Post by Mervyn Too

✒ MT Experience Part 2️⃣. Have you ever failed to trust someone and missed a massive opportunity? Extending trust can feel risky, but holding it back is incredibly expensive. During my Product Marketing rotation, I faced a classic dilemma: how do you drive massive visibility for TAKAMI, a brand entirely new to the market, right as you hit unexpected budget cuts? I pitched a bold idea to my Brand General Manager, Elaine Wong: let me personally shoot, edit, and produce a series of trend-driven IG Reels. Zero budget. For a luxury beauty brand, letting a Management Trainee experiment with content is a risk. But Elaine and I share a core belief about leadership: empowering people through trust. Instead of micromanaging the process, she extended "Smart Trust" and gave me full runway. That is the Speed of Trust in action. When trust goes up, execution speed goes up, and "costs" (like bureaucracy, delays, and friction) drop to zero. But trust has to be earned. Here is how I built my "Trust Account" with stakeholders to make this zero-cost social media strategy happen: 1️⃣Talk Straight: I was completely transparent about the budget reality and my intent. I clearly communicated that we were testing unconventional visual hooks, leaving no room for misunderstood expectations. 2️⃣Get Better: I didn't just pitch an idea; I actively studied video trends and editing. I embraced informal feedback from the team to ensure I was continuously producing, not just experimenting. 3️⃣Listen First: Before filming anything, I genuinely listened to the brand team's concerns about protecting TAKAMI's DNA. Understanding their priorities first allowed me to map the trendy hooks to our luxury standards. The result of that high-trust environment? We launched the brand's first-ever internal produced IG Reels and shattered previous benchmarks and achieved 13x more views, and 18x more interactions than the average post, all at zero cost. Massive thanks to Elaine Wong and Kiehl's & TAKAMI team for trusting me to pioneer new grounds. Have you ever experienced the "Speed of Trust" changing the outcome of a project? 👇 #Marketing #Leadership #SpeedOfTrust #ContentStrategy #Loreal #ManagementTrainee My Kiehl's & TAKAMI family Elaine Wong Sook Theng Chong Alison Chang Kelven Chew Khai Wen Su-Ann Thor Jia Le Cheryl Tai Alston Yee Grace Ching Trey Hoi Koren Phua Jamie Chin Vennesa Choi Eugene Tan Chloe Ng Jace Tan Noor Aisyah Jalaluddin Chun Wen Koay Aloe Tan Rachel Koh Sze Yen Y.