My Motivation
I am excited by partnering with founders and teams at companies that are trying to build a vision into a business, make a brand people love, disrupt a category and improve, or even revolutionize the way people do things.
Working in this capacity, I have helped several private and public companies of all sizes to raise millions of dollars in funding, and to efficiently and exponentially grow new users and increase revenue.
I like the challenge of creating advertising that connects emotionally, making a dollar work harder, and shaping collaborative teams where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
If you have that type of business mission and energy, I would like to meet you and help you make a brand people love and to scale transformational growth efficiently.
I created the strategy of “Performance Branding” to help a business like yours.
The False Choice Of Brand vs. Growth
Most startup or growth stage companies have a mandate to scale – now, fast, and efficiently. But they often don’t have an experienced marketing team, differentiated brand, compelling messaging or a scalable acquisition growth strategy. They don’t understand how to buy media, target customers, or create effective advertising.
Often they confuse cheap or fad online acquisition tactics with real brand building and advertising. To build a real brand, it must be properly positioned with authentic and compelling storytelling and messaging that connects emotionally with customers. Founders often make a false choice between “branding” and “performance marketing.” Usually, the default is to focus on one-dimensional Google search or Facebook marketing because it can be immediately measured against a CPA. This leads to a hand-wavy foray into “original content” and “social tactics” – that usually get assigned off to an intern and subsequently explained away as too hard to measure.
Paid Search, FB, content, and social all have an important place at the table. But they are commoditized and every marketer has access to the same tools, and targets.
The difference for successful brands is the brand positioning, validating research, interruptive messaging, compelling creative and how you buy the media, which all lead to great advertising that works and a brand that speaks to the right people, so they feel understood.
I call this “Performance Branding.”
The short term thinking, ever-changing strategies, and belief in “magic” marketing tactics that most companies attempt is a bad choice and once through the initial low hanging fruit (the few early adopters that try and abandon every new thing) always assures inconsistent growth, confusing branding, competitive weakness, poor engagement, forgettable messaging, and limited loyalty – not to mention, inefficient CAC.
Your competitors will thank you for this marketing failure.
Getting lucky, or assuming you can “figure it out” with more tired and white noise tactics is not a winning strategy.
Performance Branding Is A Better Way For Startup & High Growth Companies
The better way is a strategic approach to building a brand’s unique positioning, value proposition, and messaging based on identifying your brand category white space, brand positioning, value proposition and truly understanding your user personas and what role your brand plays in their lives. This strategic foundation surfaces insights and opportunities that translate into new messaging and a blended and balanced Paid, Owned, and Earned marketing playbook and builds both brand awareness and category leadership, as well as efficient and scalable new users and engagement.
Happily, “Performance Branding” also leads to incremental revenue.
I work with companies in customized projects, interim or full-time roles that will help them optimize for real, efficient, and scalable new user growth while building the foundation for making a brand people love.
My expertise in defining, scaling, and managing brands and messaging combined with innovative digital, mobile, and offline marketing tactics help businesses scale efficiently.
I help build Paid, Owned, and Earned marketing acquisition programs in collaboration with founders, marketing, product, sales, and technology teams to generate unprecedented brand awareness and transformational efficient new user growth.
Marketing Is Hard Work – And Where Many Companies Stumble
It is hard to make a brand people love, efficiently increase user acquisition and retention, model and scale marketing growth, measure and interpret data, refine and optimize tactics, and generate sales leads and revenue.
Most companies fail at building a powerful brand and efficient scale. They churn through marketing executives every 18 months, endlessly reconfigure marketing teams and constantly search for “growth hacks” and new, shiny tactics from the most recent blog or magazine articles. Or they hire a new agency to solve the wrong problems.
It is true that new ideas should be responsibly tested, teams are dynamic and evolve, and sometimes you can catch a new media wave or tactic before others realize the value.
But…here is the truth. Scale and efficiency are usually mutually exclusive. When a new efficient marketing tactic comes along, it has no scale because not enough people are using it yet. And tactics that have proven scale have little efficiency because everyone is competing for the limited inventory.
On top of that, performance marketing is largely commoditized, with everyone scrambling to “optimize” the same digital channels and “outperform” the competition on the same tired platforms without addressing the real foundational brand and advertising challenges. The brands you admire got to where they are because they challenged conventional thinking, asked “Who is it for?” and “What is it for?” and then crafted authentic stories, in the process building a leading brand that people love.
How I Help You Scale – Tens Of Thousands Hours Of Experience
No shortcuts for wisdom, I have a significant and successful marketing record (see my more than 30 written LinkedIn recommendations) across diverse categories – from start-ups to established brands and businesses – as well as experience at award-winning advertising agencies, and as an entrepreneur.
This means expertise, pattern recognition, and an ability to see around corners.
I am a hands-on leader and manager that helps provide perspective, actionable strategic insights, targeted marketing, media tactics, and development of creative around a compelling message that builds your brand and business.
My marketing playbook of Paid, Owned and Earned tactics developed over more than 20 years of learning and testing can help you create real brand leadership and awareness, and efficiently scale your business, increase revenue, and keep the board happy.
It is not magic – it is real experience, battle scars, intellectual curiosity, industry leadership, creativity, and innovation. It is an understanding of how to create and tell authentic and emotional brand stories and to build and amplify brands, marketing, and advertising that take the category “High Ground” and that are defendable, memorable, and compelling.
Your great idea, VC funding, and early business momentum do not matter if you cannot urgently and efficiently scale, satisfy the business model, and become a brand people love.
Let’s get to work.