AI is accelerating how marketing gets done, but the more difficult questions still come back to people: What makes a brand meaningful? How do you change customers’ perceptions? And how do you help teams adapt without losing the judgment and creativity that make their work effective?
At a recent Marketers That Matter® Forum hosted by Canva, three top marketing leaders explored these questions through their experiences building brands and reshaping established categories.
Our expert panel of speakers included:
- Dana Marineau, Chief Marketing Officer, North America, Canva
- David Corns, Chief Marketing Officer, Turo
- Sean Seitzinger, VP of Brand and Consumer Marketing, Kaiser Permanente
Moderated by Kathy Hollenhorst, Chief Community Officer of Marketers That Matter®, the conversation covered brand differentiation, cultural relevance, AI’s role in creative work, building resilient teams, and the career pivots that prepare marketers to lead. Here are key insights from the discussion:
Making the Difference Behind the Brand Truly Matter
One brand challenge was a common thread: helping people understand why a familiar name deserves a different place in their lives.
Dana Marineau of Canva described the company’s focus on “informed awareness.” Many people recognize Canva, she said, but fewer understand the breadth of what they can do with it. The task is to connect that recognition with a meaningful understanding of the product and its everyday uses.
For David Corns of Turo, the challenge involves entering a familiar category while demonstrating a better experience. Turo attracted people seeking distinctive cars, but many consumers still weren’t considering it when they needed an everyday rental. Its platform, “Rent a car, not a rental car,” addresses that gap by putting Turo into the rental conversation while distinguishing the experience it offers.
Sean Seitzinger of Kaiser Permanente described a different obstacle: convincing skeptical consumers that meaningful differences exist in an industry many view as uniformly broken. Simply announcing better healthcare outcomes and services isn’t enough when people don’t believe the underlying model is different.
“The world has to know that we’re different before they’re going to believe we’re better,” Seitzinger said. For his team, that means first explaining Kaiser Permanente’s integrated model of care, creating a foundation for people to understand and believe its benefits.
Finding the Human Insight That Makes Creative Work
Understanding what customers feel and value, even as the tech tools for reaching them change, was a common theme across brands.
Marineau recalled receiving dozens of messages after announcing she was joining Canva. Friends and former colleagues shared things they’d created on the platform. The insight was in their sense of ownership; they were proud of what they made themselves.
“You imagined it, you dreamt it, and you made it,” she said. That feeling of personal accomplishment offers a compelling starting point for the brand, regardless of which technology helps people create.
She also shared an example of connecting a product to a timely cultural moment. After two celebrities made headlines for changing their hairstyles, Canva’s social media team quickly created organic content showing how the platform could change their looks again. Marineau described it as one of the team’s strongest-performing social assets, using a playful moment to demonstrate what the product could do.
Asked whether AI created the response, she credited the people who spotted the opportunity. “It was a human idea executed by humans,” Marineau said.
Corns saw an opportunity in combining creative thinking with faster execution. He described sitting in meetings where an idea that once would have required an agency brief and two weeks of work was instead finished in Canva and ready to ship by the time the meeting ended.
“We’ve never been in a better place where creative, disruptive thinkers can practice their craft at speed and see real-time results,” he said.
Where AI Acceleration Meets Human Judgment
The panelists agreed on AI’s ability to accelerate work, but when asked about whether it could develop taste their shared nuanced perspectives.
“I don’t think AI alone, without human decision-making, can have taste,” Marineau said. She described using AI daily to work through problems and help teams operate more effectively, while drawing a distinction between those uses and the human insight behind a great campaign.
Corns expressed openness to the possibility. “I actually think AI can be taught taste over time,” he said, suggesting that individuals could train systems on their preferences and creative decisions. But he still saw a limit in tools that draw from what already exists.
“Ultimately the biggest ideas and the most disruptive ideas are not going to come from the robots,” Corns said.
Seitzinger cautioned against underestimating the experience behind effective marketing. “We’re asking to just press a button and replicate hundreds, if not thousands, of people’s decades of experience and judgment and nuance,” he said.
He referenced the craft of claymation to illustrate the stakes: Small details in how a character moves can affect how people respond, even when they can’t explain why. His concern with AI-generated work was similar. Subtle choices can erode trust without showing up as obvious mistakes to the team producing it.
The practical takeaway was to evaluate AI against the quality and effectiveness of the work. As Corns put it: “Just because you can doesn’t always mean you should.”
Bringing Customers and Partners Along Through Change
As brands evolve, their customers, employees, and partners may have different expectations about where to go next.
Marineau described the challenge of serving Canva’s community while also meeting the needs of a wide range of partners. A teacher or small-business owner likely thinks about the platform differently from a financial partner or an artist. AI adds another layer to those conversations, given the strong (and sometimes conflicting) reactions it generates.
