[S2] [E9] How to Turn Anxiety to Professional Marketing with Sunni Sukumar, Marketing Director at preHIRED

Navigating the Rise

This week we have the opportunity to speak with Sunni Sukumar, Marketing Director at preHIRED. We explored various topics on how he broke out of the limitations he had and practiced his grit to get to where he is now. Some of those stories we heard from Sunni include:

* How Sunni grew up scared of white people because of all the racism he faced as a kid.

* His parents didn't teach him any Indian languages or the culture. They wanted him to be as American as possible to fit in America. After all, his parents struggled to fit into the US culture even though they spoke good English and were highly educated).

* Have severe social anxiety. That drove him to understand people better, which got him curious about marketing.

* How Sunni defined marketing as the science of helping people embrace change. People need to hope that "this time can be different." The reason is that we've almost all tried to get a result many times before we finally do. That same kind of fear keeps us from straying outside our culture to understand others.

Among everything Sunni described, the core things we touched upon include using exposure therapy to get over the hump. Also, Sunni mentioned how he combined anxiety and marketing. As a result, he does that by understanding people and how marketing can be used to relieve others' anxiety. He mentioned avoiding being trapped by data. The different techniques of marketing are dangerous. They take the emotion out of marketing. People buy from emotions, not data. Hence, most importantly, he views marketing as a way to help people embrace change.