Cantu Beauty Global Vice President of Marketing Dametria Kinsley is an entrepreneurial visionary. She is a maven of the hair industry, international marketing, product development and brand management. She has continued launched successful products and high-impact initiatives that have resulted in increased sales and growth for leading beauty companies.
What inspires you to show up at work every day, especially amidst a global pandemic?
It’s the people on the other end, who we are impacting every day with our products. It’s the people that I work with internally. It’s the people that are around the world, doing their absolute best to be an advocate for these brands and push the brand in their respective countries. It is truly the people both inside and outside that inspire me to do what I do every day. Just seeing the excitement, passion, and growth, even in the midst of everything going on in our environment, it continues to drive not just me, but my whole team to keep pushing.
How do you use collaboration as a marketing strategy?
Collaboration is a key to success. If you were to ask me what are my key strengths, one of them is collaboration because I really feel like there’s power in multiple perspectives. There’s power in other voices, there’s power in different people coming to the table. Now, I think there’s a place and time for each, so depending on where you are in the lifecycle of whatever you’re trying to do, sometimes there are more opportunities to bring more people in. Sometimes, you need just a smaller group to make the decision and keep things moving forward. So, it flexes depending on where you are. But I definitely think it’s important to allow everyone to have a voice and feel included in the process.
What would you consider your superpower to be and why?
I think this has to go back to my childhood. I come from a big family, very spiritual parents who were part of ministry, and a big faith-based community. So, I’d be remiss to say, if it was me who had the superpower, versus I have powers from a higher power. I live in stories, and I think that’s a superpower in that I can see a story or create a story and help bring the vision together. As a kid, I would create a story around a chore, and it would help make the chore go by faster if I pretended in my mind that my story was washing the dishes for my family, not for my siblings and my parents and the people that I didn’t want to be washing dishes for. But I was, in the future, doing dishes for my family. In business, when we’re thinking about new products we want to develop, or the consumers reaching out, we’re trying to create that narrative around the people we’re trying to reach. Where does she shop? What is she watching? What does success look like?
