Marketing Didn’t Just Sell Products. It Changed Human Behavior.

In 1946, Reader’s Digest ran a full-page ad:

A man in a white coat. Calm. Trustworthy. Medical authority used to push a product that killed people slowly. And it worked.

By the 1950s, Coca-Cola ran ads urging mothers to give soda to toddlers:

Billions of dollars were poured into normalizing cigarettes, sugar water, and ultra-processed food. These weren’t accidents. They were the result of brilliant storytelling, relentless media buying, and mass distribution. And they changed human behavior. Forever.

The Machines Still Work. We Just Point Them Differently.

The machinery behind those campaigns still exists. Only now, the lab coat has been replaced by a ring light. The magazine ad has become a TikTok. The voice of authority is now a legion of micro-influencers promoting Big Food “Health” with good intentions…
While it’s easy to unknowingly push formulas packed with dyes, fillers, or chemicals.

So yes, marketing still works. Which means we need to ask: What are we scaling now?

We run a Direct-to-Consumer agency called Emblem. We build enduring profit-growth systems for better-for-you DTC brands doing $2M-$20M in annual revenue. But that’s not where this story starts.

It starts in a memory care facility.

Why This Is Personal: A Memory Care Facility, and a Mission

My dad was a top engineering graduate in Communist Vietnam. He defected and escaped to France, wrote a book called I Quit the Party

On the weekends gave me extra math homework haha, he was that kind of dad. He’d take my brother and I to play tennis. Go swimming. Taught us photoshop in the early 2000’s before we even knew how useful that would be.

He ate for survival. Whatever was fast, easy, salty, and cheap. Physically he appeared healthy and never looked overweight. But inside, type 2 diabetes was destroying his body and mind.

After a major stroke, he was diagnosed with vascular dementia. He’s now on a feeding tube. I haven’t heard a single word out of his mouth in years. The man who taught me how to live can no longer respond.

My mom is a different story. During the weekdays, she raised twin boys by herself in the Projects of Los Angeles while running her own business as a hairstylist. She spoke three languages: Vietnamese, French and English. Did her own bookkeeping. She exercised. Made green smoothies. Stayed sharp. But she also had one quiet vice: sugar, chocolate, pastries, ice cream—sweets were her comfort.

Now she has frontotemporal dementia.

Last year, my brother last year found toxic bleach cleaner in her shower—presumably because she thought it was shampoo. She struggles to get through a full sentence.
Every word takes visible effort.

Both of my parents were smart. Active. Independent. And still, they declined cognitively (my dad physically and eventually my mom). Not suddenly. But gradually. Over years.

What caused it? That’s the haunting part.

• Was it their nutrition?

• Their sub-optimal exercise?

• Their lack of exposure to Zone 2 or VO2 Max training?

• Their ALMI (Appendicular Lean Muscle Index) dropping without warning?

• Their sleep?

• Their stress?

• Their emotional environment?

• The strength of their relationships?

We’ll never know exactly why. But I do know this:

They did the best they could with what they had, and what they knew. From two kids who grew up in the Section-8 Housing in Los Angeles. To my brother graduating at Harvard. He’s since a senior engineer at Instagram. I gratefully graduated California Berkeley. And now I’m bootstrapping Emblem.

But more importantly: we’re healthy. We have a tribe. We’re building forward.

A testament to parents who gave up the world for us by moving to foreign lands. From refugees to immigrants to starting from zero, that outcome alone is a miracle.

And maybe that’s the point: Small inputs do compound. For our lives, for our businesses, for the lives we touch. Not just in decline—but in strength, in health, in connection, in resilience. Especially when they’re chosen on purpose.

Signals of a Better Normal

So when I say this is personal, I mean it. This is why Emblem exists. Because we’ve seen what happens when we scale the wrong things.

The beautiful thing is there’s opportunity to scale a better normal.

Food Systems Expert and Author Anne Lappé says, “Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want”. So let’s choose the world we want.

Some brands you can feel that they were built as a labor of love. Not just to ride a trend. Like they genuinely give a damn about how their product shows up in people’s lives. These are a few that have stood out to me.

• Maui Nui is turning Hawai‘i’s invasive Axis deer population into a regenerative meat supply chain. By doing so they’re helping overrunning Axis deer from causing plant species loss, soil erosion and threats to ranchers, farmers and the local population. They prioritize wild-harvesting so the deer have the highest quality of life that also results in nutrient-dense venison.

