Corinne Crockett, CMO at Hiya – Reimagining Children’s Health, joins Austin Willman to break down why she keeps her internal marketing team intentionally small while working with nearly 20 external agencies.
She explains the “brain trust in-house, execution externalized” model, how she runs quality control across multiple agency partners, and why company headcount can be a vanity metric for startups.
Corinne dives into Haya’s core values of pragmatism, no politics, and bringing genuine joy into a category that can feel heavy for parents.
She unpacks her philosophy that data tells you where to look while creativity tells you how to solve the problem, and shares how Haya uses AI to accelerate creative testing and market research without replacing real customer connection.
The conversation also covers subscription commerce, including how Haya thinks about price versus perceived value, what actually drives retention, and why forcing a subscription model onto the wrong product backfires.
Corinne shares how Hiya developed kid-friendly product flavors through extensive testing, what she looks for when hiring marketing talent, and how a successful exit to USANA has shaped the next phase of her career.
Topics covered include agency management, marketing team structure, AI in marketing, subscription retention strategy, product development with customer feedback, and building a strong hiring culture.
Takeaways:
- Headcount can be a vanity metric; revenue per employee matters more
- Haya keeps strategy in-house and outsources execution to agencies
- Clear context and direct communication prevent agency misalignment
- Core values are pragmatism, no politics, and genuine team enjoyment
- Data shows where problems exist; creativity provides the solutions
- AI speeds up creative testing but cannot replace real customer contact
- Subscription models only work for genuinely routine-based products
- Hiring only A-players protects team standards and overall morale