#onecupofcoffee Arzu UNAL

Arzu ÜNAL is an energetic, hardworking and, in her own words, a hasty businesswoman. She is one of those who take action immediately instead of thinking for a long time. She is someone who starts the day energetically and cares about the high energy of the people around her. She emphasizes that positive grows with positive and negative grows with negative. Even if the result is negative in an e-mail she writes, she finds it important to use positive expressions in the content. She reminds us that every word has a feeling.

During our conversation that we ended with coffee, he reminded us of the importance of keeping our energy high and taking care of every individual we share our lives with, from the cashier at our store to our teammates at work.

How do you continue to keep the energy high?

I met a very sweet 25-year-old woman through a mutual friend. She works at Koç University, she is very talented, young; they said you can talk to her and give her advice. After a few hours of chatting, our chemistry was great. The day I went to her to give her advice, she taught me something. She said, ''Arzu Abla, I separate the issues in life into three: My Business, His/Her Business, and God's Business. God's business is so far beyond my control, I can't do anything about it. Like earthquakes, disasters, roads closed by snow. In the past, my brother would have a topic and I would give him advice. Now I understand that this is also his topic. I shouldn't interfere. When I separate it into three baskets, I focus only on my own issues and direct my energy there.''

This way, you can manage what will affect you in life and how much. Thanks to Naz, since she told me this, I have been dividing all the issues in front of me into three.

Is this will?

Awareness, actually. Realizing what you can do and what you can't, using your energy wisely, not being wasteful.

Psychology education, marketing experience and then advertising. Of course, with the intersection of different disciplines, it becomes easier to discover the consumer's emotions. We wonder, is there something else, something internal, that you feed off of?

Good question, but the answer is chicken and egg. We used to live in Moda. On a ferry trip from Kadıköy to Karaköy, my father told me, “You were a baby in our arms. You were cute, people were interested in you. You would look at those who were not interested in you, crawl under their newspapers and try your luck until they were interested in you.” I started to be curious about people when I was a baby. Then, when I was in high school, for example, I would wonder what the life of the person sitting across from me and their family would be like on the bus. Then, when I was a tourist guide, we would tour Anatolia by bus. You were together with people from different cultures, with different experiences. You were together from morning to night. My first tour was with the Anzacs, then I mostly toured with Americans. We were together in Anatolia for 16 days. Listening to them and chatting enriched me by gaining different insights. Maybe it is no coincidence that I studied psychology. Understanding and making sense of them has always been important to me. Some people feel good in nature. If possible, I would get off at Eminönü from Mahmutpaşa, take the ferry and come home. Let there be people around me. Everything in my life may have affected each other. Maybe it has drawn energy. I would like to understand what a housewife feels when she hangs her laundry. When I was reading Victor Hugo, I was very impressed by the human descriptions, I would read for hours, losing myself in another world; always out of curiosity and an effort to understand human nature...

After social media research, we can evaluate you, your office and what you do and say this: You are modest .

I believe in personal marketing. But I also believe in this: We are really ants. Like the ants you crush while walking. A person must always go back and forth between the feeling of abundance and nothingness. A person must balance himself well with what he does. It is easy to define himself with ego, power, and achievements and is very open to illusion.

How has the industry changed over the years?

When I first started, there weren’t many people who knew marketing at the agency. The client would define an advertising need, and this need would be conveyed to a group of creative people at the agency who had a different perspective on life. They would come up with a solution. It was a shallower cycle compared to today. We knew three brands of shampoo, one bad version was washing your hair with soap. Now our job is much more complicated. When you look at the shelves now, you are choosing between 50-60 brands. There were no supermarkets, Migros had a truck, and we would be overjoyed when it arrived. Going to big markets used to be a thing, now there is one on every corner. We are losing grocery stores. With this change, marketing is done in a much more complicated environment.

