Grace Nikae is a brand and content strategist, advisory consultant, and fractional CMO with over 15 years of experience. She’s also the marketing director of Women in Tech NYC and the founder of Kizuna, a strategic initiatives firm helping startups, SMEs, and thought leaders build meaningful brands.
Over the years, Grace has worked with many startups and prominent brands like Prince Waikiki, Zara, Adidas, and many more.
But Grace didn’t start out in marketing. She was a child prodigy and former international concert pianist, esteemed as a “master of the instrument and the most compelling concert artist of her generation.”
In this interview, she shares how she built a brand & content strategist career, lessons along the way, and much more.
What inspired you to get into the marketing industry? From being a concert pianist to becoming a fiction writer, why marketing?
How that happened was accidental, like many things in life. I was considering leaving my career as a concert pianist. I had done it for two decades and wanted to explore other parts of me to see what I could do outside of that.
During my years touring as a soloist, there were three things I loved doing at night in the hotel room. One was reading, the second was writing, and the third was that I taught myself how to code.
My venture into marketing started from the back end as a developer. First, I started building websites and mobile apps, and it was just for me – a kind of creative hobby I liked, building things from the ground up.
Then, I began my author career, and this accidental marketing career started because people came to me and said, “Hey, I saw that you built your own website. Hey, I saw that you do graphic design. Hey, I saw you did this. Can you do it for me as well?”
And I think for those considering a marketing career, I also want to emphasize that timing plays a huge role because this happened right at the start of social media. It was maybe 2003 or 2004. WordPress had just come out, and people didn’t have that kind of skill set yet.
So, it was a total timing and opportunity moment when people started coming to me. I greatly enjoyed the challenge of first building these websites, which later translated into event production, visuals, and then ultimately into social media and brand strategy.
Did you have to take any courses to familiarize yourself with the marketing industry?
I taught myself! I’ve always been a big proponent of the idea that the best learning comes from doing. And I think my skill set naturally as a creative artist, like I said, it was always about connection and communication, whatever form that may be.
So, I lean towards that naturally anyway. I brought all of that emotional intelligence and understanding of people – how do we connect with one another – I brought all of that into the marketing sphere as well.
How do you combine the creative aspect of your fiction-writing and concert-pianist side with the rigid sphere of startup marketing?
I’ve always had a passion for building things from the ground up, and that’s always been very exciting to me in the startup space. The startup space has a lot of innovation, which ties very well with creativity.
This is actually a question I get asked very often – about all these pivots that I’ve made in my life and how they translate into marketing and brand, et cetera.
My approach to it is that I’m very passionate about human connection. That’s my why. That’s something I can talk about every single day – 24 hours a day, for 20, 30 years, no problem.
For me, human connection is the connective thread between all these things I’ve done, whether it’s as an artist, musician, author, or what I do now in marketing.
It requires a tremendous amount of creativity to be able to allow a brand’s voice to be uniquely positioned and to be differentiated from the rest. That requires constantly thinking out of the box, and that is a creative process.
Now we know that in marketing, there are so many misconceptions. Being a brand and content strategist, what misconceptions do people have about what you do?
They think that having followers on social media equates to a strong brand and business, and the two are not connected at all. That’s one of the biggest things.
So I think the chase of vanity metrics and looking at it that way, rather than what brand and content strategy really is about: it’s about clarifying your brand voice, your brand positioning, who you are, and building a community – an engaged, aligned community around that.
That’s really where the sweet spot is in how business can grow.
Speaking of brand strategy, what is your process for creating a brand strategy?
A lot of it is very creative brainstorming work, especially at the beginning. For me, brand strategy is about the intersection of three things:
- The context: this means the competitive landscape that you’re in in your market.
- The associations that people – your community and your customers make about you.
- Your story: this means your values, your mission, your vision.
When these three things intersect, that’s the sweet spot of what a brand is.
I’ve always said that brand is identity, meaning that we are not just who we are. Of course, we have our own stories, experiences, and values, but it’s also how people perceive us. It’s also the context.
For instance, I’m an Asian American with a Japanese background, but I live in the United States. That is all part of how identity is formed, and it’s the same thing with a brand.
We know now that marketing needs to be human-centered. How do you make your marketing strategies human-centered?
I’m very much a proponent of emotional intelligence as being a much-needed skill.
These soft skills in marketing and in the future of the economy – as things become much more automated and AI-driven – the ability to communicate, think critically, create a vision, imagine, innovate, and understand one another will be even more crucial moving forward.
And so, for me, it’s always about active listening and active connection.
If you are trying to build a brand, you should focus on authenticity and community.
