Melody Lee Is Redefining Luxury at Mercedes-Benz for a New Generation of Drivers

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Melody Lee has never been one to follow a traditional road map. Beginning her career in crisis communications at the “small-ish” Public Strategies in Austin, Texas, Lee eventually worked her way up to become the chief marketing officer of Mercedes-Benz and charting a new path for one of the world’s most iconic luxury car brands.

Standing five feet tall, Lee isn’t easily intimidated by the historically male-run auto industry. Instead she uses her background as an Asian-American executive at a Fortune 500 company to create new experiences for and relationships with a younger and more diverse consumer. As Lee tells Glamour, “One of the best examples we have in our partnership space is with East Side Golf.” The lifestyle golf brand was formed with the mission of making the sport more accessible to a wider and more diverse audience. “It was more than putting the logo on some items of clothing by East Side,” Lee says. “It was to support [HBCU] Morehouse College’s golf program. It was our donation of a Mercedes-Benz van to their golf team that enabled them to get around better. Putting more equity back into the world is much more important.”

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit Auberge Resort’s Blue Sky Lodge in Park City, Utah, with Mercedes-Benz. While the trip started off with an intimate concert from country star LeAnn Rimes and a massage at the spa, my favorite part was getting to test-drive Mercedes-Benz’s first all-electric G-Wagon, the Electric G 580. As a Gen Z’er from a low-income family, I got my first time driving a Mercedes-Benz, and it was an experience I’ll never forget. The experience also exemplifies Lee’s vision for the company: to reach young and diverse audiences through sustainability and technological innovations.

For the latest installment of Glamour’s Doing the Work, Lee shares her morning routine as a mom, the best piece of money advice she’s ever received, her vision for how Mercedes-Benz can reach= Gen Z and multicultural communities as the next consumers, and more.

Glamour: To start off, what is your typical morning routine?

Melody Lee: I get up around 6 a.m. I’m not a morning person, but my children have forced me into it. I need to get ready for work, but I also need to feed the kids, get them dressed, and out the door. One of them I take to school as well. Thankfully, it is a very nice ride in my car, so I drive him to school and then drive to the office. That’s typically my routine—a lot of running around. There’s also a dog in the mix too.

What is the best piece of money or career advice you’ve ever received?

I think a lot of the challenges arise if you’re not exposed early on to the concept of savings or credit or long-term-interest loans. If you are exposed to it over and over again as a child, it’s destigmatized instead of being scary or difficult to understand. Once I got advice that my husband and I should talk openly about these things in front of our kids to make sure that they were better equipped in the future as adults. It’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

Coming from an immigrant family myself, we did not talk about money in the household. So I’m adamant about teaching myself about personal finance and trying to set myself up the best way that I can for my future.

Exactly. When my son had his first lemonade stand—it was actually an apple cider stand—I made him do P&L for it.

Explain the moment you realized, Oh, I’m successful in my career. Or do you feel you’ve reached that moment yet?

If you were raised in an immigrant family, there’s a sense of almost never achieving enough. I wonder if it comes from that feeling that we need to make our parents proud for all the sacrifices that they make. In that sense, you never feel like you’re going to be able to make up that.

I’ll say this, though: In November we had an event in New York called The Table, and we did two editions of the event. Both were focused on multicultural communities. There was a moment when I was surveying the room and thinking, I have so many dear friends that are here, and they all showed up for me and brought someone else prominent in the community with them. For me, that was much more meaningful than any idea of success.

How do you balance preserving Mercedes-Benz’s legacy while reaching out to younger and more diverse audiences?

We have to take the very best of it and translate it in a way that Gen Z can understand it and embrace it and feel that it’s relevant for them. We have to use the right language. We have to reach out to them via the right platforms. We have to build the right partnerships and make sure that we’re speaking in a voice that they understand. But I say those words very deliberately—legacy and heritage—because those are elements that we have to protect and build and bring forward all the time. We have to make sure that we remain as relevant and contemporary as possible.

The Table is a great example of that. It is a big focus of our marketing team to think about how we talk to multicultural communities and segments as the United States diversifies at a really rapid pace. Growth is coming from multicultural communities, so it’s not just about putting equity into the world and doing good things. It’s also about good business.

How is Mercedes planning to use AI? I saw something about Chat GPT and a partnership that you have, but could you expand a little bit more on that?

We are already experimenting and using AI, machine learning, and generative AI in many aspects of the company. We have an integration of Chat GPT with our cars, but it goes way beyond the product. Most days I don’t drive to the office—my car drives me to the office. You turn on our level-two assisted-driving services, and you could flip your blinker on and the car changes lanes for you. We have amazing technology in the car that’s all based on machine learning and the car’s intelligence.

What trends do you see shaping the luxury car industry, and specifically Mercedes-Benz, in the next five years?

The data shows that the United States is going to be minority-majority by 2045 or 2050. That means that all growth in the United States, and all growth for automotive and luxury automotive, is going to come from multicultural segments. So we need to be speaking to those communities in a meaningful way.

The second big cornerstone of our marketing strategy right now is the rise in motorsport. In the last few years, racing is not just for a certain niche group of people, but a societal and cultural event. The benefit of having the Mercedes racing team—we need to be using that as a big marketing touchpoint for ourselves as well.

I would say the third thing is that with all of the data, technology, and AI that is available to us, we can get better and better and better at getting to the right person. We should know as much about you as we possibly can before we communicate with you.

Originally Appeared on Glamour