The consumer now has many alternatives. You gave the consumer a packaged product and fulfilled your promise, it is no longer enough. We started to do a more scientific and complex job. This profession, which used to be shaped by the different perspectives of a group of people, now means research, the endless richness of research, solving the tension between what the consumer defines as a need and his/her emotional need, and taking ownership of a field beyond functional benefit in life. There is a systematic, measurable process of adding value, such as measuring the results of your work. Instead of awareness, we can measure the added value we create, file it, write a sample review and send it to the competition. A group including academics evaluates these. Compared to when I started, I am doing a job that has much higher added value, is much more scientific and accountable. Being in that wave also gives me pleasure.

We have also seen that creativity is not a group job. Creativity concerns everyone, from strategic planning to customer relations. With the friends responsible for technology and software among us, it is now possible to digitize the experience and download it to mobile phones and tablets… It used to be great to do 2 campaigns a year. Now, when you do 5 campaigns a month and the reflection on digital and social media, you have to be alert and ready in an uninterrupted process. After 20 years or so, this increasing tempo is tiring. I must admit this. Even the fact that it takes a long time to get an appointment with you is an example of this. We live a life where we do business in 15-20 minute intervals.

Learning something new excites me. I really enjoy listening to a TED every night before going to bed. I also want to understand biology. With my current mindset, I would study neuroscience. Very little of the brain has been discovered. How the brain learns, how you give messages, from education to publishing, from advertising to television, tells us that there is still much to be discovered. Let me not talk in the past tense, maybe I will read it. There is much to be discovered about people and communication with people.

What do the awards mean to you?

You put in effort, and this effort produces measurable results. This is known in the ecosystem between you and your customer. In order to ensure that this ecosystem expands to a ring, the area where you share it with the sector and receive approval from the thought leaders of the sector is the award. When your work enters EFFIE (Advertising Effectiveness Competition) as a case study and wins an award, it becomes a work that has become a part of the sector. When you send it to Cannes, it becomes a value that competes and stands out among 40,000 works in the world. Awards ensure that the success you have created with your customer is known and appreciated in the sector, the European continent or the world. That is why the award is valuable. Doing unreal work for an unreal customer just to get an award is the exact opposite of this model. It does not correspond to a real experience, so these two sides should be perceived separately. My dear teammates, this year, they gave me great experiences by winning awards worldwide with real works.

What is the impact of coffee in your daily life?

For me, Turkish coffee is the ground for sweet, enjoyable conversations, and opening the doors of the heart. I associate coffee with pleasure. If the class was in 11th grade at Boğaziçi, I would definitely have my morning coffee with my mother and go to school, and start the day with pleasure. Put on the coffee, take ice-cold water and a beautiful friend with you. What more could you want?.. A sweet conversation, sharing a beautiful slice of life is what drinking coffee means for me. I have a photo of me in our old house in Moda. A coffee corner in front of the window, two wicker armchairs… Life is flowing outside. You have opened a parenthesis for yourself in the flowing flow, and you are crowning that parenthesis with pleasure. If I am going to have coffee alone on Saturday morning, I call my lover. I open that parenthesis with her. Morning coffee in the office is not about drinking filter coffee and reading e-mails at the same time. While I am drinking my morning coffee, my assistant Neslihan, who I love very much, comes, tells me about the day, and we chat together.

Coffee embraces me, wraps me, relaxes me and tells me that a pleasant day is beginning. I don't drink coffee to suppress a meal. That's a shame about coffee. Tea suppresses it, but coffee is conversation, pleasure. I don't remember a coffee without conversation. I don't drink any other coffee except Turkish coffee. I don't enjoy global coffee chains at all. I think it's unfair to coffee to see coffee as a need-satisfying drink like water. When I enjoy it so much, I can't help but drink it in big cups. I can also tell which device the coffee is made in; the coffee in Telve is different. I drink it plain, I don't like any other flavors with it. If I really want something sweet, I just take a piece of dark chocolate with it... Since I can't enjoy coffee when I'm tired in the evening, I drink another coffee in the afternoon instead of the evening.

For me, coffee is a part of our culture and an essential part of communication…