Authenticity in terms of brand building is being honest, being transparent, having integrity, and having respect for the community and the people that you’re building for.
That includes actively listening to them. Do you know what they want?
It is amazing to me how many people are trying to build businesses, and then when you ask them, “Do you know your community? Do you know what they want? Do you know what they’re struggling with?” They have zero idea. There’s a disconnect because you don’t even know the people around you.
I think that’s so critical. When you talk about human connection, it’s about you being human yourself and centering the human experience in every aspect of that.
You’ve talked a lot about human connection. Is that why the agency is named Kizuna?
Yes. I’m so glad you asked that. I was born in Japan but raised in the United States, and my work as an author has very much influenced my love for languages.
One of the things that I really love are these words in different languages that don’t have an English equivalent. I’m very obsessed with these words where they don’t exist in another language.
Kizuna, in Japanese, is one of those words. It’s a word that I’ve loved since I was a child. It means the enduring bond of connection.
For context, remember the children that you went to kindergarten with? All of you had a collective experience, and you may not see each other for 60 years. Still, when you see each other again as senior citizens, there’s a bond there – a bond that you had because of that very unique shared experience as children.
That’s what Kizuna is. It’s that kind of bond, and I wanted to make it a central part of my business – building this unbreakable bond with your community as a brand, in your content, something that cannot be replaced or that is unique. That’s where it came from.
And this bond for startups is what contributes to their growth, whether in terms of traffic or sales?
For me, it’s not just sales but conversations and engagement.
This is one of the mistakes I’ve seen startup founders make. When they’re not clear on brand, they will go and talk about all the technical stuff – all the stuff they’re excited about.
“This is innovative because of this and this and this,” and they go on and on and on.
But they’ve already lost the person listening in the first two minutes because they don’t care about that stuff. They want to know how what you do will solve a larger issue for them.
And so, when we talk about that sort of human connection, the questions I ask are, “Is there a conversation happening? Are they engaged? Are the people you’re speaking with asking you active questions?”
These questions are a sign that a connection is being made and that can be leveraged into sales and growth, and all of that.
How do you maximize the content’s potential to move the needle the most?
I’m not an advocate that a brand has to be on every single platform. I think that is a waste of time and money.
I think you should go where your audience is and where you feel most comfortable as a brand, meaning that if you are coming in with authenticity and an established brand voice, where can you move the needle the most?
For example, there are several brands that are killing it on TikTok: Ryanair and Duolingo, because they’re leaning into that subversive voice that is part of their brand culture.
TikTok is a perfect place for that, where you can make fun of yourself and do those kind of videos. Everybody hops on, and they’re like, oh, this is so amazing, and everyone’s laughing. So that works great for them.
There are other places where a brand can really shine.
Another example is the Wendy’s Twitter account. They have been killing it for decades with their roasting of other accounts. That also can work.
It really depends on a number of factors: your audience, your brand values, and your voice.
Dive in and focus your effort there; otherwise, you’re just putting stuff out into the void. It’s going to take up too much time and is not the best way to move the needle.
What are the signs that your marketing strategy is not working?
I’m a huge proponent of testing, experimenting, and iteration. So, I really believe that the quicker you know that something doesn’t work, the better.
For example, something like social needs a bit of time to get traction. I would probably give it two or three months to see if something is working. If not, pivot!
Anytime you do anything related to marketing, there has to be a very clear reason why you’re doing it. I think that’s often part of the problem because people do things without tangible reasons in the larger scope of things.
They think they should be on social just because they should be on social, but they don’t know why they’re on social. Then, it skews the metrics of what you’re looking at.
So, if you’re very clear on why you’re doing something, then you can understand more quickly. If the results are not addressing that reason and they’re not supporting it or helping it to grow in the way that you want, then you can pivot.
For instance, if you’re on a certain social platform and doing things to get inbound leads, but over six or seven weeks of consistent posting, you’re not getting any kind of leads, clearly, something’s not there, so there needs to be a pivot.
How do you keep up with the ever-changing landscape of marketing?
I am a big advocate for being a practitioner, and I think this is something that gets lost a lot, especially in marketing leadership. As you get further up, you get further distanced from the actual marketing that’s happening.
For example, I have a large following on TikTok. I have about 84,000 on TikTok. And through that following, I built a full-time leadership consulting business. A few years ago, there was no website and no newsletter. It was just that platform.
I’m a content strategist. I want to understand all the platforms. So I jumped on TikTok for one month as a consumer at the beginning of the pandemic, just to scroll and understand what the platform is about before I started creating.
