CMO Chats with Kasturi Pal, Head of Product Marketing for Amazon

Can you introduce yourself?

My name is Kasturi Pal. I currently work at Amazon, and I’m the Head of Product Marketing for one of their biggest events work streams.

Can you tell us a bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in marketing?

Kind of going back a long, long time ago, when I was, I think, nine years old, I realised while watching TV that I really liked watching ads. Back then, you would get VCRs, and you would always skip ahead of the ads and continue watching the series or movies or whatever you were watching. But I would always tell my father or my family not to skip and to watch the ads. My friends and family thought it was peculiar for a nine-year-old to like watching ads, but that love for ads continued and grew as I grew up. I think I realised that, oh, this is actually all marketing—you’re influencing people, and it has a lot to do with psychology and all that stuff. So, yeah, that kind of sparked my interest in marketing.

The next question would be: What do you do?

Currently, in my role at Amazon, I work as the head of product, but I wear multiple hats, dabbling in marketing, operations, and product. My role is about organising some of the highest-traffic and biggest-scale events at Amazon, like Prime Day, Prime Early Access Sale, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. I work with a fantastic team, and together, we take these events from plan to execution. As part of my role, I try to understand customer behaviour—what customers want to buy during these high-traffic sales and how that differs from day-to-day deals or discount behaviour. I analyse what trends are emerging or changing in the market, what kind of product and marketing automation we need to innovate, and how to ensure customers get the best shopping experience when they visit Amazon’s website. Of course, I also work with multiple teams across the company, including operations, transportation, and various business and product teams. Essentially, you act as the end-to-end planner of the event, working with multiple key stakeholders and partners to bring that plan to reality.

For the next question: What role does product play in the world of marketing?

If I look back, even just 10 years ago, there was no significant role for product in marketing. The kind of product management we have today didn’t exist. The product manager, or what we used to refer to as brand managers back in the day, was more focused on creating the physical product, like shampoo, and its packaging and marketing. That was typically what a product manager was known for. Fast forward 10 years, and the role of the product manager is very different. The role of products in marketing has completely evolved, especially with the increased intervention and dependency on technology in all areas of our lives, including marketing. The product is now kind of like a bridge—how do you translate creative marketing ideas and tie them with tech? That bridge is what the product does: it integrates business into tech and helps both functions communicate, ensuring that the end result is consumer-friendly and aligned with what the customer is looking for or will find useful.

The next question is: Can you tell me more about a marketing campaign that has caught your attention recently?

So, I was driving by a billboard the other day, and it simply said, “Injured?” There was a guy sitting on a chair, and that was all the billboard said. I drove past that billboard a couple of times over the last few weeks, and I kept wondering what kind of a billboard this was. Like, are you trying to sell insurance? Legal advice? What are you trying to sell? I actually stopped my car on the side of the road, took a picture, zoomed in, and saw there was just one phone number. It was just “Injured?” and a phone number. I called the number because I was that curious—what kind of campaign was this, and why would you spend so much money to put up that message on a billboard? It turned out it was a driving safety campaign from the state I’m in, urging people to drive safely.

It was interesting how something that seemed completely unrelated at first—my initial thoughts were insurance, legal advice, or even doctors—was actually something much simpler and genuinely aimed at helping people. That campaign caught my attention and also got me thinking about how, as marketers, we sometimes believe we’ve done everything and that we have a playbook for all the channels we can tap into to launch a product or market something. But that’s the beauty of marketing—it’s like an open-ended tunnel that never ends; the creativity never ends. There’s always something new that comes up. Even something as traditional and dated as a billboard can be used effectively, and a one-word message can have a significant impact. That billboard worked. I ended up calling to figure out what it was about, and even though I wasn’t injured, I made that phone call, and that impression materialised into an engagement action. It was interesting, and it helped me understand. I brought those insights back to my day-to-day work, and it helped my team think outside the box. We decided to try something new, something we’d never done before—proactively thinking out of the box, using a channel we wouldn’t typically use, and seeing if that could be effective. It was an interesting experiment.

