Meet Jinal Shah

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their career, insights, and accomplishments. This week, that marketing leader is Jinal Shah.

Jinal Shah spent the last 8 years working directly with founders at companies that are less than 15 years old. Today, she’s Chief Customer and Marketing Officer at Zip where she leads a team of 200+ across growth, monetization, customer experience, and communications. Here are the need-to-knows about Jinal: 

• She’s led marketing for heritage brands like Macy’s (which won Mobile Marketer of the Year) and fast-growing startups like S’well and Feather. 

• She was recently named one of Forbes 50 Entrepreneurial CMOs, one of Ad Age’s Leading Women, and won Chief’s New Era Leadership Award. 

• She was one of the early bloggers who began partnering with brands when influencer marketing was in its infancy.

From journalism to JWT

Jinal began her career on the publisher side as a journalist. “My blog was one of the early ones in the trend-spotting space, before influencers existed as a category,” she recalls. “Brands started sending me products to review, and I found myself advising them on how to improve their reach out.”

That curiosity—and her knack for spotting what mattered in culture—landed Jinal at J. Walter Thompson, where she spent a decade honing her craft on the digital side.

“By working with great people, I learned through osmosis how to build conviction in my own point of view. And that’s ultimately what taste is,” Jinal said. 

“One of my earliest bosses told me that if I’ve been invited into a room, the expectation was to have a point of view. This was in my mid-twenties so from very early on, I was trained to be that person. I think that’s how I developed taste.”

Serving missions and founders

After so much time in the agency world, Jinal started asking herself an important question: Was she just an advertiser? Or was she a great commercial marketer? She set out to prove to herself that she was the latter. 

In her initial transition, Jinal worked for a large conglomerate overseeing their e-commerce. “It was an incredible experience but I realized I wanted to get my hands dirtier. So then I began my journey of working directly with founders on brands that are less than 15 years old—so in those early days.”

Eight years into this journey, Jinal sharpened her understanding of company growth stages and how that impacts the marketing work it puts out. 

“My approach has been to start my foundation off that information and build a house of brand from there” she says.

Zip’s B2B marketing and AI

Today, as Chief Customer & Marketing Officer at Zip, Jinal leads in a competitive “buy now, pay later” space. She sees both a societal and commercial opportunity: helping consumers build better financial habits.

“I came here because I saw potential for generational impact. For the right customers, our model helps avoid debt spirals and builds better behaviors than revolving credit,” she explains.

On the marketing front, Jinal noticed a shift that intrigued her. 

You can see this all around us, whether it's TikTok Shop or Instagram Shop, everyone is embedding payments inside their ecosystems to complete that content/culture/commerce triangle.”

That trend got Jinal interested in the payments side of the marketing ecosystem, which eventually landed her at Zip. The company has over 4 million customers in the U.S. and is growing at a rapid pace. “In my four years here, I feel like I've seen multiple versions of the company in this hyper growth environment that we've been in.”

A Standout Campaign: AI Meets B2B Creativity

Of all the work Jinal has led at Zip, one recent B2B campaign stands out—not just for its results, but for how it was built.

“We trained a GPT to act like an award-winning B2B creative director,” Jinal said. Her team fed the AI with a compilation of award-winning campaigns they loved, with explanations of why they love them. 

“It was our ‘Access Changes Everything’ campaign, and the AI handled that zero-to-one ideation phase. Then our team stepped in for the messy middle and AI was brought in again for the final polish,” Jinal says. 

The process freed up creatives to focus on the work only they could do. “They were still directing the AI—almost playing the role of creative director—but they could basically hand off parts of their brain to work while they moved on to other priorities,” she said.

For Jinal, the campaign also underscored a bigger truth: taste still rules. “You’re still the one deciding whether you’ll put your name on it. That’s curation. That’s taste,” she said.

Advice and takeaways

1) Build taste early.

Taste and judgment are forged early in your career. She learned them by working with brilliant people, forming her own point of view, and being willing to have it challenged by both internal and external stakeholders. Over time, her intuition was sharpened sto she could quickly identify what’s an insight versus what’s just a piece of data.  

Seek out rooms where you can observe the best but also come with a perspective. Notice what ideas are elevated and why. If there’s a concept you thought was great and it was squashed or failed, dig into the why and add them to your library of lessons. 

2) Customize your playbook.

It’s tempting to recycle a successful strategy from a previous role, but a winning approach in one context can fail in another. Jinal stressed that the right moves depend on your brand’s maturity, market position, and customer readiness. “I think being closely aligned with the future needs of your customer (as much as possible, anyway) really helps you stay one step ahead.”

Take stock of your brand’s stage of growth and the customer’s current needs. Identify which opportunities are realistic right now, and which should wait until you’ve “earned the right” to pursue them, as Jinal put it. By grounding your tactics and avoiding recycling previous strategies from other businesses, you’ll avoid wasting resources that don’t align with your current reality.

3) Treat AI as a dance partner, not a replacement.

AI can supercharge creative work, but it can’t replace human taste and curation. Jinal sees it as a tool for value creation—freeing marketers to focus on the work only they can uniquely do—rather than just an efficiency booster. Great results can happen when human direction and machine output work in harmony, each informing the other.

Consider experimenting with AI for early-stage ideation, research, or rapid prototyping and see what the experience is like. Set clear creative standards, track the results, plan retrospectives. Using AI to accelerate certain work can allow you to focus on refining ideas and making strategic decisions. Think of it as a collaborative dance: sometimes you lead, sometimes you let the AI take a step, but the vision and the responsibility are always yours.

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