Kim Yong-hoon spent 15 years as a CMO before launching the Kim Yong-hoon Growth Lab, and he has built a career on one contrarian idea: marketing decisions should be driven by data, not gut feeling. Having consulted for companies ranging from Krafton and Bunjang to KT, he now runs a flywheel — raw-data analysis feeds market insight, insight becomes academy training and content, and that content generates new consulting work. This is where data-driven CRM becomes more than a buzzword: it's the operating system behind every recommendation he makes.
Kim's first principle is that most marketers copy what other brands do on a given platform without asking whether it's even relevant to their own business. Trend-chasing gets replaced by a simpler discipline: look at your own product, market, and customer metrics first. He defines the essence of data simply — finding out what the customer actually wants.
His view of AI follows the same logic. AI increases efficiency, but the marketer's judgment — spotting what customers really want inside the data — remains irreplaceable. Kim describes extracting "aha moments" from raw data fast enough to shape ad creative and copy, a method that lifted one homepage's traffic by 330%. He tracked everything from impressions and views to engagement (comments, likes, shares, saves) and downstream conversion into purchases and sign-ups. On Meta ads, AI dramatically speeds up planning, copywriting, and scripting, but video-generation token costs make it less cost-effective, and it still struggles to break creative conventions. On Naver SEO, AI helps with content volume and algorithm targeting, but content consumers don't trust never converts — authenticity can't be automated away.
Kim ranks three priorities for building a loyal customer base. First is a genuinely good product — building and communicating it well is the core of growth hacking. Second is authentic CRM — not just push notifications and coupons. His go-to example is Pet Friends: when shipping delays stretched to 7–10 days, the company personally sent roughly 4,000 affected customers apple juice, handmade cookies, and handwritten notes. It cost real money, but the gesture translated directly into a spike in repeat purchase rate and average order value. Regardless of company size, consistent, authentic communication with customers is what CRM actually means.
Kim is blunt about mindset: "From a capitalist standpoint, a marketer's job is to bring money into the company." He urges marketers to move past branding for its own sake, adopt a profit-driven mindset focused on revenue and margin, and use metrics to ruthlessly reallocate budget away from money-losing campaigns toward money-making ones. The one skill that makes a marketer irreplaceable, he argues, isn't channel-operation know-how or AI-tool fluency — those get replaced as the environment changes. It's the end-to-end thinking that connects customer preference to company revenue.
The takeaway is to re-anchor decisions around two axes — what the customer wants, and revenue — instead of channels and tools. As AI accelerates content production, the ability to extract insight from data and translate it into business results becomes a marketer's real differentiator. Tool fluency is table stakes; judgment is what separates the replaceable from the irreplaceable.
The Pet Friends example is worth sitting with: a short-term cost turned into a measurable lift in repeat purchases and order value. That's the strongest argument for treating CRM not as a "send channel" but as a fandom asset — proof that authentic customer experience and hard revenue numbers aren't opposing goals.
If you're rethinking how your team measures data-driven CRM and revenue-focused marketing, Best Partner's services can help you build the right measurement framework, or get in touch to talk through your specific situation.
It means using customer and product data — not gut feeling or copying competitors — to figure out what customers actually want, and running CRM (retention communication) based on that insight rather than treating it as just sending coupons or notifications.
He argues that beyond branding, a marketer's core job is to grow revenue and margin. He recommends analyzing metrics to identify which campaigns lose money versus which generate revenue, then reallocating resources accordingly.
When shipping was delayed 7-10 days, Pet Friends sent about 4,000 affected customers apple juice, handmade cookies, and handwritten notes at real cost — and this authentic response led directly to a spike in repeat purchase rate and average order value.
The ability to think end-to-end about what customers want and connect that to company revenue — as opposed to channel-operation skills or AI-tool proficiency, which become obsolete as tools change.
To apply what you just read to your own site, start with a free audit of where things are now.
A strategist replies within 24 hours on business days.
In CreatorIQ's survey of 5,095 creators, suitability topped the creator selection criteria and follower count came dead last. Yet follower count still predicts pay better than anything else.
Brand equity comes from accumulation, not novelty. How a Korean travel platform kept the same jingle for six years without stagnating.
Chipotle turned a 16-year-old YouTube star's order into a limited Kid's Meal, extending a custom-order tactic that worked on Gen Z to a younger cohort.