  • I’m a proud grandfathered subscriber to their bulk jerky pack. Matter of fact, it came in clutch yesterday when I needed 20g of protein with barely any calories to spare. 10g of protein for 55 calories is still the wildest macro profile I’ve seen. When the Maui fires happened, they prioritized food drives as their first move. That tells you something.

• Birchbury makes barefoot shoes built for performance but refined enough for business meetings or weddings like customers around the world have proven. Functional, minimal, well-made.

• Carnivore Aurelius is a long time partner and we’ve been working together with paid social for the past 5 years. With nutrient-dense products that are meticulously sourced like liver crisps, collagen, steak crisps. His content ranges from alpacas, memes, satire and a kind of troll for good. Built on a bedrock of earnest and just trying to share what’s worked for him. A very different kind of brand but an amplification of him in the style of, as he’ll say, “Silly goose time.”

  • What I respect most about him is how the brand’s evolved like a human. He’s shifted views, adopted new ones, stayed honest the whole way through. He literally changed his entire brand from an Instagram profile photo of a statue of Marcus Aurelius to an authentic photo of his back walking in a green forest.
    

• True Nutrition is my favorite Protein Powder brand. Ironically enough, I like them because of their sorta anti-marketing gimmicks stance. How everything goes back into product. They’re completely customizable to the point you can customize a jar of protein to have something as wild as 70% whey protein isolate, 20% beef protein and 10% egg protein. Customize the flavor’s sweetener and intensity level and add “boosters” like creatine, collagen, turmeric, and supergreens. The operational feat they’ve pulled off is impressive.

  • Their products have been with me since 2013 when I traveled abroad and a fellow buff Italian student said this was the best of the best protein and we group-bought a bulk order. I’m glad we did that. I did the math: I’ve consumed over 150 pounds of their protein by now. Been using them through bulks, cuts, conference trips, and now daily health for optimal protein. We even made them a commercial grade spec ad because I'm a big fan of what they've built.

These aren’t surface-level “mission-driven” brands. If the products we buy shape culture, then these are the brands shaping it in the right direction.

If culture is downstream of commerce, these are the kinds of companies I want upstream. Commerce leads, culture follows.

That’s why we’re proud Marketing Partners with some of them and champions of others. It’s the kind of growth worth protecting.

What We Do at Emblem

Emblem helps better-for-you DTC brands with enduring profit growth. Direct-to-Consumer Brands doing $2M to $20M a year that want to grow without compromising the reason they exist.

Sleep, cognition, nutrition, muscle preservation, energy, focus, emotional regulation.
These aren’t buzzwords. They’re survival levers.

We build acquisition systems that contribute to good living and that contribute to profit.

• Media buying tuned to Contribution Margin (both the contribution of dollars to the business and the contribution upon customers).

• Creatives based on a Creative-Portfolio Framework mapped to offers, avatars, angles, media types, and creative styles.

• Hyper-Specific Experiences through landing pages, advertorials, listicles, and checkouts so the message signal is highly relevant versus generalized and ignored.

We build structure that protects your business and your mission.

Our Belief: Profit and Purpose Are Not Opposites

Founders pour everything into building something meaningful. We build systems that honor that effort and not just the algorithm. Because we give a damn. About inputs. About outcomes. About attention. Every ad impression is a moment with someone’s brother, someone’s mom, someone’s partner, someone’s future self. We take that seriously.

You don’t have to choose between doing good and being profitable. You just need systems that let you do both.

Where We’re Headed: A Healthier Culture, Built on Better Brands

We believe the most profitable brands of the future should also be the most beneficial to human life.

We believe marketing is a lever that can fix what marketing broke. That the next Coca-Cola moment should belong to a product that preserves cognition. That the next household names won’t be 3 Billion Dollar conglomerates but of thousands of niche brands by people who stand for something. Brands that’ll help people move, sleep, and think better. Instead of contributing to all-time-high charts of death, disease, despair.

We’re reminiscent for when food had fewer ingredients and life had fewer algorithms. We keep that nostalgia with us while being ready to build forward.

For the founders, product designers, operators, marketers, spreadsheet wizards, that create brands and products they proudly put in the hands of someone they love.

We champion that and will do our best where we can to support these adventurers of daring brands along the way.

Because what we scale is what becomes normal. Let’s make sure it’s something worth normalizing.

Let’s scale what matters.

Kenny Hoang is the Founder & CEO of Emblem. For 2025, he’s reading a GPT-curated book list, getting back in Jiu-Jitsu, and this year, working on improving his resting heart rate with Zone 2 and 5 cardio. He’s based in San Diego with his wife. Connect with Kenny on X and Linkedin.