Okay, so moving on to our next question. What are, in your opinion, some of the biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

There are so many. Podcasts, for example, are not one of the newest marketing channels, but they’re newer than influencers and social media. I was listening to this podcast about how the world is going to change in the next couple of years with the introduction of artificial intelligence, and everybody’s talking about that. So, I think in the next couple of years, one of the biggest challenges will be how marketing adapts to incorporate artificial intelligence. Which parts of marketing will become redundant because of AI? More importantly, how do you maintain customer trust when AI is involved in your campaign? I see this a lot on social media—people are creating campaigns with celebrities who aren’t even in the video. While the campaign might be engaging and effective—people click, engage, and it goes viral—at some point, you start questioning whether it’s even ethical.

When AI comes into marketing channels, how do you maintain customer trust? How do you ensure that what you’re presenting isn’t fake, that it’s genuinely endorsed by the celebrity or spokesperson? Even if the person isn’t in the video, AI can be advantageous because you don’t have to physically appear for a shoot. You can use a morphed version of yourself, review, and approve the content, and that’s good. But what if it’s not? That’s one issue. The second issue is that AI can be used to create fake videos that could lead to misinformation, with products selling based on false premises. There’s a whole ethical component to consider. Normally, marketing channels have a lot of guidelines and guardrails in place, but AI could become like a weed if not used carefully. We might cross ethical boundaries without realising it until it’s too late. I foresee that happening, and I’m very curious to see how leaders across the world will come together to address that challenge or even think ahead to tackle it. I’m sure we’re already thinking ahead, but how do we manage that?

Moving on to our next question. In your experience, how can one stay ahead in terms of marketing?

I try to inspect. I was like, “Hey, did I see social media and influencer marketing coming up? No, I did not, and most of us probably not.” So, if I had to go back and tell this to my junior self, this advice of “How can I stay ahead of marketing?” I would say this: “Don’t stay laser-focused only in the industry that you are in. Try to be as curious and as hungry to learn as much as you can, even outside of your industry.”

What I’ve observed is that the brightest and most unseen successful ideas and products often come from industries that are not your own. If you are one step ahead of learning and keeping yourself educated on all of those, then you will kind of see the trend because something is happening. It doesn’t happen in one industry. It’s kind of the vibe is kind of going across industries. So, if you can zoom out and see that ahead of time, then you will have that foresight to know what to do and use that for your marketing channels or even your marketing strategy, and you’ll be ahead of that game.

The other way is, again, more tactical experimentation. If you see something is working, has worked last year, and you say, “Oh, we have experimented multiple times. It worked last year,” and you know, that becomes the status quo. No, customers change their minds almost on a minute basis. And what worked yesterday may not work today. If you don’t experiment, and if you do, again, that experimentation will help you understand what the trend is and how the mood of the customers is changing, and you’ll get a lot of data. And if you are passionate about that kind of space and that kind of data digging, that will help you see the trends that are kind of forming at a more micro level. So the first one was more at a macro level, and the second one is at a micro level to help you see the trends and then use that to stay ahead in marketing.

And then on to our next question. In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

I feel like it’s going to be very exciting. It’s also going to be very volatile. There are a lot of new channels and marketing formats coming up. New devices are coming up, and those will become new channels. In some cases, all channels are coming back, like word of mouth is kind of becoming stronger because of influencer marketing. Earlier, television ads used to be a big thing, and now, with TV going down, you know, Netflix and Hulu are all coming up. So, you know, the role of television, the native television is going down, and native TV ads are going down, also, like you can have a subscription to not see ads. So, what’s the role of ads? All of that is happening.

I feel like in the last ten years, a lot has changed, a lot has evolved, and the rate of change is only increasing. So, the future of marketing is going to be very dynamic but also very volatile because the customer segments are also changing. Like now you have Gen Z, and then you have Gen Alpha, maybe you’ll have Gen Beta, and I don’t know, like after you’ve exhausted all the Greek alphabets, you probably use some other Latin language or Sanskrit, who knows. It’s not as slow and as paced out as it used to be. And it’ll be interesting to see how all of that change is coming to evolve and inform the decisions on how we market to our customers. I also hear about how some segments of Gen Z don’t like being marketed like they are stepping away from their telephones and from their cell phones and screens because they’ve had too much of it, and they’re making conscious efforts to be, you know, screen-free and screen is kind of becoming the primary mode, whichever the channel be of marketing.

