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Ad Age Marketer's Brief
Turning brand youth into a strength in a luxury category dominated by legacy players, with the CMO of Genesis Motor America.
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- [00:00]
A
This episode is sponsored by Warner Bros. Discovery Advertising. You've probably seen the headlines and yeah, there's a lot happening at WBD right now. But here's the thing. Change is happening everywhere. Media planning has never been this complicated. More platforms, more data, more pressure to drive results. And that's what WBD delivers. Iconic stories and the audiences who love them. So your brand shows up in the right place at the right time with real impact. Visit adsales.wbd.com to learn more.
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B
How does a young brand find its way in a category dominated by legacy players? Hello. This is E.J. schultz, news editor at Ad Age. And on this week's Marketer's Brief Podcast, we answer that question. Our guest is Amy Marentik, Chief Marketing officer for Genesis Motor America. While the brand's parent company, Hyundai is well established in the States, Genesis is a relative newcomer trying to gain share from BMW, Mercedes and other luxury auto stalwarts. Amy will discuss how Genesis is going about it, including what metrics it is using to gauge success. She'll also share some advice on how to break through in experiential marketing. That's a big priority for Genesis, which runs the Genesis House in New York City's Meatpacking District, which includes a car showroom, but also a Korean restaurant, library and event space. But before we begin, a little bit about Amy. She worked at Ford Motor Company for more than 25 years, including leading marketing for Ford's autonomous vehicle business, as well as a stint as president of Lincoln Asia Pacific. She took the CMO job at Genesis in 2025 after a couple stops outside the auto industry. At Google, she was involved with the tech giant's strategic partnerships with advertisers. And then at consumer analytics firm Circana, she led a team that helped clients with media, e commerce analytics and software solutions. And now my conversation with Amy. Hi, Amy. Welcome to the Marketer's Brief Podcast.
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C
Thank you. It's so good to be here, ej.
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B
So Genesis, in the automotive category, you guys are in the luxury business, right? And traditionally in automotive legacy along history has been seen as a strength. You look at BMW, Mercedes constantly leaning into their heritage. But Genesis is a younger brand. And what you guys have done is actually turned your youth into a strength. Can you explain how you are doing that?
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C
Yeah, we did. When I first came onto the brand, we were meeting with one of our chief designers and he said something that really resonated with me. I. I asked him what makes it different to design a Genesis, and he said simple. He said, we're untethered. We have no history that we have to design from. We can simply look into the future, look into the consumer and what they want, and we can design for that. And that really stood out for me. So instead of following rules, we can really write our own rules. And it's a real opportunity for us to lean into modern luxury.
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B
And so, you know, you had come on. The Genesis, you know, was born out of Hyundai, owned by, you know, the larger Hyundai company. There had been marketing underway already for the Genesis brand. How big of a pivot was this for Genesis when you started?
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C
You know, the global brand message is disruption, refined. And so we still use that very much at our core, but we use it in a bit of a different way. There really is a paradox of two brands. It's our brand in Korea that is very much the heart and soul of the country, and then our brand in America, where our awareness is low. I often describe it as we moved into a new neighborhood where the neighbors had lived there for 100 years, and how do we make our own way? And that's something that we're working to do now.
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B
So you have that big idea. You have the brief you mentioned, the agency you work with in Ocean. What were some of the key steps you took to sort of change the messaging, change the way people thought about the brand internally before you started creating your advertising?
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C
We wanted to make sure we stayed true to the global brand, because the global brand is very important. It's been incredibly successful in Korea. But we also wanted to make sure that we gave people a reason to notice. Right. We moved into this new neighborhood where all of the neighbors knew each other. Nobody was asking for another luxury brand. But it really gave us an opportunity to say why we were different, why we were unique. And the tagline that we're using is welcome to Genesis. We want to make sure that when somebody's interested in a luxury brand and when they're looking for something new and fresh, that we're on their shopping list. So being very inclusive is important to
- [04:57]
B
us and executionally, how are you doing that? What were some of your first steps to sort of try to raise that awareness and put that image out there?
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C
So the first thing we did is we talked to everybody internally. We took them through the brand strategy, we took them through the brand plan, and then we started to create image and build our advertising. And also our experiential. You may know, we spend a tremendous amount of our marketing budget in experiential, but we started with a brand campaign we called it blank canvas and it was building a luxury brand from absolutely nothing, from the blank canvas and being able to create something that was absolutely incredible, that it was really important for people to take notice. Right. At least check us out, we'll show
- [05:41]
B
some of those ads so people can see them when they're checking out this podcast@adage.com but as you were doing this, I imagine, you know, like with all new things, with all new approaches, you might have gotten a little bit of pushback internally. Did that happen and how did you handle that?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. You know, you always. Creative is something that's very subjective. Right. I come from the world of data. I have a very weird brain. I'm left brained, I'm right brained. I'm an engineer that's found her way to marketing. I'm in love with the consumer, but I love to drive from a base of data and it's very important to do that. So oftentimes when you speak with data, you can get people, people on your side. So we knew we weren't going to out engineer the German luxury brands. Even though when you put our vehicles side by side, when you do the crash testing, when you look at the content, when you look at the luxurious of the leather, we stood out. But it was important that we told our story and that we told our story in a way that could resonate with the consumer. And we had to do that in a way that was different. And what we decided to do was really lean into that Korean hospitality that was our differentiator. The way that we show up to the consumer, the way that we invite consumer into our experiential space, the way that we advertise, it's all based in that Korean hospitality. And nobody argued with that. That was something that people universally thought was authentic to our brand and that we could absolutely deliver.
