Erin Chin joined Logitech for Creators, as chief marketing officer in November 2020. The Harvard Business school graduate has spent most of her career in beverages – having held senior executive positions at Pepsi, Diageo and Proximo Spirits. The role is a natural fit as her current post is all about tapping into the culture, something she spent years on in the beverage industry.
Connecting to the current culture is at the center of Logitech for Creators’ first global brand platform. The effort, which debuted in April, promotes the brand as a community destination in the creator economy with a message of diversity, inclusivity and passion.
“Our Together We Create campaign is really our commitment to having creators at the center of everything we do by providing products and solutions that will help them create better,” explains Chin. “It’s building that community and that really authentic relationship with creators that range from first timers to experts. And it’s working together with them to drive change for this more diverse and inclusive future. This notion of Together We Create is really sharing our vision of collaborating with creators to shape our future, the future of creating together, the way we see it, it’s our rallying cry.”
The Together We Create campaign is inspired by Logitech’s Defy Logic campaign, a broad scale effort by the master brand to connect with the multiple cohorts that the Logitech business serves. The company partnered with seven different creators from different parts of the world to create an anthem video. “They’re from different creative fields, whether they’re musicians or gamers or cosplayers or choreographers, they drive their content on different social platforms, but they’re all connected by this passion for creating,” says Chin. “We share that passion with these creators, and we really want to make sure that we’re working together to create a future in content creation that we all want to see.”
Logitech for Creators’ audience includes a range of generations, genders, ethnicities and race, that make content in a range of verticals. They look at content creators in two buckets –gaming content or lifestyle content which can encompass everything from music to podcasting to cooking and beauty.
“We’re trying to be as inclusive as possible and create a community of creators that is as broad as possible so that aspiring creators can see themselves in the content that we put out and can see themselves using the tools and solutions that we’re creating,” says Chin.
Brand Innovators caught up with Chin from her home in New York to talk about digital content creators, the Together We Create campaign and the brand’s mission. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You joined Logitech for Creators as CMO in November 2020. Can you talk about what attracted you to the brand and what your goals have been in the CMO role?
I spent my marketing career mostly in beverages but what I had done over the many years was really focused on building brands that are culturally relevant. And whether that meant in some instances, building brands from scratch, or taking big behemoth brands like Mountain Dew and changing the positioning and tapping a little bit more into what makes them relevant in culture with a specific consumer. I came over to Logitech to do to do just that in an in a category that I think is super exciting. We’ve seen how much the creator economy has grown so much and there is a lot of runway to continue to build there. I came over to head up this group within Logitech that is focused on making tools and building a brand that connects with digital content creators.
How do you define digital content creators?
What we mean by by digital content creators are people who are intentionally making content to share through social media platforms and digital platforms. We like to say that anyone who posts something on Instagram could be seen as a creator and tons of people make content. But who we’re really trying to target are people who are purposefully creating content to share their passions on these digital and social media platforms. They’re not necessarily just making content to update their friends and family of what’s going on in their life, they’re actually quite ambitious about their content creation journey and building their brand. They’re doing it with intention, and they’re interested in getting better and leveling up their tools.
We started to think about how we connect with them on an emotional level. How do we take the Logitech brand and extend it to authentically connect with that group of people and really build a brand extension, so that it could ladder back to Logitech at large. How do we connect very intentionally with these intentional digital content creators?
Can you talk about Logitech for Creators’ how this connects to the brand’s purpose?
We built a purpose dovetailing on the overall Logitech brand purpose, but ours is with a very sharpened approach towards creators. It’s about how we help all creators pursue their passions, by unlocking their extraordinary potential and ability to shape culture. Our first pillar is to put creators at the heart or the center of every single thing we do from how we think about what our product roadmap is, how we talk and communicate with them, how we drive our product messages, how we involve them to weigh in on our marketing to ensure that we’re speaking from what we like to say, is a creator to creator approach because they are ultimately our consumers as well.
The second pillar is embracing the community of content creators, and it’s really about creating a place where any creator can share their story and belong –whether someone is just getting started and only has a few followers but really wants to make it a career and turn their passion into something that can help be either be an income driver for them, or people who are have these massive followings in this huge personality and share voice.
And then the last pillar for us is change. It’s about how we partner with this creator community to power the change that we want to see in the world and it’s about enabling and empowering and working together with creators to create change big or small.
Can you talk about how this purpose shows up in your marketing?
We launched Logitech for Creators last July. We didn’t want to launch with a product or a campaign, we really wanted to launch by walking the walk. We launched the fact that Logitech for Creators exists with an activation of the creators for BIPOC. It was really leaning into our mission of driving equality and inclusion in the creator space. It was a two-pronged activation – on one hand, we were partnered with 50 BIPOC creators and used it as an opportunity to shine a light on them and highlight them as creators. We partnered with Twitch to get them on the front page, so that they were immediately discoverable by people who just logged into Twitch. And we worked with them to raise funds for BIPOC charities using our Streamlabs Charity streaming platform, which is a service on one of our products as a software as a service platform where we’re able to donate. It empowers creators to raise funds for certain charities.
Separately, we partnered with amazing choreographer JaQuel Knight –he’s featured in our Together We Create campaign. We’ve been partnering with him for about a year, he has been at the forefront of creator rights in terms of making sure that choreographers get credit when they are due for their work. He was the first Hip Hop and pop choreographer to actually copyright his choreography with Beyonce’s Single Ladies. As part of that he wants to make sure that other creators like himself, choreographers, specifically, can can have ownership over their IP and so we partnered with him to take care and handle the entire legal process and also fund that process for 10 creators who have made super popular dances on TikTok so that when people look to use that work commercially, they can be compensated for it.
What channels are you playing in and what makes sense so that you can message and communicate with your audience?
From a channel perspective, it’s all online, of course. We’re talking about people who are digital natives, and everything they do is in a digital sphere. We are solely digital in terms of how we connect with people, a lot of it happens through social media channels because that’s a native environment to many of the people that we’re talking to. These are people who make content for social. They’re active and engaged in social and that is definitely a place where it makes sense for us, as well as general digital media stuff, media outlets or media properties.
And then a lot of it is creator to creator. So how we work with our creator partners to tell stories on our behalf. There’s definitely giving up some control, so it might not be the exact message in the way that we would exactly say it in a paid ad, but we know that we are creating amazing products that creators love. We want to hear their candid assessments of the products, and we want to hear from them how the products help them remove friction in their content creation processes. And if they don’t think everything is perfect, we want to hear that too. We want them to be honest and open with our product reviews, and we want them to engage with our vision that we’re creating together with creators, making sure that we are dialing into the issues that are important among the creator community like mental health.
What are you most excited about for the second half of 2022?
Right now is a big moment for Logitech for Creators, but it’s really just the beginning. We will continue to improve with action that we’re committed to these creators, and doing things that really help them create it for BIPOC, which we we actually launched it two years ago, we made a much bigger effort around it last year, which is the stuff that I talked about, but that’s an ongoing, multi year commitment to this. We have dedicated the month of July, so that’ll be coming up this July again.
The No. 1 thing is making sure that we’re working with creators that share our purpose and values. We want to make sure that the creators that we work with are fully aligned with celebrating creators building community and driving change. We want to have authentic relationships with people who already like what we’re doing and people who already love our products and feel great about the stuff that we’re doing. And then making sure that diversity is a huge piece of it. We want to represent the widest swath of creators possible so that aspiring creators can see themselves in our group.