So if that happens, you know, 20 years down the line, who knows what the future of marketing will look like? But I think, in a nutshell, it will be very different from what it has been so far.

On the very last question, what career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders?

A lot of us have the same insights but for different problems, and it’s interesting to see how, despite having different problems and different approaches to solving those problems, the insights are all the same. It’s ironic. So I would recommend leaders across the country and across the world to take the time to stay connected with other leaders and share those insights because sometimes you may find something that will help you save a lot of dollars and a lot of time and energy.

The other thing I would say is that some of the brightest ideas and the most successful campaigns that I’ve run in my career as a marketer have come from the team that I work with. I used to think that a successful campaign was the genius of one mind, and I no longer believe that—and I feel like that’s one of the biggest myths. It’s a culmination of many bright minds that make a campaign come together, like from the copywriter to the designer to the editor, the merchandiser, the product manager, and the engineering team behind it—everybody has a role. Even if you’re not creatively inclined or contributing to a campaign, you’re still making that campaign successful. So take the time to nurture your team, identify who is contributing to what aspects of the campaign, and grow that skill set because, in the end, it’s the people that make us all successful. I mean, and I realise it more and more, because with technology spiking up, and, you know, intelligence and artificial intelligence spiking up, the role of human involvement in marketing, especially, we’ll have to make that decision very, very soon: how much involvement do we need from a human and how do you hone in that talent? As leaders, we should think ahead and think from a people standpoint as well, and share insights, whatever we learn across marketers, around your industry or your network.

As VP of revenue marketing, what is currently your marketing focus?

My main focus is two things: at the simplest level, it’s acquiring new customers and then growing existing customers. On the acquisition side, we do that through demand generation, other acquisition channels, advertising, paid media, and such. The website, our SEO, and the self-serve funnel, as well as field marketing and events, are all focused on bringing in new customers into the funnel.

On the growing existing customer side, this is more of your growth marketing process. We’re testing and iterating across onboarding and lifecycle marketing, working with sales, and trying to create opportunities for self-serve accounts that are coming in with the opportunity to grow. I also oversee the marketing tech stack and all of our marketing operations and systems. What I try to do is get these things working in harmony. Because all of these are kind of squarely placed against the customer life cycle where we’re bringing them in, we’re nurturing and onboarding them all digitally, and then as they adopt the product and as they use more of the product, we try to grow those customers and introduce other features and products to them.

Can you tell us about a particularly memorable marketing campaign, whether it was particularly challenging or especially successful that you’ve executed recently?

Prior to DigitalOcean, I was at Google for seven years, and one of the things that really has stuck with me in, really, my whole career was during COVID when I was on Google Workspace. Team workspace is, you know, Gmail, Calendar, Doc, Slides, Meet, etc. This was when Zoom and the surge of video communication began; all of us were locked at home, and all of the chaos was going on. It was a great opportunity for Google to strategically bring Google Meet into that conversation. At the time, I was leading growth marketing for the workspace team, and we created a master class on how to get a team focused, mobilise that team, give them strategy, give them structure, and ultimately execute a really big vision.

We had maybe 50 people coming in and out of this work, streaming across daily stand-ups, regular syncs from a program management perspective, looking at metrics and reporting to leadership, and a full project scope. We had people from brand, media, the UX team, research, product, product marketing, growth marketing, sales, and even engineering sometimes. What was really, really amazing to me was that it could have been utter chaos. It could have been a complete disaster, right? You have that many people that many opinions, and that many agendas, and it wasn’t. It was just that everybody was so focused on what we were trying to do. Each person was completely content with their work stream, their tasks, and what they needed to do, and everyone had the autonomy to sort of own their own lane in the pool. That, in itself, was just amazing to be a part of. I’ve taken that with me and thought through it whenever I’m building a project team.

