The interesting thing about marketing a workplace lunch is that the buyer and the customer may never meet. One person signs the contract. Another person stands in line, chooses a plate, finds a seat and decides, almost unconsciously, whether the room feels welcoming. Won Park Costof works in the distance between those two people.
At Sodexo, where she is Global Chief Brands & Marketing Officer, Costof oversees brands inside an operation built from millions of ordinary encounters. A meal before class. Coffee between meetings. A lobby that either lowers the shoulders or raises them. These moments arrive without the obvious packaging of lipstick, a laptop or a luxury product, all categories she encountered earlier in a career that moved through L'Oréal, Samsung and Revlon.
Her challenge now is to make a vast service system legible at human scale. The uniforms, recipes, sourcing rules, digital tools and client agreements matter. Yet the person eating lunch experiences none of them separately. She experiences a welcome, a wait, a taste, a conversation and perhaps a reason to come back tomorrow.
“Workplace experience is more than a concept. It is the culture we create every day.”Won Park Costof
A career built on translation
Costof describes herself as a trilingual general manager and marketing innovator. Her public career starts in business development at Ipsen, then moves into beauty at L'Oréal. A former colleague who worked with her there from 2008 to 2011 remembered an energetic international leader with operational and strategic range, along with empathy and an instinct for managing teams. Those are useful muscles for a marketer whose work would keep crossing languages, countries and categories.
At Samsung, the object changed from skin care to screens, appliances and connected homes. In 2012, as a vice president of marketing for the company's IT Solutions business, Costof spoke about pushing Samsung PCs toward a premium identity. The market was crowded, specifications were easy to compare, and only a small share of the company's laptop sales sat above $1,000. Premium could not live in a spec sheet alone.
A Samsung colleague later described her talent as putting emotional messages around dry and complex technology. He also credited her with starting Club des Chefs, a program that connected celebrated chefs with Samsung's home-appliance business. The move is revealing. An oven is a technical product. A chef turns it into culture, appetite and possibility. Costof found a person who could carry the product from a showroom into the imagination.
The path continued through senior global and U.S. roles in Samsung's consumer electronics, digital appliances and smart-home businesses, then to Revlon, where she led U.S. luxury brands and direct-to-consumer work. In 2023, Sodexo announced her arrival as chief marketing officer. The welcome emphasized that she had built multibillion-euro brands in Europe, Asia and the United States. The assignment was to oversee a portfolio tied to sustainable food and what the company calls valued experiences.
Moving between those categories requires more than changing the nouns in a presentation. Beauty marketing often begins with identity and ritual. Consumer electronics asks a person to care about capability that may be hidden behind glass or metal. Luxury depends on distinction and a carefully managed route to the customer. Contracted services have to deliver consistently through people, places and processes the marketing team does not directly control. Costof's public record suggests she learned each system from the inside, taking on general-management responsibilities as well as brand work.
Her international route matters for the same reason. Public roles place her in France, South Korea and the United States, while her education includes Concordia University and Université Paris-Est Créteil. The experience of moving among markets resists the idea that a global brand can simply be copied and pasted. A promise needs enough structure to be recognizable and enough flexibility to make sense locally. That tension later shows up clearly in Sodexo's culinary work, where a common brand platform meets local ingredients, flavors and techniques.
The consumer hiding inside the contract
Costof has a compact name for her approach: B2C4B. Business-to-consumer-for-business begins with the person at the end of the service chain. Design for that person's needs and experience, she argues, and the service creates value for the institutional client. A workplace becomes worth returning to. A dining hall gives students a feeling of belonging. The invoice remains business-to-business; the experience is unmistakably personal.
This sounds obvious after it is said. In practice, it changes where a marketer looks. The buyer may care about cost, consistency, safety and reporting. The diner notices whether the menu feels relevant and the room invites connection. Both sets of needs are real. The brand earns its place by holding them together instead of treating the consumer as an anonymous unit inside a contract.
It also changes what counts as useful evidence. A campaign can report reach, but a service has behavior all around it: which dishes people choose, when a space fills, where they linger, whether an experience gives them a reason to return. Costof's consumer-first framing makes those signals part of the brand conversation. Data can reveal a pattern, while the local team can explain the human reason underneath it. The useful loop runs from observation to design to delivery, then back to observation again.
See the person
Start with the employee, student or guest who lives the service, not only the organization purchasing it.
Shape the moment
Turn menus, spaces, technology and hospitality into one coherent experience.
Return the value
Connection, satisfaction and participation become meaningful outcomes for the client.
Costof's public writing often returns to the social function of place. In a hybrid-work world, she says, time together matters more. A workplace experience is made from warmth, welcome and human connection. This is less about decorating an office than giving people small proofs that being there has value.
The same logic appears on campus. Costof amplified Sodexo's One & All resident-dining concept, built around the finding that students see dining halls as a primary way to connect. The idea places community before throughput. Menus and adaptable spaces are tools for a social outcome. A dining hall can carry a school brand because it is one of the few places where that brand becomes lunch with another person.
“The warmth, welcome, and human connection that turn a workplace into a true community.”Won Park Costof
Let the chefs carry the strategy
Sodexo's scale creates a familiar corporate problem: a global promise must survive thousands of local decisions. Costof's work around Cook for Change offers one answer. The program brings chefs from different regions and business segments into a competition centered on seasonal and local ingredients, plant-forward cooking, full use of the product and minimal waste.
A chef challenge does several jobs at once. It recognizes craft. It turns sustainability from a target into a dish. It creates a shared language among teams who may never work in the same kitchen. It also produces stories a consumer can understand without reading a report. The evidence is on the plate.
When the 2025 regional semifinals approached, Costof wrote that she was holding her breath while waiting to learn the winners. Months later, she described the London final through passion and emotion, but also through specific constraints: respect the whole ingredient, waste less, cook with what is seasonal and local. The enthusiasm matters because it sits beside operating standards.
The portable idea
Put the strategy in the hands of people who can perform it. A chef can make sustainability tangible. A host can make belonging visible. A brand becomes credible when frontline craft gives it form.
That approach has continued through culinary-brand training at École Lenôtre in Paris, where chefs from several European markets worked on priority brands, techniques and local adaptation. A global brand needs recognizable standards. Food also demands a sense of place. Training becomes the negotiation between those requirements, with the chef acting as interpreter.
The room is part of the brand
Costof led a global marketing summit around a three-year vision and the exchange of practices across regions. Her account focused as much on people connecting in person as it did on strategic alignment. Colleagues responded by describing the week as a chance to deepen relationships and understand the company's varied businesses. The gathering itself demonstrated her thesis: the quality of a shared experience affects the work people can do together.
There is an appealing continuity here. At Samsung, the task was to draw cultural and emotional relevance from complicated technology. At Sodexo, it is to draw human meaning from complicated service operations. The inputs have changed from patents and appliances to recipes, facilities and contracts. Translation remains the craft.
Costof's recent support for Sodexo's Shift & Grow 2030 roadmap puts strong brands beside client relationships, simplification and meaningful consumer experiences. That combination avoids treating brand as a decorative layer. A service brand is an operating promise. It lives or dies in delivery, repeatedly, in places where no marketer is present.
The lesson from Costof's career is useful because it travels. Begin with the person who will feel the work. Find the emotional meaning inside the technical system. Give frontline teams a way to express the promise through their own craft. Then measure whether the moment created value for the person and the institution around them.
The outcome may look ordinary: lunch tastes good, the room feels warm, someone stays to talk. That is precisely where an invisible service becomes a brand.