My first college gig landed me in our student center lobby, fitted in an unflattering cerulean blue tee with "Techspert" printed over the front. I was a Microsoft brand ambassador, tasked with evangelizing the wonders of the newly launched Windows 8 and Surface Pro. I'd iterate on invitations to unsuspecting passerbys: Come, step onto the mat, and experience this new paradigm of an operating system.
Hot spoiler alert: Windows 8 didn't take off. Its legacy exemplifies the truth of time: product flops become product blips; companies persist, offerings shift. The marketing evolves in turn, finding new balance between the edges of imagination and demands of scale.
Yet in capital-flush product ecosystems, scale prevails, sanding down the rough edges of curious and creative language. We instead slide down smooth slopes of unquestioning enablement. Want to look this attractive? Click to purchase. Desire this person? Swipe to choose. Think cookies taste good? Check to accept. Best practices in communication design become unintended aggression towards our wallets and wants.
Design may come in an elegant package, but it doesn’t always make things right.
I'd almost forgotten about that Microsoft job. It now strikes me as the accidental primer for my experience to come: managing marketing for millennial-favored consumer product companies, ranging from bootstrapped to venture capital funded to acquired.
I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, walking a rigorously and lovingly paved path to business school in DC and finance in Beijing. My path then took sharp turns into culinary research in Copenhagen and photojournalism in Chennai. It veered into UX design in San Francisco and digital strategy at the U.S. Health & Human Services. My winding pilgrimage ultimately led me to New York City in 2017, as yet another unemployed and uninsured fresh transplant.
Making it to mecca hardly felt glorious. I found no romance in navigating public welfare systems, only conviction in the work awaiting. It revealed the throughline across industries: Even for the tech-literate, building the platforms and products for public good is still…laborious. Multiplying ecological, political, and sociocultural earthquakes complicate the [feasible—desirable—viable] innovation trifecta. The big fishes are often the ones who survive the shock waves, due to sheer resources.
Yet it is the year 2021, the second year of COVID-19, and small is again beautiful. Community organizing finds fresh momentum across our Discords and DAOs and Buy Nothing groups. Companies continually recalibrate their products to serve the independent before the corporate. For example, in music—artists can choose to participate in alternative economies like SoundCloud and Bandcamp and Ampled, if not Spotify and Patreon. In journalism—writers can join emerging collectives like Defector and The Brick House Cooperative, invest in independent platforms like Substack and Ghost, or crypto networks like Mirror, if not established media publications.
Without discounting its devastation, the pandemic reoriented strategies around human trust and care, counter to uncritical consumption. It resurfaced lingering spiritual discontents inherited from our predecessors—the roots of immediate user and audience needs.
Because if you don't look at the [stock] tickers, you're really just searching for the truth within all the numbers and all the chaos. And that's the key to being a recording artist. You're telling your story or finding your truth at the moment.
This is the ethos that anchors my consulting practice with Studio QQ. I partner with you to articulate purpose and communicate it in ways that spark collective progress. We employ new language to trace the raw edges of the challenge at hand. We speak poetry to technology, refine zeal with grace. We get wild, because the margins are places of play and delight.
Depending on industry, my work is usually framed as:
— Brand and marketing strategy
— Content, community, and organizational design
— Editorial storytelling and audience development
Partnering together means envisioning a new market context. It entails stomaching risk for new measures of reward that expand beyond user count, audience reach, or customer lifetime value. It thrives off readiness to experiment within thoughtful bounds.
I used the Surface Pro for a couple years, until it shattered after falling off a poorly designed desk. I then converted to The Way of MacBook.
That's the beauty of pushing into new edges of creation. Things can unexpectedly break and fade into irrelevance. They can become commercially successful and culturally celebrated and ecologically redemptive. Either way, they can outline new contours of change and reframe the public language around it.
Just like emerging ideas and organizations, I expect my working ethos to also evolve. For now, it's a moment of clarity in the mess of rebuilding through corona-era. A reminder and hope that throughout the pursuit of progress, we never lose our edge.
If you'd like to explore working together, get in touch with me at vicky [at] studioqq.co. I'd love to hear from you.
