The Rebel 50 honoree has built a career on curiosity, calculated risk and a refusal to play it safe. Here, she reveals how disciplined rebellion, creator-led storytelling and a challenger mindset are reshaping both the brand and modern marketing leadership.
When Soyoung Kang talks about rebellion, she doesn’t describe swagger or shock tactics. She talks about curiosity. She talks about method. And she talks about the courage to experiment even when you can’t guarantee the outcome. Because for her, creativity without risk isn’t creativity at all: “If you’re not making mistakes, you’re probably not doing enough things.”
It’s a philosophy that has shaped her rise from chief marketer to president of Eos Products, powered the brand’s viral breakthroughs and earned her a place on The Drum’s Rebel 50 list. But when she hears the word “rebel,” she still laughs with a kind of surprised humility: “I’m always caught a little bit off guard when people talk about the work that we’ve been doing as being rebellious and brave and courageous. I think we just put our heads down and try to do the best work… to delight our audiences and our community.”
That instinct – to focus on the audience first and trust bold instincts second – is the throughline in everything she shares.
Kang is clear: rebellion isn’t recklessness. If anything, her approach is meticulous.
“We never jump into something without a pretty strong hypothesis,” she explains. “Whether an outcome in the business, a positive outcome in brand equity, [or] affinity with our target audience – those are the things that we’re always looking to be able to prove out.”
Her brand of bravery is structured, reasoned, intentional. It’s not about disruption for its own sake: “I like to think that the difference between reckless and rebellious is that being rebellious means that yes, you are leaning in and being courageous… but you have to know where you’re starting from… rebellion for rebellion’s sake is not always the healthiest thing for a business.”
This framework – boldness with boundaries – has been fundamental to Eos’s ascent. “In the earlier days, [we were] a challenger brand… our business has grown quite significantly since then, but we continue to embrace that challenger spirit in order to be able to feel what’s next.”
For Kang, this willingness to “feel what’s next” starts with curiosity: “A willingness to lean into the unknown and a really, really deep level of curiosity… fuels a taste for experimentation that ends up being viewed as rebellious.”
It also demands humility. The willingness to test, learn, adjust, repeat. That appetite for evolution becomes crucial later in the conversation as she reflects on Gen Z, creators, leadership and the future of the company.
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Her recent promotion has not softened her rebel spirit – rather, it has broadened it.
“It’s always such a joy to continue to learn… to get back down at the bottom of that learning curve,” she says of stepping into a wider commercial role. The shift requires recalibrating the very instincts that have defined her marketing career: “Taking on a broader mandate… really means that I need to recalibrate what does risk look like? What does placing big bets look like in this other area of the organization?”
Now she moves fluidly between creative and commercial worlds: “Being able to go really deep into creative content… but then really get deep into the business, the P&L, the future growth strategy… that sort of flex has been so much fun.”
And yet, she is emphatic that leadership is never a solo act. “I am nothing as one of the Rebel 50 if I don’t have my own Rebel 50 working with me within Eos. None of what we’ve accomplished would have been what it is without that team.”
This belief in collective creativity underpins her view on why more marketers should pursue the top job: “There’s no reason why anyone who starts from one place can’t end in one of the top jobs… As a marketer, if you can progressively start to stretch, the rest of the organization can see you in those spots.”
And marketers, she argues, bring something essential: “The person who thinks the most about the consumer, growth potential, the wider marketplace, innovation, creativity, connecting… those are all fundamental skills that these top jobs absolutely need.”
Navigating the C-suite requires marketers to translate instinct into impact. “Marketers are first and foremost a steward of the business,” she says. “Speaking about the work… starting first from the context of how it’s going to help to grow the business is always a great foundation.”
So it’s not about changing the work, but changing the framing: “Recognizing that our audience may not be thinking about it as marketing first, but business first, and how does the marketing then support the business?”
This commercial clarity acts as a counterweight to the creative daring she is known for, ensuring the brand’s rebellious spirit strengthens, rather than destabilizes, the business.
If curiosity is Kang’s operating system, creator marketing is one of her most powerful tools. But again, the approach is grounded in experimentation, not prescription.
“Almost everything can be learned through doing better than through saying or observing… The best way to learn about it is to try things out, and not everything is going to work.”
Creators have been central to Eos since before her tenure: “Creators can help to tell your story… in a way that sometimes you can’t yourself as a brand.”
And their influence is only increasing: “The voice of creators has become significantly more important for our brand fans versus other traditional ways of doing paid storytelling.”
Her team now works across a vast spectrum of voices – from everyday storytellers to celebrity-scale influencers – but always with the same ethos: experiment, evolve, refine.
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When the conversation turns to Gen Z, Kang points to empathy and awareness.
“Gen Z is not one thing… we have to understand and know them as people rather than as strategies,” she says. If brands miss the mark, it’s usually because “we’re not listening enough.”
Her most underrated tool? “Social listening is… the most underrated tool in the marketer’s toolkit… It’s free information we get access to 24/7.”
This ability to observe, adjust, reorient – without ego – is the same muscle she described earlier when talking about experimentation. And it’s why her rebel philosophy remains internally consistent: brave ideas land when built on deep audience understanding.
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Growth hasn’t dulled Kang’s appetite for reinvention.
“Every time we enter into new territories… it means we get to start all over again. And so we get to embrace that challenger spirit and the rebel spirit going forward.”
And the ambition for Eos is expansive: “Our vision has a much broader footprint than where we’ve been. And it’s gonna take a lot of rebellious thinking to get us there.”
Which brings the story back to where it began: experimentation, curiosity and the inevitability, even necessity, of missteps along the way. “Every brand makes mistakes. That’s just part of the journey,” she says.
Few leaders articulate such a clear, consistent belief system. Even fewer lead with it. Kang’s rebellion isn’t loud. It’s disciplined, human and relentlessly curious. And in an industry obsessed with certainty, her comfort with the unknown might be her greatest act of leadership.
Check out The Drum’s Rebel 50.