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B
So in a sense, while you're new in America, you are actually using a little bit of your heritage, your Korean heritage. Right. To inform this kind of new positioning. What was the first sign you saw that this was working?
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C
Our ads, People started to absolutely love our ads. Our scores, we use ACE metrics, our scores were off the charts, our awareness was growing, our opinion was increasing, and most importantly, we were selling more vehicles. If you looked at our sales last year, our sales were up 10% and the industry was down, the luxury industry was down. So at the end of the day, it's our job to put more people in our vehicles so they can then talk about our vehicles. It's a wonderful thing. We Call it the aha moment. You know, I talked about our experiential. We do these events where we bring people in and they sit in our vehicles and they just kind of do. They sigh and they do this. They can't believe the quality of the leather. They can't believe the way that we've stitched the leather. They can't believe the content inside the vehicle. And the vehicle I drive, there's a crystal sphere that is the prindle. And every time you turn the vehicle on, that crystal sphere lights up and flips over and it just welcomes you into the vehicle. So once we get people in the vehicle and show it to them, it's very impactful and they talk about it to all of their friends and oftentimes they go and they buy one.
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B
So, you know, you talked about the bottom line sales. You know, I think a lot of CMOs these days are struggling with, you know, what metrics are you using? How are you impressing your cfo, your CEO who basically do want just that bottom line number, but yet sometimes brand building takes time and you don't have those sales results right away. Did you encounter any of that? And what kind of data were you using in that early period to kind of let the rest of the team know, hey, this is working.
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C
Oh, we use so much data. I remember I got all of the smart people I knew on my team. I brought in all the big minds from the agency and we sat in a room and we brainstor all of the KPIs that were possible for us to look at. And we looked at them. We used a framework of the marketing funnel and we said, what are the KPRs that drive demand search, maybe housing starts, maybe S&P 500. And then we went down the funnel and we looked at all of these KPIs. We probably came up with, I don't know, 75 to 100 of them. We then ran correlations to sales on each one of them. And then as a team, we came up with two to three. One primary, a couple secondary. And we use those KPIs to really drive the business. That's what we use internally to the board, to the cfo. We use things like awareness, we use opinion, we use sales, of course, pricing, power, incentive spent. And then the most important is sales. Are we selling? Are we growing? And you know, I've worked for brands that didn't grow. I worked for brands that lost market share for 20 to 30 years. And it's so exciting to work on a brand that that has been growing for the last five years.
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B
So you've mentioned a couple times your experiential strategy and I want to dig into that. But first we're going to take a quick break.
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A
This episode is sponsored by Warner Brothers Discovery Advertising. You know those moments in entertainment when you're not just watching, you're feeling it. That's what Warner Bros. Discovery delivers to audiences every day. From the roar of live sports arenas to the clash of dragon ruled kingdoms. From the front lines of breaking news to the heartbeat of busy kitchens, WBD Advertising combines this incredible IP with modern ad tech and a partner first mindset to turn this cultural attention into real connection and measurable conversion. Visit adsales.wbd.com to learn more.
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B
Okay, we're back with Amy Marentik, Chief Marketing Officer for Genesis Motor America. One of the really interesting things Genesis is doing from a retail perspective. You guys have something called the Genesis House in New York City's Meatpacking District. For folks who aren't familiar with that, can you explain what it is?
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C
It is an incredible space. It's in New York City, as you said, it's in the Meatpacking district. It's right across from Restoration Hardware. It is one a one acre building and it has three floors. It has a Michelin Guide Korean restaurant on the top floor. It has a tea house. It also has a space in the middle where we display our vehicles. And then in the basement, it has this incredible experiential space with screens on the ceiling, on the walls, on the floors where we do these incredible tent pole events that are almost like going to a modern museum and it's all free. Anybody can walk in off the street to the Genesis House and really experience our brand.
- [11:50]
B
And so is this, do you see this as more of a brand image play versus I mean, are you actually selling in this space or is that not the point?
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C
We don't, we don't sell in the space. That isn't the point. People can always get more information if they choose and want to go visit a dealer and that that's the dealer's job to sell the vehicle. It's our job to really create a cultural experience for anybody. They don't have to be a consumer or potential luxury buyer. So many people bring their children. We do partnerships and we do these tent pole events. We did one with Gwyneth Paltrow, we did one with Ashley Park. We have some really exciting events planned this year. But it's really an opportunity to just experience Korean hospitality and understand a Little bit more about where our brand came from.
