Episode #39: The Purpose Pursuit: An Empowering Career in Mission-Driven Marketing with Opeyemi Oluwole
In this episode called the Purpose Pursuit: An Empowering Career in Mission-Driven Marketing, Kelly talks to Opeyemi Oluwole, Senior Vice President, Consumer Engagement at Teledoc Health and a Board Member at Stride. Opeyemi and Kelly discuss their mutual passion for mission-driven marketing and how marketers can be a force for good in the industry.
The Purpose Pursuit: An Empowering Career in Mission-Driven Marketing with Opeyemi Oluwole Episode Recap
Opeyemi Oluwole is a marketing leader with extensive experience at top brands like American Express and Delta Air Lines. Opeyemi currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Consumer Marketing at Teladoc Health, where she drives positive health outcomes by promoting virtual primary care and mental health services.
In this engaging conversation, Opeyemi shares her inspiring career journey, revealing how she stumbled upon marketing during college and fell in love with its potential to create impact. She emphasizes the importance of working with like-minded individuals and pursuing mission-driven marketing, which brings her immense joy. Opeyemi highlights the personal connection she has with healthcare, recounting her son’s mysterious illness and the profound impact it had on her perspective as a marketer. Through her work at Teladoc Health, Opeyemi has witnessed countless heartwarming success stories. She mentions members who have achieved significant health improvements, such as weight loss and improved mental health, thanks to the support and care provided by the company’s services. Opeyemi’s personal experience as a parent during her son’s illness has shaped her approach to marketing. She is dedicated to empowering consumers, providing them with essential information and support to make informed decisions about their health and well-being. Her passion for making a positive impact on people’s lives has made her a highly effective and compassionate marketer.
Opeyemi’s career in marketing began unexpectedly when she stumbled upon a marketing class during college and realized her true calling. Ever since, she has been on a journey of growth and has found her purpose in mission-driven marketing. Working with companies that have a clear purpose not only motivates employees but also attracts like-minded individuals, fostering a collaborative and engaged work environment. The impact of mission-driven marketing goes beyond the organization itself and extends to customers. Companies that align with customers’ values and beliefs, like Whole Foods and Tesla, enjoy high customer loyalty and trust. Opeyemi also admires Devoted Health for its exceptional mission of treating every member like family, which led them to create virtual social gatherings during the COVID pandemic to combat loneliness among seniors.
When it comes to becoming more mission-driven, Opeyemi emphasizes that it starts with top leadership and permeates through the company’s values, strategies, and priorities. A clear vision and purpose act as a guiding North Star, driving a positive culture and impacting the lives of employees and customers.
In terms of industry trends, Opeyemi highlights the role of AI and generative AI in driving personalization and delivering tailored recommendations to consumers. She stresses the importance of having human intervention to ensure ethical and brand-aligned content. Additionally, video content is gaining momentum as an effective modality to engage consumers, especially in the context of health-related information. For young professionals aspiring to venture into mission-driven marketing, Opeyemi’s advice is to fearlessly explore various marketing areas and identify what truly resonates with them. Understanding personal preferences and dislikes helps in shaping a fulfilling and impactful career path.
Episode Transcript:
Kelly
Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms Podcast. I’m Kelly Callahan-Poe and today’s episode is called The Purpose Pursuit: An Empowering Career in Mission-Driven Marketing with Opeyemi Oluwole.
Opeyemi is a marketing leader with 25+ years of experience driving consumer behavior change and revenue growth at world-class brands like American Express, Citigroup, Delta Air Lines.
As the Senior Vice President of Consumer Marketing at Teladoc Health – Opeyemi is driving positive health outcomes by shifting ingrained consumer health care habits to broadscale adoption and usage of Teladoc Health’s virtual primary care, mental health, and chronic condition management services.
Opeyemi also serves on the Board of Directors of Stride Health – a gig worker benefits platform.
Welcome Opey.
Opeyemi
Good morning, Kelly. I’m so excited to be here.
Kelly
I’m happy to chat with you. We’ve had some fun conversations about mission driven marketing. So, let’s dive right in. Can you talk a little bit about your career path that led you to where you are today at Teladoc Health?
Opeyemi
Absolutely. So marketing is something that I discovered by mistake. I was an economics major in undergrad. And I always thought I’d work at the World Bank, IFC, somewhere something to do with finance or economics. And I happened upon my sister in the middle of college and she said, Hey, come with me to a marketing class. And I sat there for the first time and said, My God, I have to do this for a living. And I had one internship after the other, I had an internship at a radio station, a PR firm an advertising agency. And what came to mind for me was, I want to be on the other side, I want to be where the clients are, who are coming in to work with us. And that kind of led me to the path in growth and lifecycle marketing, which is where I’ve really focused a lot of my career. And along the way, a few things came to light for me, that were very, very important to me personally.
