Ad Age is marking Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2023 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction here.) Today, our guest editor Soyoung Kang, CMO of skincare brand eos, writes about thinking behind the award-winning “Bless your f#@%ing cooch” campaign.

Early in my marketing career, I was told that I wasn’t the “creative one,” I was the “analytical one.” 

Was it true? Maybe. After a decade in management consulting, I had finally made the leap into my first brand role and was just learning the fundamentals.

But oh, did that comment burn. I bristled, feeling boxed in. That familiar strain of enduring others’ expectations of an Asian kid. You have to be practical. You should be a doctor. You must be good at math.

Perhaps I had approached my new job like I approached everything: observe, assess, decode and then, finally, reconstruct. I suppose that’s “analytical.” It’s what I’ve done my whole life. Watch and learn, find the patterns, replicate.

Growing up as a first-generation Korean-American immigrant, these skills felt existential to me. When I showed up on the first day of school without a single word of English. When I visited a new friend’s house and felt lost on dinner-table etiquette. When my family couldn’t afford cool new shiny objects, so I had to improvise.

Because eventually, you learn not just to replicate, you learn to remix. It’s something more than code-switching; it’s code-hacking. And you can get so good at it, it becomes like breathing, a background process that’s always running. Many people who grew up “other” know it well.

Over time, code-hacking has become my creative asset. Being creative without constraints is a beautiful thing—but that’s art, not brand-building. Wielding creativity to build a brand and a business is about deftly balancing all the variables, from the mundane to the sublime. You have to know how to move quickly and how to take big steps, both of which require a keen analytical mind.

In early 2021, I was a couple years into my role as eos Products’ first-ever CMO. As we sheltered at home, eos was unexpectedly tagged in a hilarious, profane and super-educational TikTok that went mega-viral. Our cult-favorite shave cream was declared to be the secret for how to “bless your f#@%ing cooch” as a young fan pantomimed exactly how she shaved to achieve a “smooth @$% hooha.”

As a brand that had been active on TikTok for years by that point, we knew that a swift, daring response was the best way to keep the momentum going. And so, our team did what few brands would do: We printed her verbatim NSFW words directly onto our products, within just three days. What followed was a spicy, months-long campaign built on cooch strategies, hooha education and some very funny creators. Also, sustained business growth that continues to this day.

Our team’s rapid-response campaign has been lauded as creative and bold, going where few marketers may have dared to go. But to me, ours was the most obvious reaction. To see what was working in real-time—being authentic, unfiltered, educational, funny—and remixing it in a fresh and surprising way. 

In the end, those schoolyard lessons have served me well: observe, assess, decode, reconstruct. And if possible, add an F-bomb or two.