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“Ubiquity is the opposite of cool.” That brand wisdom comes from Urban Outfitters’ CEO, and it’s a saying Sheila Joglekar Vashee picked up back when she worked in retail. “Gap in the 90s was the perfect example of this. It was on every street corner, and it stopped being cool,” she says. “As you grow, the challenge becomes how to remain relevant. There's something special about being the challenger, the underdog. There are still ways to keep that spirit alive.” She points to brands like Harley Davidson and Apple, which successfully kept their it factor even as they became huge companies. She’s now the Chief Marketing Officer of Figma, where she spends a lot of time thinking about what it takes to build a beloved brand for a public company with widespread usage. In this episode of Executive Function, she walks through what excellent marketing looks like in 2026. She shares: - Why AI needs more optimistic stories: “So many new opportunities are created with platform shifts: the internet, the Industrial Revolution, mobile and social. We haven’t been optimistic enough about AI — there's room to recapture the joy of building and making that got us all here in the first place,” she says.
- How to run marketing as a portfolio of maintenance and moonshots: “The creative breakthrough ideas always seem crazy when you look at them individually, but as a portfolio you realize these are the risks you should be taking toward the step change outcomes,” she says. “But you need to have them as part of a portfolio, because if one of them doesn’t work, you still need to hit your numbers and run the business.”
- Why quick-hit growth plays can stain your brand: “Think about any spammy ad you’ve seen on TikTok,” she says. “That doesn’t improve brand perception, but it gets your attention in the moment and it might make you click. Over time, that’s detrimental to a company’s brand, even if it’s effective as a local maximum for that channel.”
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