First thing was the culture, the people you work with, who are like minded as you are so very important to your work experience.
The second thing was the impact. I love marketing, it is what I do. It is what I always do, it’s what brings me joy.
The third thing I discovered while working in Open for American Express, I discovered that when you do mission driven marketing, it just brought me joy. Being able to have an impact on people’s lives brought me joy. And from that moment on, I said, anything I do going forward, has to be mission driven and has to be something that I truly care about, and I can have an impact on and I can work with people who I enjoy working with.
Kelly
I love that. And when you talk about bringing joy to people, can you give us an example based on your work? How do you bring that joy are there are stories that you can tell?
Opeyemi
Absolutely. And I think of it more as me helping people. Right. So, the favorite part of my job is when a member tells us of how we’ve touched their lives. So just a few examples of members who have heard from recently one of them. Tom lost 45 pounds after seeing one of our primary care physicians. He is coming off of his diabetes medication soon. And he basically said you guys saved my life without you. I don’t think I would have been able to do this. Another member of ours Irene said we helped her with her mental health. We helped her get her culture back as she met with one of our nutritionists and finally how we how we lost one of his eyes, his eyesight in one eye from diabetes and because he works with us, he knows that he is empowered. And he has the tools, and he has the information to ensure that he can maintain his eyesight.
We have over 80 million members that are eligible for Teladoc Health. And when I look at just these three stories, you can see how just how very inspiring the work that myself and my team do in terms of connecting members to the care that they need when they need it.
Kelly
But this has a personal impact on you, correct? I mean, you have a personal connection with health care, which has kind of led you to where you are today. Do you want to tell us that story?
Opeyemi
Absolutely. A very personal story to me is a few years ago, my son had what His friends call a mystery illness, the doctors were not able to diagnose him for three or four weeks of him being in the hospital. What was so important to me at that time was I had my father who was a physician by my side, he translated all the numbers, he translated all the medical speak. And I felt empowered. I felt like I had the information I needed to make the decisions that I had to make, and continue down the journey and path.
Now, if you think about many people who like think of you as a mom, if you’re in that situation, there’s so many mothers, and there’s so many parents, who may not have access to somebody who’s going to sit there with them, and advocate for them, and talk to the physicians for them. And I see this and I was able to really bring it into the work that I do. And think about how can I through the marketing that I’m doing, empower the consumers who I serve? How can I educate them and give them the information that they need, and really add value to their lives and help lead them down a path and a journey where they can be healthier, and where frankly, they have peace of mind in the decisions that they have confidence and the decisions that they’re making around their health or the health of their family.
So that very, very, very personal experience has made me a much, much better marketer. And I’ve always been great at marketing, but it was it was such a personal experience that I feel impacted the way I do my job and the way I look at the people who I serve.
Kelly
So, I think it’s obvious as to why mission driven marketing is so important. But what do you see the benefits are to companies that are mission driven not just as an employee, but also kind of as an employer.
Opeyemi
Yeah, there are, there are a couple of things I would say the benefits of mission driven marketing clear purpose, a company having a very, very clear purpose is so very important. It drives the employees have a vision is crystal clear.
The second thing is it really drives the culture. Right? It attracts like-minded people. I look at myself at Teladoc health today, and almost everybody who works there came because they want to help people live healthier lives. And that just breeds a culture of collaboration, and a culture where people feel inspired and frankly drives really high retention, and very high engagement and job satisfaction.
The other thing that I think about is customer loyalty, right? People are very much attracted to companies that are aligned with their beliefs, their value systems, and serve a purpose. Companies like Whole Foods, right? They’re all about sustainability. They’re all about sourcing food responsibly. And I am an avid customer and a very loyal customer of Whole Foods. And you can extrapolate that into many, many other industries, the automobile industry, with Tesla, etc. But it really drives very, very high loyalty. Mission driven companies are helping to drive impact and to make this world of better place to make the communities that that they exist in better communities, and really to help impact people’s lives in very, very positive ways.
Kelly
Well, you mentioned your own company Teladoc Health, you mentioned Whole Foods. You mentioned Tesla. Are there any other mission driven organizations that you admire and why.
Opeyemi
So, there’s one that’s called Devoted Health that is so very near to my heart, dear to my heart. I met the co-founder, Todd Parks a few years ago. And he told me about the mission of his company. And the mission of his company is to treat every member like they’re your family. And they’re a health care insurance company.
Kelly
That’s amazing.