- [12:34]
B
So, you know, we were talking about measurement earlier. This does not sound like a cheap investment. I mean, just real estate in New York alone is expensive. How do you measure the success of this? Is there anything you look at in particular to make sure this is something you still want to do?
- [12:47]
C
I don't think I could ever do an ROI to justify to the CFO how this makes business sense. But I will tell you, the emotional experience that people have when they go really is incredible. We've taken many of our partners to the Genesis House. When I'm in New York, I'll host NBC or I'll bring our Google friends or maybe our partners from Meta Netflix. They'll come to the space, they'll see our vehicles, we'll maybe take them through a tent pole, we'll buy them dinner. And they take a minute and they say, amy, we really didn't understand your brand, but now we do. It just is an incredible space. And you really feel the brand.
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B
When you have regular consumers in there, is there anything you're learning from them that you couldn't learn, like using traditional media?
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C
I think the biggest learning is how important the culture is and how important treating people with that hospitality is, because then they go and they talk to other people. Oh, that Genesis House. So many people think it's a private club. It looks like a private club, it feels like a private club, but it's not. It's a welcoming place where we want everybody to stop by. Welcome to Genesis.
- [13:57]
B
Last question on this topic. You know, you've, as you mentioned, you've been at other brands. Do you think that brands could be doing more of this kind of experiential right now? Like, what would your advice be to other CMOs who are considering doing something like this? Like, what were some of your learnings?
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C
You know, I think customers want more experiential. They want it in a way that's authentic. They want a way that they can build a relationship with a brand. But it has to be authentic. And you have to provide them a value exchange. Right? You can't just set up an experiential, an event, expect people to show up and just speak to them about your brand. But how do you make them feel? I'll give another example. One of our big events and one of our big investments is in golf. There's all the right reasons why we are in golf. Our customers, it's the number one hobby. For the customers that buy Genesis, we have all that reason. But the way we execute our signature event. The Genesis Invitational is like nothing I've ever experienced. You talk about honored guest. It doesn't matter if you are a player, if you are a caddy, if you are a player's wife, if you are a consumer. The way that that is executed is very, very much Korean hospitality. And again, it's how we make people feel. And then hopefully they go and give our vehicles a chance and. And they feel incredible when they're driving their vehicle.
- [15:18]
B
Looking ahead quickly, you know, we're recording this about a week before the New York Auto show will start. Can you tease anything you guys are planning to do in New York? And speaking of experiential. Right. One of the bigger auto shows on the calendar.
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C
Yeah, we love the New York Auto show. There are two auto shows where we really lean in in the U.S. one is New York and one is the LA Auto Show. We bring our event space. We always have hospitality. Last year we had Korean donuts from Knotted Donuts that were a huge success. This year we're going to have our GV60 magma, which is our first performance vehicle. We're also going to have a G90 Wingback concept vehicle. And then my favorite, we have a new lineup called Prestige Black. It is the most incredible, nasty, blacked out series that I have ever experienced. And we offer that on our G80 or G90, our GV80 and our GV80 coupe. And then we'll have a new vehicle, our GV70 Prestige Graphite, that will be on display and we'll have more treats and we'll have some surprises. I don't know if you know this, but we own Boston Dynamics and we'll have a new influencer there that may or may not be Spot. And there'll be some fun things for people to experience. Do you get a chance to go to the show?
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B
Ej, that's one show I've never been to. But now that I know there's going to be a robot dog, I might actually go.
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C
Well, we would love to host you. So if you'd love to come experience some Korean treats and see Spot, you never know what he or she or it is going to be wearing. We had Spot at the Invitational and he worked with all of our influencers. He got a hole in one, he was potting, he was serving drinks and Korean salt bread. And he was dressed like a golf ball. So for a week we called him Dimples.
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B
Fantastic. Before we go, we're starting to ask all our guests this final parting question. We have a lot of CMOS on this podcast. So if you could ask another CMO one question, what would it be?
- [17:11]
C
Oh my gosh. So I am obsessed with Corey at Elf Beauty. So many people think Elf is just a TikTok brand, but when you look at what she is and the team have done, they have spent so much time investing in their first party data platform, they have their beauty squad. So everything she does is based on data. But then she also really pushes the envelope. I've heard that she says, why the Elf not? And I love that. Right? We're always pushing the envelope at Genesis. I always say to the team, what if it all works out? What if we can do it? I would ask Corey how she set up all the unsexy things that have led to 28 consecutive quarters of growth in such a competitive industry. So hats off to her. Would love to have coffee with her someday.
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B
All right, we'll try to make that happen. Thanks again for your time today.
- [18:07]
C
Thank you, E.J.
- [18:16]
B
That was Amy Rentek, chief marketing officer for Genesis Motor America. I'm E.J. schultz, news editor at Ad Age. I want to thank our producer, Lauren Ciardio, and invite everyone to subscribe to the Marketers Brief podcast on your favorite channel. We will catch you next time Marketers
- [18:32]
A
brief listeners get $40 off an AdAge.com subscription, sharpen your marketing edge and visit AdAge.com brief for your discount.
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C
It.