If you’re an Emory University student, you’ve likely been the target of Assistant Professor in the Practice of Marketing Marina Cooley’s marketing strategies — or at least a viewer of her and her students’ TikToks. In fall 2022, Cooley’s digital content marketing class started a collective TikTok account that amassed 10 million views and 1.8 million likes in 30 days, earning the new professor renown beyond Goizueta Business School.
Cooley is a jack of many trades and a master of quite a few. A pioneer of marketing pedagogy, Cooley previously served as senior brand manager for Honest Tea at the Coca-Cola Company, founded a peanut butter company in her twenties and most recently became a sort of influencer, showcasing a weekly hobby to her thousands of Instagram followers. The New York Times recognized her work for integrating TikTok into the marketing curriculum and assigning student TikTokers who amass 25,000 views an A grade.
Born in Latvia, Cooley’s path to academia wasn’t linear. As an only child raised on “scarcity,” she felt the weight of her parents’ dreams pressing upon her shoulders and headed to New York University’s Stern School of Business. At university, Cooley quickly found her love of culture and people channeled through sociology, but she chose to study marketing consulting to combine passion and practicality. She felt the sector was “closer to culture” than finance, but nevertheless a field in which she could make money.
While Cooley loved the concepts of building a brand and carrying a vision through, consulting fell flat for her in terms of cultivating impact and pivoted.
“I thought that I could find a way to not love the job, but love the things that came with it, like being comfortable,” Cooley said. “It turned out that I was wrong, that I have to be deeply interested in what I’m doing — and I don’t think everyone is wired like that.”
Feeling unfulfilled, Cooley did “something ridiculous.” In 2010, as the natural food movement emerged alongside the early days of blogging, Cooley wrote a grant proposal, quit her consulting job and started Better Butter, her own peanut butter company.
“I created the brand, the story,” Cooley said. “I moved from New York to Philadelphia because it was a lower cost of living, and I rode my bike everywhere. Those are the most romantic days of my life.”
Through this venture, Cooley realized her passion for repairing the American food system. With a “layer of peanut butter” on her at all times, she began production in commercial kitchens, communicating with bloggers to review her product and shipping jars through FedEx. Propelled by her newfound energy for “building brands,” she earned a Robert W. Woodruff Scholarship from Goizueta with a plan.
Letting go of the “scarcity mindset,” Cooley went into her graduate education with her sights set on working for the Coca-Cola Company post-graduation to enact change in the private sector. Reflecting on six years at the company, Cooley examined the pleasant and unpleasant aspects of her early career.
“There were a lot of really unhealthy things about the organization that I was a part of at Coke,” Cooley said.
Driven by passion as an evolving force, Cooley said that her scholarship provided her the privilege to act on this passion. After giving birth to two children, she was surprised to see an email from a former professor at Goizueta asking if she would be interested in a faculty position opening in 2021.
“I read that email, and I just knew immediately, no matter what the pay cut was, ‘this is what I wanted to do,’” Cooley said. “A true moment of clarity.”
In August 2021, as uncertainty surrounding teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic increased, Cooley stepped into her new job. Deeply aware of the pandemic’s effect on internet reliance and media usage, Cooley realized how strongly internet culture had begun to translate through social influence, and began her teaching career with that in mind. She credits Emory and Goizueta for allowing her to be a “non-traditional hire” and, consequently, a non-conventional teacher.
Cooley celebrates storytelling as the central tenet of marketing. Despite having no teaching experience before Emory and “throwing a dart” with her syllabus structure, she found that teaching how to build a strong narrative — with TikTok as one vessel — is the fundamental truth of marketing.
“You should always be asking yourself, do I believe, and what would it take for me to believe?” Cooley said.
Cooley believes that in the digital age, storytelling has never been a more accessible skill.
“We’ve democratized creation, but the arc of a story has always been the same,” Cooley said. “As a consultant, as anyone selling anything, what’s the story?”
Cooley’s love of storytelling and her realism regarding the internet’s power is rooted in her foundational love for sociology. Effectively, her class prompts students to question the narratives built into Emory’s culture, building marketing strategies off of the colloquialism “the Harvard of the South” or comical digs at “finance bro” culture.
Cooley is constantly seeking ways to innovate her curriculum with the ultimate goal of teaching her students how to wield power over their platforms. This past semester, she instituted a social media cleanse in her content marketing class from three to seven days and a reflective essay to chart students’ emotions regarding this change.
“In some of the writing, I could feel the anger oozing off the page,” Cooley said. “And then by day four or five, they’re like, ‘I think I was addicted.’”
Cooley expressed the transformative power of a liberal arts education, which reshapes the way one thinks beyond grade metrics or job offers. She also emphasized how at its best, social media is a tool that can be controlled, whether to generate profit or reevaluate its presence in one’s personal life.
“The real trick is you have to create this part of yourself you’re willing to share, and to do this well you have to save a part for just you, for your family, for the people that actually know you,” Cooley said.
Her teaching philosophy has expanded to reframe social media as an immutable staple in her students’ daily routines. In doing so, Cooley imbibes her perspective on marketing as being founded in culture, making students question the role of digital storytelling every time they see an advertisement, like a post or read a headline.
Reflecting on the many hats she has worn, Cooley said she prioritizes ongoing new experiences both in the classroom and her personal life.
“If growth is one of the key ways of being happy, I live in growth,” Cooley said.