I’m a huge advocate that if you are going to do something – if you are a marketer in social, paid emails, copywriting, or website building, you need to practice and understand it for yourself before being able to give any kind of advice.
So, I am always the first to dive into anything new that pops up on the radar. I will be the first person in there to get a feel for it and understand the shift that’s happening.
That’s an important part of marketing leadership because you need to have a vision of what might happen two to five years down the line.
Part of that is being in tune with the cultural and societal zeitgeist, what’s happening, and where the shift is happening. It’s asking the crucial question: where is everybody starting to lean towards? And being up to date on that.
I think it goes to say that if you want to know how to use a platform well or if you want to sell a product on a particular platform, you should also be able to use that platform for yourself.
Yes, you should understand how the platform works.
It’s astonishing to me how many people try to market and sell things, but they don’t understand the vibe of a platform, or they don’t really understand how people connect there.
That’s why it comes across as so tone-deaf and gross. You’re like, what are you doing?
So, yes, please use the platform as a consumer first. Understand what it’s about before you try to market or sell anything there.
Based on your experience building a digital marketing agency, Kizuna, how do you get inbound leads to work with?
Right now, the majority of my leads have come in from referrals and my in-person network. But the reason why I’ve hopped on X and LinkedIn is to be able to start scaling that in a different way.
I want to advocate here that I know how to build a healthy lead pipeline through platforms because I’m a content strategist. But I want to encourage everyone that there is no one way if you are trying to build leads.
For you, a lead pipeline might look something different: it might be going to another website and tapping into the subscription there and getting cold leads. For others willing to put in that investment and time, you can build on social.
I know where my strengths lie and where my brand lies. If I’m going to help people with content strategy, I have to produce content. I have to be on social media to show that. That’s how I’m trying to scale right now.
How do you spot the right hire for your agency? How do you know this person gets what I want to do? This is someone who gets the clients I work for, and this is someone who understands my creative space.
I think what I look for more than anything are the qualities that cannot be trained. There are a lot of skills that you can train someone.
For example, someone can come in with no skills in email marketing, or they don’t really have skills in graphic design. All that stuff can be trained.
I look for what’s untrainable: passion, personality, character, and how they approach work, growth, and learning.
These things matter to me more than actual skill sets because those things cannot be taught. So, I often look for someone who has a sense of individuality and who has their vision.
Another thing that I look for is people who can see the things that I cannot see. Every leader has their blind spots. You want to surround yourself with a team that can see the things that you are not able to see.
That is critically important and the quality I’m looking for when I hire people.
At what point did you start making money from marketing?
In the beginning, the first people who came to me and asked me to build things for them were friends, so I did it for free. And then when those friends started referring me to people I didn’t know, I started charging and thought, okay, I can actually do this, and maybe this is interesting to me.
There are only two reasons why someone should ever work for free. Just in case anyone’s starting out right now and thinking about how to do this: when you are at the very, very beginning with zero experience.
And even then, I would convert to monetization as quickly as possible. So, I would do maybe two projects just to get some kind of portfolio and experience. Then the next one – even if it’s a small amount – charge so you can get into the habit of charging.
Time is your greatest commodity. You never want to waste time. So, you don’t want to spend six months doing free work. It’s unnecessary. Two projects only; get it under your belt and start moving forward.
The only other time to do something for free is because you’re financially stable, have the time, and want to help someone.
But other than that, never, never do anything for free. Even if it’s just a toke – not a huge amount – it’s to kind of get into the habit of “I’m doing this work, and I’m going to get paid for it accordingly.”
How do you know when to increase your price?
Let’s say you start a service, and you’re kind of experimenting and testing to see if it’ll work.
When the clients start coming in, and it gets to a point where you are overwhelmed with clients because you have a lot of stuff coming in, it’s clear that the service is valuable, and you are getting exhausted because of the amount of time that’s being taken up by it.
That’s when you know you need to raise your rate. Then, you can reduce the workload in terms of the number of clients, but you still can make the same amount or more doing the same service.
How do you balance being creative with a brand’s need for clear, concise messaging?
When I talk about brand positioning or figuring out brand strategy, it’s a creative problem-solving exercise. So, creativity is a part of it, but that creativity is applied towards coming to a solution.
For example, when I first start working with a startup, the first thing I do is to have interviews with major investors, clients, and stakeholders to get their perceptions of how they view the brand.
Next, it’s about collating all of that data together and going through a creative workshop or problem-solving workshop with everybody else – the C-suite and advisory board – to come to an understanding and agreement on “this is who we are, and we’re going to clarify it and hone in on this messaging because this is what best aligns with our place in the market, with the things that we value and the way that people perceive us.”
