Stay too long in one company and your scope narrows; switch industries and you wonder whether you will translate. Kye Yoon-sook, who started in hotels and moved through F&B, beauty and consulting to become head of marketing at Korean dessert chain Sulbing, answers the marketing career question in one line: "I'm a marketer who raises her hand."
Her first job was at The Plaza Hotel, starting in concierge and front desk. About 18 months in she took on hotel PR — writing articles, producing the membership magazine, writing in-property copy. That was her first experience making content as a marketer.
At the time, hotels had no clearly defined branding or marketing roles. Whenever work appeared that no one owned, she raised her hand: "Let me try." That led to planning parties, building events and promotions, and joining renovation projects for the wedding hall, spa and restaurants. Career expansion rarely begins inside a tidy job description. It begins the first time you volunteer for the work that makes everyone ask, "whose job is this?"
Her biggest turning point was leaving the hotel for CJ. The hotel was stable and people advised her to stay. The question she asked herself was simple: do I want to grow as a hotelier or as a marketer? The answer was marketer, so she joined CJ Foodville and went on to work on major projects for Tous Les Jours, A Twosome Place and Bibigo.
The point is that she was not chasing a company — she had criteria first. A career move is not switching employers; it is deciding who you want to become and then making the uncomfortable choice that matches.
At CJ she was handed Tous Les Jours, a bakery brand. She was not a bread enthusiast or a baking expert. So she went to the R&D lab, visited factories, read books and trade magazines, and learned how bread is made and how coffee, cakes and merchandise get planned. At Innisfree she relearned cosmetic ingredients and industry jargon. At Sulbing she ate every menu item, memorized recipes, and watched customers and staff in stores.
People who widen their careers do not fake expertise in unfamiliar fields — they relearn from scratch.
Learning does not mean only big campaigns and polished decks. In hotels she worked room service, housekeeping and the call center; understanding how hard it is to make a bed became the foundation for understanding the business. At CJ, when a new store opened she spent close to a month there watching which breads sold out at which hours and who came in the morning.
She argues that in F&B marketing, the menu is the most important thing — a good product carrying the brand's identity. Bibigo dumplings worked not because CJ entered the dumpling category but because texture, ingredient differentiation and an understanding of Korean food created a new reference point against cheap incumbents.
Goobne has Gochu Basak, Sulbing has injeolmi bingsu, Kyochon has soy-sauce chicken, BBQ has Golden Olive, BHC has Bburinkle. Enduring F&B brands have a menu item that carries identity, not just volume. In a market where single-item brands rarely survive, Sulbing has lasted over a decade because "Sulbing means injeolmi bingsu" is a clean association.
Marketers need a signature too. You can collect industries, but without a center that ties them together, a career does not widen — it scatters.
At Sulbing she is focused on resurfacing existing strengths. Research showed the brand's associations clustered on functional words like bingsu and injeolmi, with emotional attributes weak. So she looked at what actually happens in stores: customers from teens to sixties, conversation instead of café silence, most people visibly happy in front of something sweet. The keywords that emerged were "happiness" and "a social brand."
Her renewal principle stands out: do not negate the past. New arrivals often dismiss what exists and reject every previous attempt, but brands that survive have reasons for surviving. A renewal rediscovers what the brand already does well and makes it more visible. For how Sulbing designs customer time, see What Sulbing and Terarosa Actually Sell Is Time — Brand Strategy in the AI Era.
Leading a team at Innisfree taught her that doing good work yourself and making a group produce results are entirely different jobs. Through Goobne and Sulbing, the leadership she came to value is helping people grow, gain varied experience and build results strong enough to move on to a better job if they choose.
The summary: people who widen their careers are not the fully prepared ones. They are the ones who say "let me try," then learn, ask, go to the floor and finish.
Not the number of employers. Volunteering for work no one owns, relearning an unfamiliar industry from the basics, and proving yourself in a new arena are what expand scope.
Learn the business rather than leaning on what you already know — visit R&D, factories and stores, and observe products and customers directly.
Treating everything that exists as outdated. A renewal should rediscover what the brand already does well and make it more visible, not erase its past.
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