Comms advice to level-up your marketing - from Oddbox’s CMO, Gastón Tourn

If you’ve ever felt like your career zigzags more than it climbs, you’re in good company.

Gastón Tourn, Chief Growth Officer at Oddbox (ex-CMO at Bumble, Emma Mattress, and more), didn’t plan to end up in marketing at all.

“I studied communication because I was fascinated by language, and how we create meaning through symbols,” he said. “I almost looked down on marketing at university, to be honest. The formulaic approach felt like dumbing down complex human behaviour – the four Ps felt like primary school.”

Yet today, Gastón leads growth at one of the UK’s most beloved ethical food brands, rescuing millions of “ugly” fruit and veg from waste. His journey is packed with insights for marketers who want to level up not just in skill, but in mindset.

By the end of reading this, you should have a few tools under your belt to make your founder actually trust you with strategy, get your ideas signed off and funded, and secure that promotion you’ve always wanted.

It all comes down to one thing:

Communication.

1. Great marketing leaders are translators

Moving from Google to Bumble was, in Gastón’s words, “a wild jump.” It turned out the biggest challenge wasn’t technical, but interpersonal.

“Managing the founder is your full-time job,” Gastón said. “At first I thought, ‘Why am I explaining this? It’s obvious we need to do this.’ But I learned that it’s my job to explain why.”

One founder he worked with was obsessed with top-of-funnel ideas, and had been blocking conversion and CRM investment. So Gastón ditched the jargon and tried something new:

“I explained the marketing funnel using dating. You go to a bar and you just show up and then you leave. Do you have any conversion? No – because you're just building your brand, your awareness. You're not even talking to people.

Talking to people is called consideration, and you need to build that consideration as a brand, so that hopefully, some people might convert. If everything goes well, it might lead to loyalty.

The founder absolutely got it. So suddenly, it was like, oh, you're right.”

Great marketing leaders are translators. Turning data and jargon into stories non-marketers understand is what gets things moving (and this applies to both the internal team and your customers).

2. Read the feedback. ALL of it.

At Oddbox, Gastón still reads every Zendesk ticket and Trustpilot review.

While most marketers read ads dashboards, Gastón reads customer language – because then you know why something is failing, not just that it failed.

And that’s how Oddbox spotted a problem:

Customers loved the rescue concept but felt overwhelmed. They got kohlrabi and had no idea what to cook.

Now they’ve got a new, soon-to-be-launched MVP, and his team are treating this launch like a real commercial experiment:

What they’re doing:

• Hard target for conversion

• Hard target for 4-week retention

• Testing 3 variants of the launch email going out to a randomised audience

• Each variable tied to “which drives more revenue per box”

So not “brand vibes first” / “we’ll see”.

If your team has a “brand experiment” floating around, create a measurable revenue hypothesis first. Ask: what conversion rate would make this experiment a win? And what’s the cheapest way to run this as a X-week MVP?

Then write that into the brief.

TOP TIP:

Create a Slack channel named something like “CRO voice of customer” → Pipe in your Zendesk / Gorgias feed → Put the top 3 recurring complaints into your weekly mgmt note.

3. Show your why

Not every launch works. Oddbox’s “Market”, a refillable pantry range, underperformed at first.

“We expected adoption to double every month. It didn’t. People didn’t understand why we were doing it.”

The solution? Tell better stories.

“When we explained why the founders of Black Bee Honey were reinvesting in wildflowers, adoption grew.”

When in doubt, go back to the story. Data can guide your tactics, but ultimately the stories are what change hearts.

4. Make structural changes after building trust

The trap that most new marketing leaders walk into is immediately diagnosing and critiquing the business. But if people don’t trust you, it’s going to be hard to convince them to make any structural changes.

When Gastón joined Oddbox, there hadn’t been a CMO for two years. He knew his first priority needed to be building trust with the team, rather than trying to prove himself by fixing everything. He spent the first few months learning what’s been done, finding quick wins, and setting clear expectations.

“Most CMOs join because something isn’t working. Don’t walk in like a cowboy trying to fix everything. Listen first.”

If you’re a marketing leader or looking to step up into the role, here’s the pro move:

• Interview customers directly (read all the reviews and complaints)

• Identify 2–3 quick wins that improve reality without creating fear (e.g. tighten targeting + creative on one meta audience and publish the delta)

• Pitch structural changes only after trust + small wins

5. On driving more value for the business

Gastón says the biggest mental shift to C-suite is realising your team isn’t the marketing department, but instead the leadership team. In practice, that means being willing to step outside your job description and take on whatever the business needs most.

When one of Gastón’s previous founders needed someone to lead a fundraising push, he saw it as a chance to prove his value.

“I'm not someone who comes from a fundraising background, but the founders needed someone to develop the fundraising deck and really tell the story to potential investors. Yes, I was leading the marketing team, but really, my full-time role was getting the narrative right in order to get fundraising for that company. I think that was a really big mental shift for me: you need to think business-first / company-first.”

That experience reframed how he saw his role. It wasn't about protecting what he was good at, it was about driving impact. So the question wasn’t ‘can I do this?’, it was ‘will this create more value for the business?’

For Gastón, the answer was yes, so he jumped.

If you’re a mid-level marketer with your eyes on leadership, take note. Promotions don’t come from staying in your lane; they come from thinking bigger. Businesses don’t let go of people who drive value. To grow your career, zoom out – the business is your brief.

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