What books are not specifically for marketing but marketers need to read them?
I think every marketer should be reading, actually, everyone. I will say every entrepreneur should be reading as much fiction as they can.
We are in a weird situation with our culture now, where everyone is reading how-to books and only nonfiction books. It’s so limiting!
Nonfiction books tell you what to think, but fiction encourages you to think for yourself.
And there is nothing more important, I think, in any field than that particular skill. So, I would encourage everyone to dive into fiction. It doesn’t have to be boring literature.
Read what you love. If you love action stuff, read action stuff. If you love fantasy, read that. If you love mystery, read that. Read whatever it is you love. That will inspire a certain part of your brain to get active in the creative center to interpret and think for yourself. And that is a powerful, powerful skill to have.
Imagine someone walks up to you in New York and tells you, “Hi, Grace, I’m trying to get into marketing. What do I have to do to become a marketer?”
This is not going to be a common response because I’m not going to give skills advice. Like I said before, skills can always be taught and can always be learned.
So, my advice would be to understand people.
Develop your ability for empathy, communication, and understanding. Learn to understand people.
Some of the best marketers are extraordinary teachers in terms of how they understand the human experience. Ultimately, that is what marketing is. You are making that connection to someone and understanding them well enough to say, “Hey, I can solve this problem for you; I can help you.”
So, in order to be able to do that, you have to understand people. That’s the number one, most critical, and often overlooked skill.
What are some successes and accomplishments as a brand and content strategist along your career journey?
There’s been quite a few that I’ve been very thrilled about. I recently worked with a fintech startup that was trying to move into the travel space. When they brought me on board, they had no brand. And after six months of pretty intensive work, they landed three huge giants in the travel industry as clients.
Also, when I was brought on board with Prince Waikiki, they had been around as an organization for about 25 years as a three-star hotel. Then, they underwent a top-to-bottom renovation in the hotel and changed their name. It was a complete rebrand, and they went from a three-star hotel to a luxury five-star hotel.
So, it was a completely different market for them. They brought me on board to lead that transformation, and I developed and built the marketing team from the ground up. It was like working with a startup, even though they’d been around for a long time.
Within the first year, I shifted all of their marketing into digital: social, SEO, and online advertising. We had a 140% jump in revenue growth in one year.
That was something that I was enormously proud of. We were ranked and became #1 on TripAdvisor and #2 on Travel + Leisure best resorts in Hawaii. I was very proud of that success, and it was certainly not just because of me but because of my marketing team, who did amazing work.
So, there have been many successes like that along the way that I’m very proud of.
I think the biggest thing that I’m happiest about is when I see a business own who they are as a brand. You can see that they have a sense of self and voice, and it’s translating into the right alignment with their audience and community.
How do you juggle being busy and remaining creative?
I think it’s really important to be connected with yourself. I’m very in tune with my body. I’m very in tune with myself. I don’t force ideas. I don’t create when I don’t feel something.
For example, when I’m feeling low energy and low vibration, it’s a sign that I need to nourish and take care of myself.
So I have to go and fill up my cup by reading some wonderful fiction books, going to the museum, listening to music, and doing things that inspire me. Otherwise, there is no source for creativity to be born.
What marketing advice would you give your younger self?
Don’t be afraid, and don’t run from the fear. Embrace the fear because that’s where all the good stuff is. That’s where the growth is. That’s where everything wonderful is going to emerge from. Don’t run from the fear.
What are some tools that you use as part of your workflow?
Oh, I have quite a bit. Let’s see.
- Google Workspace for managing the business itself.
- QuickBooks for finances.
- Notion as my client portal.
- Scrivener, which is a writing app for all of my writing.
- Sprout social for social content for me and my clients.
- Adobe Creative suite for all creative and visual work.
And probably a whole bunch more that I can’t remember right now, but these come first to me.
Away from marketing questions, what type of wine do you like?
For the longest time, I was very much a Rioja fan, and that was because I lived in Spain for a little while, and I love the wines there.
Recently, I have started to lean very much towards either Chilean or New Zealand’s very dry Sauvignon Blancs. I like the occasional Rosé during the summers, but I mostly lean towards Sauvignon Blancs.
If you were to have a glass of wine with any marketing professional of your choice, past or present, who would it be?
Gary Vee! Gary Vaynerchuk. I think he’d be fun to have a drink with. I think he’d be very interesting. And then we could just talk for like an hour. That would be nice. I would love that!
Where can we go to learn more about Grace?
Kizunanyc on Twitter.
kizunanyc.com for my website.
You can certainly find more information about me there.