Coworking with Satoru Wakeshima

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

Satoru Wakeshima is a partner at the brand strategy and design agency CBX. He was previously EVP, general manager at Sterling Brands.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? Branding isn’t like other marketing fields in that it’s often foundational and it’s cumulative, something that’s built over time. So to describe what I do to someone who isn’t in this field, I have to strip away the execution and bring the conversation to the root of it: I help brands tell their stories. And we use all these different tools—words, pictures, type, motion, music, sounds—to tell these stories in ways that will get people to believe, or at least want to believe. Now, there’s a lot of BS in this business, and there are some that take themselves and what we do way too seriously.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? I’ve had the good fortune of working on some of the world’s most-loved brands, so it’s hard to pick just one. When we did a brand restage of M&M’s, I was really proud of not only the work but also the process we went through to get to the answer. Brands like M&M’s have equity that needs to be handled carefully and responsibly, but also creatively. It’s not easy to make something new for a brand that everyone knows so well. But we did, and it worked.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign has done a wonderful job making people feel human and connected. They did an amazing ad where a forensic artist drew women based on their descriptions of themselves and then drew those same individuals based on how others described them. The difference in how we see ourselves versus how others perceive us was astounding. It was moving, honest, and completely supported their brand strategy. Beautifully done.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I write songs constantly. Everything from punk rock, rock, indie, blues, country, to utter nonsense. I don’t do it because I have aspirations of being famous for it. I do it to create. LinkedIn is so formal and everyone is on their best behavior to make a good impression to the professional community, but it’s not a reflection of who people really are as humans.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Well, of course I have to say AI and…AI. It represents an entirely new era that will change everything we know. And that’s awesome, but it’s also daunting. A lot of bad work will be done simply because AI makes it “easier and faster.” It’s happening right now, and you can see it. But a lot of incredible work will be done because AI played a role in making some aspects of the process easier and faster, too.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? There’s a lot of posturing from these so-called marketing gurus. I enjoyed the Everyone Hates Marketers podcast by Louis Grenier. He had a good run and had some interesting guests.