Fun-sized Filipina who writes about marketing, writing, and life. Sometimes she mixes them up to make cool stuff.
Hey! Ria from Manila here. First of all, thanks for taking the time to get to know me. I hope this bio gives you a good idea of the face behind the words. I’ll start with four essential things about myself.
- I’m a marketer by day
- I’m a writer by heart
- I’m very passionate
- I’m a lifelong learner
Meet Ria
A Marketer By Day
“Marketing is simply storytelling.”
To be specific, I’m a trade marketer. Ring any bells?
Yeah, I didn’t know about it either until I started working. Since this is probably the least known subset of marketing, here’s the easiest way to describe it…
Research suggests there’s power in reflecting on the what ifs
The words that changed my outlook came from, of all places, a presentation on workplace safety at my new job. “Always report the near misses,” the facilitator said, as a slide showed a couple of boxes falling off a forklift and narrowly missing the man standing underneath it.
When I saw the image, I flinched. But then I thought, “Wow, lucky guy.”
This past year has been a string of near misses for me. My sister, a doctor, tested positive for Covid-19 but had an asymptomatic case. Soon after switching jobs, I learned that my former company would be shuttering…
Be your own hypeman
“You’re on in one minute!” signaled the stage crew.
This was it — the finals. Three months of blood, sweat, and tears came down to this moment. Waiting in the stage wings, the team huddled for one last time. And right before we stepped onto the spotlight, our coach said six powerful words that sent the adrenaline on overdrive: “When you walk in, you win.” I was ready to go kill it.
We ended up winning the dance competition. I don’t know if that’s the reason the phrase stuck with me. But since then, I found myself using it before…
Redefining success in “The Defining Decade”
As of writing, I had just turned 27 years old — my first, and hopefully last pandemic birthday.
This health crisis has slowed down what would have been a flurry of activity for 20-somethings. This defining decade is supposed to be a time for chasing and realizing desires — Career growth and side-hustles. Licensure. Rock-solid abs. Financial security. The opportunity to travel, meet new people, and learn new things. We want to be more sure of ourselves, of what we want, and where we’re going. …
Lessons from ‘The Breakfast Epiphany’ that launched a shoe empire.
In 1971, the University of Oregon was sponsored with a new, expensive running track. Though track team coach Bill Bowerman was pleased with the top-of-the-line polyurethane surface, he had a problem: His runners weren’t getting the most out of it. Their metal-spiked shoes just didn’t offer the best grip.
Bill sought ways to modify and adapt the running shoes. Then, on one fine Sunday morning, as his wife was serving breakfast, something caught his eye: the waffle iron.
The gridded pattern made him wonder: “What if you reversed the pattern and formed a material with raised waffle-grid nubs?”
This simple marketing framework will help you change your behavior
The greatest marketers are obsessed with understanding their consumers. Why? Because as Seth Godin says, “Marketing is our quest to make change on behalf of those we serve, and we do it by understanding the irrational forces that drive each of us.”
There are a hundred ways a marketer can go about creating a marketing plan. But at the core of it lies this simple, fundamental principle: Current consumer behavior is tied to a specific belief. To change that behavior, there must be a corresponding shift in belief.
Say you’re a marketer who wants to convince customers to switch from…
3 easy steps in Google Chrome
First of all, full credit to Zulie Rane for showing us that not all hope is lost when Medium took away our visibility in curation, replacing it with a more modest tagging: chosen for further distribution. The key, as Zulie reveals, is the source code. However, it seems that there has been a slight change in the back-end. The method no longer applies. So, with a bit of tinkering, I found a workaround — and it’s super easy to do.
Here’s the updated way to tell which topics your story was curated into.
Take note! These instructions apply only to…
A simple packaging trick created a whole tradition
Chocolate and Valentine’s Day — it seems like a given for these two to go together, doesn’t it?
On the contrary, it took centuries before the sweet treat became associated with the romantic holiday.
Chocolate wasn’t even consumed as a solid, to begin with. In Mesoamerican history, it was a drink made of roasted cacao beans with cornmeal, vanilla, honey, and chilies. Then as it spread across Europe in the 1600s, chocolate houses popped up like coffee shops, becoming hotspots for social gatherings. The cocoa business boomed.
As for February 14, the feast day of St. Valentine really had nothing…
Inspiring lessons on creativity from “Soul” Pixar director Pete Docter
Monsters Inc., Up, Inside Out, and now, Soul.
It seems that our friends at Pixar really enjoy making us grown people cry. We suspend disbelief over odd-looking characters and worlds to finally grasp life lessons at a depth even that bestselling self-help book could not teach us. The mastermind?
Meet Pete Docter, Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer and Director of four of the greatest Pixar films. Founder Ed Catmull once said:
“I’ve heard people who’ve been on Pete’s crews say that they would volunteer to take out the trash if it meant getting to work with him again.”
‘Soul’ Pixar Director Pete Docter on the job of a storyteller:
We stumbled on this idea that the world is full of amazing things. That’s, on one level, why you choose to expose yourself to art — you’re shaking yourself awake. On a daily basis, it’s so easy to fall into a routine. I wake up, get to work, exercise, dah, dah, dah, ‘oh, time for bed!’ It just cycles through every day. When you go to a film or are exposed to some story that shakes you and says, ‘You’re alive, pay attention!’ That’s, I think, the job that we have as storytellers. And usually, that manifests itself in a sense of awe and wonder that you’ve failed to experience just by getting trapped in the cycle of everyday life.
Coming soon! A piece that answers: How do you create a powerful story like ‘Soul’?
