Professional Experience

In my current role, I work as a brand strategist, with a focus on strategic positioning, digital strategy and analytics, content strategy and creation, communications planning, quantitative and qualitative research, creative activation. You can learn more my professional endeavors over at LinkedIn and I can always be reached at ina.yang@u.northwestern.edu.

Thoughts on brand strategy

Whenever I’m asked to explain the details of what I do at work to people who aren’t familiar with the industry, my go-to is always, I help brands “soul search. Strategy to me is digging deep into the “why” behind human actions and synthesizing insights from it.

When you’re in marketing you’re in the business of creating results, so strategy for me is also about leveraging these actionable insights to creating measurable results that are data-driven and consumer-centric, for clients. It’s connecting the dots to tell a compelling story, to come up with creative solutions to solve problems for clients – at the end of the day, strategy is deeply rooted in people, from the consumers you’re trying to reach, to the clients whose problems you’re helping to solve.

Brand, on the other hand, is all encompassing. It’s not just a company’s public-facing image – more importantly, it’s a codification of the purpose of the company and the value it brings to its customers. By brand, I mean not only the high-level positioning and identity that highlights what makes a company unique, but also how companies talk about their products and offerings at the product and services level.

Brand also serves a critical guide and filter for customer experiences – it influences a plethora of customer interactions, from the consumer making a conscious purchasing decision, to an employee deciding to join a new company. 

Brand strategy, specifically, is about helping brands live up to their promise by uncovering the insights behind what makes an organization unique and ensuring that ethos is brought to life, breathing life and humanity into brands where they engage with their customers.

Thoughts on what makes us human

I am an innately curious person and deeply passionate about understanding the way the world works, how humans behave and interact. I believe what makes us human are our emotions.

In today’s day and age, we’re increasingly pressured by society to constantly be optimizing our productivity and efficiency: we try to do everything with the utmost efficiency, as if one more minute spent on the task means one less minute that you could be contributing to the productivity of society – we’ve become robots! With productivity in mind, we also prize rationality over being emotional – there’s neither time nor space for it.

Yet our emotions are what make us human. Faulkner once said: “the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” Being in tune with our emotions – validating them, valuing them, whether it’s pain or glory, joy or grief, that’s all part of the inherently human experience.

I’d like to think of my career as constantly exploring the “who, what, why, where, how” behind human behavior, and how we can leverage that to generate actionable insights to drive business results.

Projects

Below are client projects that I have worked on while pursuing a master’s degree at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and Integrated Marketing Communications.

Client: American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’)

• Developed an integrated marketing communications plan that included strategic, actionable recommendations to attract recent college graduates and make Chicago a top destination for these top talent that want to work in the marketing communications and advertising industry

• Conducted quantitative surveys sent out to 300+ interns, human resources professionals, and university career counselors with 179 responses

• Conducted 25 qualitative in-depth interviews, analyzed interviews with content coding method

• Build upon primary and secondary research to create strategic plan and creative campaign, presented to 4A's Board of Directors (including CEO’s of Chicago agencies) and executive level HR leaders. Board was highly satisfied and is and is considering implementing recommended solutions.

• Rotated through different agencies with team to conduct interviews and understand agency culture: Ogilvy, Cramer-Krasselt, Energy BBDO, FCB, Digitas, OMD, Leo Burnett

Team Members: Sophia Salinas, Abby Lin, Sakhile Richards, Kalli Ricka Wolf, Ina Yang

P.S. Due to NDAs I cannot share the final presentation here but feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Client: Starbucks 

• Extracted all tweets mentioning Starbucks Rewards within nine day's timeframe using R, separated them by category into UGC content and posts by the official account

• Analyzed Tweets and Facebook posts using R and Tableau to analyze the existing features and patterns of different types of posts

• Performed sentiment analysis and generated sentiment distribution graph using R

• Organized the findings through data visualization using Tableau and Regex

• Developed a social media strategy recommendation for Starbucks' official account (Facebook, Twitter)

Team Members: Sophie Wang, Cindy Yang, Shuyi Shang, Yumeng Du, Warakant Jaturasil

Client: Motorola 

• Conducted interviews and research to map out the brand DNA and consumer context of Motorola

• Conducted social listening analysis on existing social media platforms of Motorola and its competitors

• Proposed strategic recommendations and tactics for Motorola to establish brand community

• Pitched to Motorola team
  

Team Members: Xian Xu, Courtney Wassel, LaVern Thomas, Ina Yang