• University of Witwatersrand BA (Psychology)

• 15+ years industry experience

• Co-founder of social marketing consultancy Treeshake

Maximillian Kaizen is co-founder and Chief Intelligence Officer of Treeshake, a digital marketing firm that focuses on campaigns for positive social and environmental impact. Clients include the Lewis Pugh Foundation (UN Patron of the Oceans), Thirst, UNFPA, World Animal Protection, and the World Economic Forum.

Max has more than a decade of experience teaching and building programs on emerging tech and entrepreneurship for universities & business schools around the world, including the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, Gordon Institute of Business Science, and Duke Corporate Education. Currently, she is working with the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and the University of Amsterdam. Max is a founding member and connector-in-residence at Barclays Rise Cape Town, a global fintech exploratorium. As a 2017 Inspiring Fifty award recipient, she was recognized among the women progressing STEM fields in South Africa.

Marketers adapt with creative technology, knitting artists, and deep technology specialists together in their world-building, will have a distinct advantage. And create fandoms. But marketers will continue to exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities with more precision. Marketing is about shaping behavior. Behavioral science and tinkering with biochemistry is part of this role, for good or ill. There is a profound responsibility here. And there may be a reckoning.

Q&A with Max:

What do you enjoy most about your industry? 

How fast it evolves. it is both timeless and timely. And terrifying in its power to shape the trajectory of our collective futures now. For our species, ideas must be packaged and sold. Genius, no matter how useful, languishes without the metabolism of marketing. 

What are you working on right now? 

I’m building immersive cultural diplomacy learning experiences for two business schools, US and European. An important downstream threat of the pandemic is that we become insulated without the ease of travelling.

Treeshake has a number of campaigns running simultaneously, I am only participating in two. To make the case for defending the waters against overfishing for the last remaining African penguins; and an African film nominated for the Oscars.

Why did you decide to get involved with teaching and how do you continue to keep things fresh?

I didn’t decide. I was the kid who tortured friends and family with “learning adventures” when everyone just thought they were going to chill. Any opportunity to use fun as a carrier-wave for a piece of knowledge, or puzzling out an a-ha! And I was in there. 

The wow-I-love-this kicked in about 20 minutes into my first lecture; in front of around 300 commerce students in 2008 on globalisation for the Centre for Management Studies at UCT, as the world was about to plunge into economic turmoil along tracings of the fault-lines that we’d explored. I still have that slide deck. 

There’s no guarantee that you’ll watch the flicker of curiosity spark behind your student’s eyes. But it’s that, to which I’m paying keen attention, and adapting. The responsibility of illuminating a path – not just as a map to follow – but adventuring into the territory with students never gets old. The things that shape that territory: our cultures, markets, media, how we trade, the stakes, all these things are changing at a hot clip right now. Knowledge goes stale quickly now. Entropy eats what isn’t tested. So I’m always hunting out how we can apply what we’re learning in class to test its validity. 

How do you see the industry changing in the next 10 years? What skills will industry professionals need to have?

A decade is almost unfathomable at the rate of compounding change, and I know better than to predict. But what is blazingly clear, the CMO role has exploded in scope, and those best suited to it now, have both creative and analytical modes active. 

Magic realism is forged technologically.“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Marketers adapt with creative technology, knitting artists and deep technology specialists together in their world building, will have a distinct advantage. And create fandoms. 

But marketers will continue to exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities with more precision. Marketing is about shaping behaviour. Behavioural science and tinkering with biochemistry is part of this role, for good or ill. There is a profound responsibility here. And there may be a reckoning.

Be professional learners: 1. Relentlessly refining and mastering the timeless first principles of marketing makes for a steady base to deal with whatever change is swirling. 2. Then you can take real delight in the novelty and the tech. Try stuff for yourself – the new tools, platforms, research, trends, ride the hype cycles. Experiment. 3. Develop high quality decision and resource-management skills, because overwhelm is the storm that is part of this landscape. 

Bonus skill: learn to craft compelling stories from evidence. It’s a survival skill, no matter what your field. 

What are you looking forward to about the program? 

Teaching with the luxury of time and application. Setting out on a learning journey together, not knowing what shape it’ll take at the end. Specifically, putting the skills into practice towards a mission that matters, is an adventure I’m looking forward to.

And because we are all so Zoomed out at this frayed end of the pandemic, stepping up my own teaching skills to meet this moment.

What skills will students have after graduating from your class?

The comfort and confidence of where they stand within the broad map of digital marketing practice today. Because it is very easy to get lost in this rapidly-evolving realm. Chief Marketing Officers have the shortest tenure in the C-suite because the role has outpaced the textbooks. By miles.

For those who want to take up a leadership mantle, they’ll develop a basic fluency across its disciplines – SEO, analytics, social media, multimedia content, ad tech, automation, email, affiliates, web design, pricing, and reporting – to scaffold their ongoing learning. With the jargon, to decode and connect like an insider. And for those who want to go deeper, to find the discipline to which they can devote themselves, whether they skew analytic or artistic or both.

What’s one piece of advice that you have for the class of 2021?

Don’t specialise/optimise too early. Find and actively learn with a crew of courageous, curious and kind people who will be more truthful rather than diplomatic. With a bias for variety. Everyone will learn faster and trust each other more. 

We’re part of an ostentatiously beautiful, complex living system, don’t stay in your lane. Adventure across disciplines for delight, not just career utility. 

What would students be surprised to learn about you?

I used my 101 Things to Do Before I Die list as a decision-protocol tool for years beyond which it was sensible. With a near-death experience that didn’t warn me off. I’ve learned that a lot of those adventures will even surprise people who have known me for years.