels me with ideas for how to connect with this group in our research and the kind of language, memes, and topics that may engage them.