At Setup, we have the privilege of partnering with multiple established marketing agencies with groundbreaking business practices and leadership styles. In this series, we will highlight these leaders’ stories in order to inspire, educate, and unlock new ways of thinking to marketers.  

Today’s feature is Josh Perlstein, the CEO of Response Media.

What gap in the market led to the creation of your agency?

Our agency was founded on a couple of beliefs:

1. Companies need more meaningful data at scale, and need to use data more strategically and intelligently to make marketing work more effectively. That is precisely what we do – help companies grow their zero and first party data, and then build and execute strategies to leverage that data for more effective marketing.

2. The other principle - we believe as consumers, our minds are more cluttered than ever these days. The only marketing that we see which consistently breaks through that clutter is meaningful relationships between brands and their audiences. We see meaningful relationships using a value exchange as the future of marketing – where value is delivered from the brand in the form of hyper-personalized promotions, education, community, inspiration, and the like.

What differentiates your agency from others?

In addition to what you’d consider typical agency services, we’ve curated a unique set of services to help brands intelligently grow using data as their North Star. We enable and empower responsible brands to confidently grow their data, maximize value, and reliably measure how it contributes to brand growth. It’s a really cool system that’s been proven for some of the largest brands in the world.

 Are any of your personal values incorporated into the agency?

Response Media echoes my values and beliefs in candid transparency (where we all can learn as much from the bad news as the good, with honest opinions always welcome), respectful dialogue (using the golden rule), the power of collaboration (you can’t know all the answers – but we can learn from one another), and the value of diverse sets of people contributing to create the best solutions (the world is a diverse place, and different points of view are critical to solving a problem).

 Do you have any advice for marketers?

My best advice to marketers is to build your capacity to EMPATHIZE. Empathy is not only the key to successful relationships with peers, coworkers, and teams, but also the key to creating great marketing. Empathy helps marketers visualize how to create meaningful value to all stakeholders. 

Understand each stakeholder group and their perspectives, see things through their gaze. Mastering empathy will help you create meaningful and valuable interactions which consistently produce great marketing results.