Her approach centers on listening, explaining the company’s direction, and being candid when something doesn’t work. Marineau emphasized “full transparency and making sure we are learning from each other.”
Seitzinger emphasized recognizing which parts of a brand its loyal customers already value. Modernization should carry those associations forward. He pointed to Kaiser Permanente’s recognizable blue color as an example of an established brand element that requires thoughtful stewardship.
For Corns, brand purpose provides a way to evaluate decisions and then explain them. Turo’s internal purpose, centered on reinventing the car rental industry and unlocking independence, helps guide priorities and partnerships. It also gives the company a basis for explaining where AI fits and what it is intended to achieve.
Building Resilient and Adaptable Teams
When the conversation turned to their changing organizational structures, the leaders focused on helping people take ownership, keep learning, and navigate change.
Corns opened with a conviction: “I actually think the importance of the human is greater than it’s ever been because of AI.” From there, he described his preference for small, accountable teams supported by the right partners. With research and other resources more readily available through AI, he sees an opportunity to reduce layers and give people greater ability to develop and execute ideas.
“I always like to say we’re about making, not meeting,” he said.
Seitzinger emphasized applying technology in ways that reflect the organization’s core mission and values. Curiosity and a learning environment matter, but so does responsibility for the downstream effects of decisions, particularly in healthcare.
Marineau focused on resilience. “I think we’re in a moment where we need the most resilient type of marketers,” she said. With the pace of change creating sharp highs and lows, she wants people who can help one another remain steady.
That resilience also requires room to acknowledge mistakes. Corns described a practice of sharing three wins and three failures, helping teams explain what went wrong and how they plan to fix it.
Marineau shared a similar practice inspired by Ted Lasso: “goldfish presentations.” At monthly meetings, team members discuss work that didn’t go as planned, what they learned, and where they need some assistance. Over time, people began volunteering to present.
“It teaches people to say, ‘Hey, this thing didn’t go very well,’ or ‘I need help,’” she said. “And it teaches you that it’s okay to say that.”
Career Lessons from Taking the Harder Turn
The leaders closed by reflecting on career moves that required them to learn unfamiliar disciplines or rethink assumptions about where they belonged.
Seitzinger spent years as a consumer products marketer before deep research into consumer wellness led him to a question: Could the same brand and marketing discipline that built name-brand products also help transform healthcare? That question eventually pulled him into the industry. He said others warned him against switching into a regulated field. He made the move anyway and found a strong connection between his marketing experience and work that could improve people’s lives.
“I’m really happy I had the courage to change industries and change my career,” he said.
Marineau traced her development from brand marketing and creative work at Electronic Arts to learning growth and performance marketing at Credit Karma. She knew that becoming a CMO would require understanding the full discipline, even when the learning was uncomfortable.
She describes that balance as aiming for work that is “meaningful and measurable” and storytelling substantial enough to matter, paired with a clear read on whether it’s working.
Corns shared a similar experience moving from creative agency leadership into a CMO role.
Data analysis and performance marketing became skills he had to actively develop, to the point that others now identify him with that expertise versus his roots in branding.
“Growth is hard,” he said, encouraging marketers to take the turns that feel difficult because those moves open possibilities they’d otherwise miss.
About the Speakers
Dana Marineau, Chief Marketing Officer, North America, Canva
Dana Marineau leads North American marketing at Canva, where she is building the regional team as the company evolves its global and regional marketing model. Her work focuses on helping people understand the platform’s capabilities and strengthening its connection with its community.
Before Canva, Marineau worked at Rakuten and Credit Karma following 15 years at Electronic Arts. Her career spans brand marketing, advertising, design, and growth marketing, combining a creative foundation with experience measuring business impact.
David Corns, Chief Marketing Officer, Turo
David Corns leads global marketing at Turo, with teams across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia. His remit includes brand building, demand generation, demand capture, and defining the brand purpose that guides the company’s marketing.
Corns attended art school and built his career in creative agencies, progressing through brand management and agency leadership before becoming a CMO. At Turo, he brings that creative background together with a focus on data, performance, and challenging established expectations of car rental.
Sean Seitzinger, VP of Brand and Consumer Marketing, Kaiser Permanente
Sean Seitzinger leads brand and consumer marketing at Kaiser Permanente, where his work focuses on communicating the organization’s integrated approach to care and coverage and helping the brand navigate a changing healthcare industry.
His background includes consumer products marketing and work with Coca-Cola. Research into consumer wellness inspired his move into healthcare, where he has applied his brand and marketing experience to helping people understand their choices and connect with care.
Forum moderator Kathy Hollenhorst is a Marketers That Matter® Advisor & Chief Community Officer.
Marketers That Matter® is a community of top marketing executives coming together to pioneer the future of marketing, sharing real-time experiences, and solving current challenges.
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