The language-learning app Duolingo has spent the last several years cultivating a reputation for corporate behavior that might generously be called unhinged — crashing movie premieres, being ejected from sporting events, staging the apparent demise of its mascot. It is the sort of marketing that makes traditional brand managers reach for their approval matrices.
But according to Kat Chan, the company's senior director of brand marketing, the chaos is rather more choreographed than it appears. In a recent interview with Campaign, Ms. Chan described an operation built on what she called "high trust, lightning-fast execution and an obsession with taste" — a phrase that could describe either a marketing department or a particularly ambitious restaurant kitchen.
Ms. Chan, who previously worked at Red Bull, Tesla and Meta (a résumé that suggests a certain comfort with companies that generate headlines), outlined an approval process for responding to cultural moments that she said could be completed in under an hour. For those accustomed to the traditional agency model, in which a topical reference must be approved by roughly as many people as a minor treaty, this may require a moment of adjustment.
The interview also addressed what Ms. Chan called the "uncopyable moat" of good taste — her explanation for why brands that attempt to replicate Duolingo's internet-native antics tend to produce results that feel, as one might put it, like a photocopy of a photocopy. (The owl, it seems, knows when you are merely pretending to be chaotic.)
Whether the green owl's theatrical unruliness can sustain itself as a long-term brand strategy remains an open question. But for now, Duolingo appears to have solved a problem that has vexed marketers since the first brand joined Twitter: how to be genuinely weird on the internet without anyone in legal having to lie down.
Original story published in campaignlive.com: "Campaign Chemistry: Duolingo’s Kat Chan | Campaign US"