Bozoma Saint John built her career as a marketing executive advising some of the world’s most recognized and respected companies. Now she’s charting her next chapter—and giving others a seat at her table.
By Maneet Ahuja, Globes Staff
It’s a sunny afternoon in Beverly Hills, and marketing savant Bozoma Saint John, 47, is in her element. Flanked by producers in her formal sitting room inside her Hancock Park colonial revival-style home, cameras are carefully stationed in position, ensuring all the right angles and shots needed are captured. Dressed in a pink ensemble by designer Ellaè Lisquè, her presence commands the attention of the bustling crew. It’s par for the course for Saint John, who just hosted her Badass workshop at the Beverly Hilton yesterday for a sold-out crowd of over 300 ambitious women and is the newest cast member of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills on Bravo.
In a career spanning over two decades, Saint John’s relentless hustler mindset has pushed her to shatter glass ceilings time and again. She has redefined what the role of the Chief Marketing Officer means at some of the world’s most recognized companies: Apple, Netflix, Uber, PepsiCo and Endeavor. In addition to being named #1 most influential CMO by Globes in 2021, she has been featured on the cover of Adweek as “one of the most exciting personalities in advertising” and inducted into the American Marketing Hall of Fame, to name a few. Now, after publishing her memoir The Urgent Life last year, Saint John is preparing to launch her next major entrepreneurial venture: founding a new company set to disrupt the beauty industry this fall.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
AHUJA: I want to go back to the beginning. You went to Wesleyan University as a pre-med major with a minor in African American studies—but then you took an early pivot and followed your intuition. You came to New York and were couch surfing before you got your big break into the world of marketing.
SAINT JOHN: I do believe that our destinies are, to some degree, set— there's almost like a sketch of them, and it's your action that makes them ink. And so I think that for all of us. For me, destiny was already being written, but it required me to get up, go to that phone booth daily, and say, ‘Hey, do you have something for me today?’ Nope, okay, hang up. Pick it up. Do you have something for me today? Hang up. Then, one day I got the call that Spike Lee needed somebody to answer the phones [at his marketing firm, DDB]. When I saw him walking with his manuscript for [Bamboozled] under his arm, it was really curiosity that made me ask him if I could read it. It wasn’t necessarily that I thought I could partner with him—he’s a brilliant screenwriter, movie maker, and narrative storyteller. I just wanted to understand what he was writing. I was always impressed with Spike’s commitment to the Black experience in America and telling it raw, without the white gaze, without trying to soften it for anybody. [Bamboozled] was a beautiful piece of work, but it was very hard; it was a tough read. I took up my pen, made some comments in the margin, and handed it back to him. I was just like, let me just contribute something, right? That has been a continuous pattern for me; even in my friendships and work relationships, I'm always looking for ways to help, even when it's out of my depth.
AHUJA: So after [working with] Spike Lee, you went to work at PepsiCo. You were part of the [team] that was the brainchild behind getting Beyonce her halftime Super Bowl performance and commercial. From there, you went to Apple Music and beyond. What made you realize marketing was your calling when it wasn’t a part of the original plan?
SAINT JOHN: You know what's so funny? A lot of people in marketing and advertising always say they fell into it, and I never really understood it until it happened to me. You know, it's like, no, I did not plan the career. You know, it's like even now, as I sit here with you, thinking back to the places I've been, the campaigns I've been a part of, I couldn't have dreamt any of that.
For me, the connection between what I was doing at 12, which was my first experience coming into a permanent living situation in the United States, moving around so much as a kid. But at 12, we moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, which meant that I had to very quickly connect with my classmates and even my teachers. I had a deep accent. I had braids down to my ankles. I had to understand pop culture very quickly in order to connect with my classmates. Now, I can analyze that, and talk to you about it, but [back] then it was just about survival. And so it's like, yes, I needed to understand what the hottest music was and why, and who were the hottest sports teams and why. What was happening in the political landscape? What was the hottest food? As I became more entranced and more involved in the marketing space, I simply pulled on all of those experiences from when I was 12 and connected to people.
Bozoma Saint John at home in Hollywood, CA
AndradeAHUJA: One of the things that is remarkable about your story is that the past several jobs you had were jobs no one else had before you—they were created specifically for you—and you’re also someone who has said you don’t necessarily have a career plan. So many of us are looking for guideposts on how to navigate our own careers—acknowledging there’s no one size fits all, what is the secret sauce?
SAINT JOHN: Gosh, it's such a tough question to think about. Because, again, I think some of it is destiny and some of it is the hustle. So, I don't know that without the personal traumas that ignited the urgency in my life, I would have made it to 4,5,6 Fortune 50 companies. When my husband died of cancer in December of 2013, I understood very clearly that this whole thing where people say, carpe diem—you really never know what is coming. Life is short. All of those things were no longer theory. It was real. And so, yes, I had been at PepsiCo for 10 years when Peter died, but I knew I couldn't spend another 10 years there and be in the middle. There was no way. For me, life felt like, look, if I don't get up and go get the thing right now, I may not have the opportunity.
AHUJA: Superpowers…or whatever it is that makes you original. I want to talk a little bit about the creative power of your intuition because you did a Ted Talk on this topic. In it, you said something that speaks to combatting imposter syndrome and about how molecular DNA shifts when we enter and leave a room. Tell us more.
SAINT JOHN: Here’s the funny thing, right? Because I’m a marketer, people forget that I actually have a science and math background. So, I think of matter, which comprises a bunch of molecules. And if each of us is a molecule, then when we enter a matter, the matter has to change—because that’s what happens with matter. You take out one little molecule, and the matter changes. You put in one molecule, and the matter changes. And so I, as an individual molecule in matter, which happens to be corporate settings—has to change because of my presence, and it will change again when I leave. That's why I believe that, regardless of what business I've been a part of or what experience I've had in the corporate space, my presence is important. It changes the way people behave. It changes the outcome of whatever we’re trying to achieve in the company.
AHUJA: One of the last times we were on stage together at a conference a few years back, you had just moved on from Apple and had this great anecdote about how when you told your parents you were leaving to go to ride-hailing firm Uber, they balked, asking why you would leave one of the most profitable companies in the world to go to a taxi company.
SAINT JOHN: Well, this goes to intuition, right? I’m going to tell you that every time I have jumped jobs or decided to quit, no one has cheered me. No one. Zero. I think after Peter’s death, I felt more emboldened to really live my life without all the rules and fear. And so when I [would] look at an opportunity, it was my intuition that would guide me because I would feel like, okay, let me go in and see what’s going on here, and if it felt right to me, I didn’t really care about the opinions of other people.
Thank you, Boz, for your time today.
MORE FROM FORBES
Globes Women newsletter. Editor-at-Large & Founder of Iconoclast, Globes' global investment summit featuring many of the world's greatest changemakers, billionaires and beyond. A former Globes “Under 30” lister myself, I am author of The Alpha Masters and host of Spotify’s “Megatrends” podcast. Before joining Globes, I was a Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia Journalism School and had over a decade-long tenure at CNBC, most recently as Senior Editor and co-founder of Delivering Alpha, the network’s flagship annual Wall Street summit. Formerly, as CNBC’s hedge fund specialist, I broke news on various activist campaigns like Herbalife and covered investigations such as Lehman Brothers’ insolvency during the financial crisis.I got my start in journalism as a part of The Wall Street Journal’s Money & Investing team and began my career at Citigroup at the age of seventeen—which is where I earned the nickname “Wall Street Maneet”.