As a longtime New Yorker, Maryam Banikarim has gravitated to her natural-born role as a community builder. So when she set out to celebrate her neighborhood of Chelsea two years after the pandemic, she had no idea her vision of a few dozen people coming together would end up as 500 people gathering at a long table to swap food and stories.
“Somebody said, I like your idea,” says Banikarim. “And I was like, ‘Okay, well you know what? You’re crazy enough. Like let’s go do this together.’ And it was like being back in college. I put flyers under windshields. That moment where literally 500 people showed up, I could not have imagined,” she says.
Most recently, after co-founding NYCNext during the pandemic, and following a long career as CMO of some iconic and emerging brands such as Hyatt, Gannett and Nextdoor, Banikarim’s efforts to re-imagine the iconic We<3NYC logo, part of a launch of a campaign to encourage New Yorkers to take action to better the city, didn’t go unnoticed, to say the least. The campaign itself stirred up a ton of feedback, both positive and negative, from the community, and that has been a major learning experience for her as a marketer. “This initiative is that we love New York City and to help see if we can unlock that, because that’s what ‘we’ means.” What it has led successfully, she says, is a passionate conversation among highly engaged New Yorkers, and that in itself is a win powering change.
Tune into this episode of Marketing Vanguard to learn more about more of her lessons from the We<3NYC campaign launch, what’s next, and the college course that changed Maryam’s life.
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