Opeyemi
The stories he told me about the behaviors and drives and the decisions that people make within the company, truly inspired me. They are a Medicare company, and they serve people who are 65. And during the COVID pandemic, one of the stories that Todd told me about was how one of the key attributes that many seniors have is loneliness. And COVID was very isolating for many of these people. Todd and his team pulled together, virtual social gatherings, they are a health insurance company. Think about that kind of behavior. Those are the kinds of things that I would say that mission driven companies do. They go above and beyond, and again, it drives loyalty. And it drives just positive culture and impact for the people that all of these companies serve.
Kelly
I love that, well, how can companies become more mission driven?
Opeyemi
It’s being mission driven, really starts from top down? It starts from the CEO, and it starts from the vision that is set forth for the company. That’s so very important. And then it trickles down into the values. And when you’re able to pull that into the employees, and what guides how the employees act, the strategies, the priorities, those are so very important in terms of building a mission driven culture, it has to permeate everything that you do and sort of be the North Star for everybody who works at the company.
Kelly
So, what sort of trends are you seeing in industry that are impacting mission driven marketing? I think you’ve got some good stories to tell.
Opeyemi
Yeah, that’s a great question. When I do my job well, I am influencing people and changing their behavior so that they are doing more things to be healthier and to live healthier lives. Think of the amount of information that’s coming at all of us as consumers, and need to break through to these individuals.
So, two key trends that I’m seeing now one is around AI. AI, I actually see as a very, very positive thing. If you think about personalization, which is very important in order to break through and and change behavior. AI is something that’s actually around us in our day to day lives. So, think about when was the last time you downloaded or looked at Netflix show, for example. probably recommend that what shows to watch to you. Those are AI models; they’re serving up information that’s most relevant to you. Or think about Starbucks, or even when you fly and you buy an airline ticket, you’ll notice that the prices change. Often. Those are all AI models that are driving that level of personalization for consumers.
The new trend in AI or the new development in AI is generative AI, which is creating personalized texting personalized copy blocks. And I see this as a really, really powerful tool that comes with a level of responsibility that we all need to have but a really powerful tool that can take and scale and make our jobs that much more powerful and impactful in terms of driving personalized recommendations, for members and for consumers.
When I talk about responsibility, though, it’s important to always have human intervention. Right? But generated AI is something where if you actually go on generative AI and look at should I use generative AI for marketing, it says absolutely. But you need to have human intervention to ensure that it doesn’t hallucinate, which is what it does sometimes. So being able to have a person who can validate the information is aligned with the brand is ethical, and is meeting all legal requirements is super important. But think of the scale that that could drive in terms of personalization.
The second trend, I would say, really focuses around content modality, video is a trend, that is really beginning to take hold. So, think about how you personally or your children consume information. Many kids today are watching full shows on YouTube. Back in our day, we watch television, network TV, mostly, but YouTube and TikTok, and Instagram reels etc. Video is so very important. If I were to pull it back to the industry, I’m in information is a determinant of health, and being able to serve up information to individuals in a way that they can consume it and understand it and be able to act on it. It’s so important.
So, I look at YouTube. 34% of people who have chronic conditions say that they search on YouTube to get more information for them to help them make the right decisions. Because it shows them people like themselves. And they feel like they have a community. They feel more empowered by having this. It’s so important as marketers, for us to think about, how are we reaching members? How are we reaching consumers in the micro moments in their lives, when they’re making decisions, in the ways that they’re consuming information, because we’re competing against all the information that’s coming at people every single day.
And content that’s in formats that you personally can digest. So, I some people are visual, some people want to read things, some people want to listen to things some people want. So being able to have a very diverse set of content, so that you can meet people where they are very, very important.
Kelly
So, talk to me a little bit about, you know, what advice would you give to young people who are interested in mission driven marketing, for example, right out of college? How would you guide them?
Opeyemi
There are three very important things I would say to a young person or even me coming out of college is, don’t be afraid to try many different things. There are so many different areas of marketing. And I tried PR, I tried to advertise I ever worked at a think tank. And all of those experiences led me to where I am today.
The second thing is, always look back to understand what about those experiences? Do you absolutely love and also understand what you don’t want to do again. And that will help really shape and serve as a beacon or compass for you as you think about what your next steps are in your career.
And then finally, when you shaped what you want to do, and when you understand that, go for it, be very persistent. And there’s so much joy that comes from finding what you love and finding a space where you feel like, you can have an impact. For me personally, it’s helping people and being able to work in a job where I feel like I’m helping people every day. And it is a reason for me to be excited about getting started with work every single day. And as a mom. Anytime that I’m spending away from my kids, I want it to be time that’s truly enjoyable. And something that I feel like I’m having an impact or are really affecting people’s lives in a positive way.
Kelly
I think that’s a wonderful final thought. Thank you for time today.
Opeyemi
Thank you so much, Kelly.
