🏥 Stanford Medicine's Chief Strategy Officer, Priya Singh
How an accidental internship in America led to 3 decades marketing premier global companies
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🏥 Priya Singh, Chief Strategy Officer & Senior Associate Dean at Stanford Medicine
For our mid-season finale, I’m joined by Priya Singh — Chief Strategy Officer, Senior Associate Dean, and Vice President of Stanford Medicine.
Stanford Medicine encompasses a $13 billion preeminent academic health center comprised of the Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford Health Care, and Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. Priya first began her career at Stanford in 2002, when she joined Stanford’s Graduate School of Business as the Director of Marketing for their Executive Education program. By 2006, she had become an Assistant Dean at the Business School. After a decade, in 2013, she transitioned to Stanford University’s School of Medicine, where she would serve as Senior Associate Dean, before transitioning to the broader Stanford Healthcare enterprise.
Prior to her time at Stanford, Priya led marketing management in senior roles at Oracle, a startup called Respond.com, and iconic apparel company, Levi Strauss & Co. She is a writer who has written extensively about the Great Pretend — the code-switching, concealing, and compromising that women often partake in and are subjected to in the workplace. For her extensive work at Stanford and beyond, Priya was named one of the 100 Outstanding Silicon Valley Professionals in the 2020 Class of Women of Influence. Priya is originally from India and earned her Bachelor’s & Master’s degrees in Business Management at the University of Bombay, India.
Read on for episode excerpts, which we’ve edited for clarity + brevity. Curated by our Content Fellow, Nikki Zinzuwadia. 👇🏾
Simi Shah: Can you share how you made your initial foray into marketing management at the iconic American apparel company, Levi Strauss?
Priya Singh: I first came to the U.S. on a vacation. I had a job lined up at an advertising agency in Bombay. But I literally saw an ad in a newspaper for an internship at Levi Strauss — if that tells you anything about how old I am. And for anybody who wants to go into marketing or advertising, it was the iconic dream brand. So I applied for the internship on a whim, literally thinking, ‘You know what, I'm not gonna get it. I'm not even in college.' I just thought it would be fun to go through the process. But I thought, ‘I'm going to go home and start my job.’
But I got that internship. And it was meant to be one year long, but I ended up staying with Levi Strauss for almost 10 years. It was a vacation and was never intended to become a career, but who could resist? It was that iconic brand in the world of marketing — especially as a young person visiting from India. I mean I had the chance to work on a brand like 501 jeans — it was just wow. It led to 10 unbelievable years for a variety of reasons — not just in developing my marketing skills and experience, but even just how I thought about jobs and employers moving forward.
Simi: In 2002, you joined Stanford University as the Director of Marketing for Executive Education at the world-renowned Graduate School of Business (GSB). Can you speak to what such a role looks like at a higher educational institution as compared to the work that you did at Levi and Oracle, where you managed multibillion-dollar advertising budgets?
Priya: My singular budget at Oracle for advertising was a massive budget, so it was a big difference to come to Stanford. I took a massive pay cut. The interesting thing about marketing at an academic institution is there are far fewer traditional marketing channels; there aren't huge marketing budgets. It's much more about building up your brand presence — through thought leadership, through everything that you stand for. For executive education, it was about marketing everything from the blue skies in Palo Alto all the way to marketing the reputations of world-renowned faculty. It was exciting because it was fun to market. Who wouldn't want to market the Stanford Business School? They're so different. Marketing Stanford was about marketing the people, not a product. It was even more amazing for me on some levels in having to do it with a tiny budget and having to think about what the brand stands for. It was about wearing more of a PR hat than a marketing hat, while still having to accomplish marketing goals — without the marketing dollars and the traditional marketing channels that one would use in a normal industry role.
Simi: Today, you’ve pivoted to Stanford Medicine where you serve as Chief Strategy Officer and Senior Associate Dean. Generally, people in these roles have backgrounds in academia. Did you ever face challenges with respect to upward mobility given your background in industry?
Priya: Whether it was at the Graduate School of Business (GSB), or now at Stanford Medicine, people have valued the skills I have because they are different from the skills they have. Whether I was working with pure researchers, academics, or now, in medicine, where I'm working with physicians, surgeons, doctors, or healthcare workers, I find they appreciate my strategy, my marketing skills, tools, and frameworks. They appreciate that I can take their big ideas and translate them into what the world wants to see. I can operationalize these ideas with my team, and execute on the deep work that they specialize in. That partnership allows them to really recognize that we need all of these skills.
I would never say it's easy getting to the C-suite. I'm a Senior Associate Dean, and you don't typically get to be a dean if you're not an academic. Understandably, it's an academic institution. But for me, I think it's because the dean and other faculty and experts understand that it takes a variety of skills and talents to make Stanford everything that it's capable of being. There's very much recognition of that — which I love.
Join us as we dive into Priya’s foray into marketing from Levi Strauss to Oracle to Stanford — a journey that began accidentally on a vacation to the United States. Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and our website!