But the thing I was most personally proud of was on the growth side. What we did was figure out how to introduce Google Meet to existing workspace customers. So these were customers that were heavy users of probably Gmail and Calendar, maybe even docs and slides, and some of the collaborative document types. What we figured out was a way to extract some of the signals of what these customers were doing in these apps and then feed that into a predictive formula that would then introduce Google Meet at the right time. An example of this I’ll share is: let’s say you and two other folks in your workspace account are all in a document at the same time. Maybe you’re editing; you’re sort of interacting with each other. That’s a great opportunity to say, “Hey, did you know you can actually take this document and share it directly and meet and have a quick huddle? ”You can see each other. You can have a conversation. Maybe that makes your collaboration a little bit easier. There were dozens and dozens of these experiments. But it was new. It was the beginning of what would later become a more solidified, cross-functional growth process. It was just a really profound opportunity to be a part of that when the world wasn’t at its best. We all found some solitude in that process.

What are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

I’ll share something I think is kind of general for the industry because I think that might be more relevant. I certainly face some of these, and I think a lot of them. When I talk to friends and colleagues in marketing positions, we’re all kind of hearing and saying the same thing. But I think what’s happened is that, particularly in B2B, the buyers that we’re trying to market to are extremely fatigued. In some cases, they’re annoyed, right? They’re tuning out our marketing. I think you see that in the data. You see website traffic start to go down, and you see impressions go down. You see advertising costs go up. It’s ultimately just harder to get in front of our buyers, on top of even just understanding who our buyers are.

The second thing is that I think over the last few years we, as marketers, really kind of overdid it. We had this surplus of budget and desire to grow during COVID. And so, what did we do? We did tons and tons of webinars, tons of digital content, tons of digital media, and tons of messages nonstop. We were able to distribute this on a scale we never had. Unfortunately, what we did was just saturate the market, and now, as a result, we’ve got these buyers who are engaging less with marketing, and I think, ultimately taking the sales process into their own hands. You see all these stats where the average sales deal the buyer has already completed, like 60% of the process before they even talk to a salesperson. In some cases, they want to do it all themselves. They want to go to a review site, they want to talk to peers, they may join a community, they look at social media, and they’re already formulating their opinion before they even talk to you. That’s a key sort of risk for marketing, where we typically try to influence that thought process before they talk to sales.

On top of that, you see budgets are down. Marketers are facing lower budgets, and they’re trying to do more with less. But also, for the companies that we’re selling to, their budgets are down, right? They might be investing less in certain types of software or certain types of processes. And so, all of these things happening at once kind of create this perfect storm where it’s just become a lot harder to market, is what I think. As a result of that, I believe it’s forcing the marketers to get back to some of the basics. We need to understand who our customers are and what pain points they’re trying to solve, and then creatively explain what our product or solution does to them. This is where you’ve got to find something unique and just simply use the channels that every other one of your competitors is using in a kind of mundane way. It’s just not going to cut it, right? You really have to focus on the customer and what they’re looking for, and then build around that.

What are some common trends that you have noticed different companies capitalise on to stay ahead of their competitors in terms of marketing?

Right now, I see two things really growing: One is the rise of the B2B social influencer. You go on LinkedIn now, and it is, it’s all; it’s either founders, CEOs, CMOs, or some sort of C-level that is positioning themselves as an influencer in their industry.

Then the second is communities. You can see how these things can actually work well together. But a lot of companies are investing in the community. I think the ones that had this sort of strategy in their DNA as a company before are doing really well because they’ve already got this built-in audience. And so, as I mentioned before, it’s getting a lot harder to reach that audience through media, essentially renting it from LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, or whatever you’re using as an ad platform. If you have that built-in community, you now have a leg up. You have a community of, hopefully, your prospects and customers that you can learn from. You can do research, understand what their pain points are and what they’re looking for, and then design products, solutions, and marketing around that. So, I think influencers and communities are really important right now.

But I think the catch here is that it’s like content. Simply creating content doesn’t drive growth or performance—it has to be good content. And so, on the influencer side, I think you see some who have kind of stumbled into this, and their posts just look like promotions for their company or their product, not really creating any value. You have to be a part of the conversation; you have to join the conversation and add value to it. It’s the same thing with communities, right? If you build up a community and all you do is advertise your product to them, you’ll likely not have a community very soon. I think it’s all about how you create value across these two channels and, ultimately, how you build and win the trust of your customers and position them to consider doing business with you.

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

Oh, I love this question. I think the answer is that it’s different. It’s going to look different. I’ve already made some, like, I guess, predictions you could call them from, say, six months ago, that are stale already. I think the big thing is that AI is obviously going to change a lot of marketing. But what I’m excited about is where AI strategically gets placed in your marketing supply chain. If you think about the entire marketing process across brand, creative, demand, generation, and operations, and how you’re showing up to meet buyers in their hypothetical journey, I think that’s the key. There are so many places where it can be valuable. And what you see now is kind of the first foray into AI, which was messaging and creative. You can now build content and copy and visuals and videos and audio just super, super easy—almost too easy—to an extent, where we really do run this risk of over-saturating and already saturated market content is just becoming a lot easier to create, but also harder to find and harder to consume.

The second area is workflow management with AI agents. This is where I’m really excited because you think about all of the mundane commodity tasks that a marketer might do, even just preparing a social post. They historically, maybe, went to a copywriter to get the copy, they went to a designer to get the design, and then they went to maybe a channel owner who’s going to craft all that together and put it into the channel, click Post, and then you’ve got a person who’s going to report on that. You’ve got agents now that can do most of that, and then you’re sort of managing these agents. I think that’s really cool. It also comes with some responsibility, right? If you’re sort of hyper-accelerating with crappy messages, it’s not going to do you well, right? You still need to be creative, but what you can do is speed up the delivery process.

Then the third one I think I’m particularly fond of, and I’m really keen to learn more about, is just predictive analytics and better insight creation through AI. In my career, a kind of pre-chat GPT coming up with insights requires a data scientist. Building a predictive model required a data engineer, a data analyst, and a lot of resources, and the results were great, right? You can really understand a lot about your customers by looking at that data, but I think I imagine a world where a lot of that is automated and streamlined. As you launch a campaign, you basically feed that campaign into some machine learning or predictive model, and it’s now looking for all the things that you’ve trained it to look for. As a result, it’s giving you much faster, more real-time insights that you can take action on. It could be simple things like changing creative or changing messaging, or it might be something more along the lines of, “Hey, your most valuable customers are doing X, Y, and Z before they take that action.” And so, it’s starting now to help you understand what the buyer journey is and doing that at a way more granular level. All customers are created equal; they’re all very, very, very different. Now you have this proliferation of buyer journeys that are driven by insights, and then you can take action on that, personalize messaging, and do all that fun stuff.

If you could describe the role of a CMO in one word, what would that word be? and why?

I love this one. I think I just sort of came across this as an aha moment, but the word is servant. There’s a common description of servant leadership. As a leader, are you serving? I really want to understand what this means. There’s the leadership side, but even as a marketing team, you have to think about your role of serving customers, those on your team, your organisation, and then other areas in the company, right? Most businesses don’t succeed just because of marketing. I think you really need to be okay with that; you need to be humble that your role is to work with products, to work with product, marketing, sales, engineering, operations teams, and strategy teams, to bring the brand to life in the market, or to bring those products and solutions to market in a creative way. For me, the times where I felt the most successful are when I’ve been really tuned in to these other teams and really understand what they’re working on and what their goals are, and then I can bring that marketing perspective. Whatever it is, whether it’s from a creative side or it’s from more of an operational and growth side, either way, you know the value that you bring, and you’re working with these teams to execute.

What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders out there?

I thought about this one a bit, and where I landed was to control what you can control. Thinking about where I’ve been successful or felt the most successful is in the places where I didn’t get caught up in either politics, drama, changes in the organisation, or things that I just couldn’t control, right? Like, maybe the market’s down. I can’t really control that, right? But what I can control is my little slice of marketing, my team, and the people I work with.

In some cases, as I’ve personally grown through my career, most of my role changes were the result of reorganisation and new organisational design, which most people kind of commiserate around. “Oh, I don’t want this change. I don’t want to do that and this and that.” You can’t control the fact that it changed. But what you can control is how you show up, how you work with your new leader, and how you transition from the old leader. If you’re getting a new team or joining a new team, you can control how you show up there, and you can control your personality and your outlook. Those types of things, I think, go a really, really long way. I’ve tried to think about this and even the day-to-day. You can very quickly at work; just get thrown into a bunch of things that you realise you really have no control over. But find the thing you can control and just run with it. Do what you can do as well as you can, and block out what others are doing and the things that are out of your control.