Fractional Marketing: A Solution for Non-Profits?
The pressure on a business’ bottom line can be intense - nowhere more so than in the non-profit world. Most non-profits succeed and fail based on their ability to maximize the amount of their revenue on their cause area, which often means the focus of staffing is in two areas - operations and development. While marketing may be high on the priority list, hiring a senior marketer can be difficult for small to medium sized organizations. That’s where fractional marketing support comes in. Fractional marketing consulting can offer several benefits to non-profit organizations looking to improve their marketing efforts without the consideration of a full-time salary or benefits. For roughly the cost of a full-time, entry-level employee, a non-profit can often hire a senior marketer for 10-15 hours per week and achieve results that can propel their organization forward. Following are some of the key advantages:
1. Cost-Effective Expertise: Fractional marketing consultants provide specialized marketing expertise on a part-time or as-needed basis. This allows non-profits to access high-quality marketing talent without the expense of hiring a full-time employee. It's a cost-effective way to leverage the skills of experienced professionals.
2. Strategic Guidance: Fractional marketing consultants bring a strategic perspective to your organization. They can assess your current marketing efforts, identify weaknesses, and develop a tailored marketing strategy that aligns with your non-profit's mission and goals. This strategic guidance helps you allocate resources more effectively.
3. Flexibility: Non-profits often have fluctuating marketing needs, such as during fundraising campaigns or awareness events. Fractional consultants can adapt to these changing needs, scaling their involvement up or down as required. This flexibility ensures that you get the right level of support at any given time.
4. Fresh Insights: A fractional marketing consultant often provides fresh perspectives and innovative ideas. They bring experiences from working with different organizations and industries, which can lead to creative solutions and strategies that your non-profit may not have considered otherwise.
5. Focus: A fractional marketing consultant can help focus your organization in a variety of ways through a more strategic assessment of your audience, a sharper insight, and more impactful messaging. Any of these adjustments can lead to reduced expense and/or increased impact.
6. Access to Networks: Experienced fractional consultants often have extensive networks in the marketing and non-profit sectors. They can introduce your organization to potential partners, donors, and collaborators, which can be invaluable for growth and sustainability.
7. Training and Skill Transfer: Fractional consultants can also provide training and mentorship to your existing staff. This helps build internal marketing capabilities, ensuring that your team can continue to implement effective marketing strategies even after the consultant's engagement ends. Providing additional training to your staff can also help strengthen your succession plans.
8. Measurable Results: Fractional marketing consultants are typically results-oriented. They work with your organization to define clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs), and they help track and measure the impact of marketing initiatives. This data-driven approach ensures that your marketing efforts are producing measurable results.
9. Risk Mitigation: Marketing trends and technologies are constantly evolving. Fractional consultants stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the field, helping your non-profit adapt to changes and mitigate the risks associated with falling behind in marketing practices.
10. Improved Fundraising: Effective marketing can significantly boost your non-profit's fundraising efforts. Fractional consultants can help develop targeted campaigns, refine donor engagement strategies, and optimize online fundraising channels to increase donations and support for your cause.
In summary, fractional marketing consulting offers non-profit organizations access to expertise, flexibility, and strategic guidance without the commitment of hiring a full-time marketing team member. This can lead to more effective marketing efforts, increased donor support, and greater impact in advancing your non-profit's mission.
The Power of Belief
When I started my business, my wife and kids were binge-watching the hit series Ted Lasso, about an inspirational American football coach who takes a job as coach of an English football (soccer) club. In the show (not a spoiler!), Ted hangs a simple, handmade sign above the doorway of the locker room that says “BELIEVE”. The sign and the idea seemed so apropos for what I was embarking on that my family got me a miniature version of the sign and hung it over the doorway that leads to my office. I see it every morning before I begin my day.
Being an entrepreneur requires incredible belief. Belief that is tested every day, sometimes to your very core. You need to believe in yourself, in your ability and capability. You need to believe that what you’re going to invest your time, money and energy in is both worthwhile and able to provide an acceptable return on that investment. And mostly, you need to believe that what you are dreaming of not only can happen, but will.
But is self-belief enough to be successful, or is it just being Pollyanna?
I DO think belief is enough, and here’s why: belief begets confidence, and confidence is tangible to others. If you truly believe in yourself, others will believe in you, and that will lead to success. Think about your own career: the most successful leaders were the ones so confident in themselves and their vision they inspired others to follow. The most successful entrepreneurs are supremely confident - sometimes even when an outsider might question whether they have reason to be. They’re not necessarily smarter and they don’t necessarily work harder than other entrepreneurs. But people are drawn to them because confidence is a magnet. When you believe you are the best person to do the job, others will believe you too.
But do people with a high sense of self-belief ever doubt themselves? Of course! It’s when that confidence breaks down - when that belief is questioned and doubt creeps in - that unsuccessful entrepreneurs allow it to consume them. In contrast, successful entrepreneurs use periods of doubt as fuel that drives them forward. How? By motivating them to continue to learn and grow and improve; by never allowing them to be satisfied.
What do you do to get your mojo back? Find the helpers. You know who they are. They’re the folks who know and believe in you and offer support unconditionally. Their positive feedback is sometimes enough to remind you of why you started your business in the first place, but they can also remind you how capable you truly are. For me, it’s my former co-workers. I KNOW I’m really good at building brands because I have performed at a high level for a long time and received accolades and advancement for my work from clients and bosses and peers. They are also a good at reminding me of the lengths I’ve gone to to create truly exceptional work. Often, those simple reminders are enough to recharge the batteries. Of course, having a little sign to hang above your door that reminds you every day to “BELIEVE” is nice too.
Hire For Diversity – Of Experience
One of the most common mistakes I see B2C companies make when they are searching for a marketing executive is prioritizing industry experience. I’m here to tell you that unless your field is HIGHLY technical (which typically would preclude you from being B2C anyway), finding a generalist with a broad base of experience usually leads to the best outcome.
You’ve probably already read studies that show that executive teams with increased diversity of gender, ethnicity and age tend to solve problems and grow their businesses faster. Diverse executive teams have a wider variety of life and work experience to draw from. By extension, hiring a marketing executive that has worked in a number of industries (diversity of acquired experience) will yield greater adaptability, innovation, creativity and versatility, while reducing risk!
Finding this hard to believe? Throughout my career I have worked on both the advertising agency side and the consumer engagement side of client businesses. I have marketed brands in industries as diverse as banking, non-profit, luxury, industrial, technology, telecommunications, consumer electronics, apparel, tourism, professional sports, utilities, food & beverage and home goods. While each business required a “ramp-up” period - typically about 3 months to learn the fundamentals of what make that industry unique - after that ramp-up period I would say I knew 80% of what I needed to be successful. Less if I had access to R&D and product development teams who DID benefit from specialization. After all, consumer engagement by its nature is as much (or more) about understanding the prospective buyer as it is about the product itself. The X-factor I provided was that every single business I worked on benefitted from best practices I was able to bring from the other industries in which I had worked. I brought experience from the industrial sector to professional sports, from sports to apparel, from apparel to food & beverage, from food & beverage to tourism, et cetera.
Unconvinced? Bill Gates made the same argument regarding Microsoft’s success in his review of the book, “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by David Epstein here.
Quite simply, a marketing executive with diverse experience is better equipped to adapt to changing market dynamics and trends. They bring a broader perspective and strategies that can be tailored to a variety of business contexts. They are also more likely to innovate within the category, drawing upon a wider range of ideas, approaches and best practices. They are more likely to think outside of the box, exploring unconventional solutions and identifying opportunities for cross-pollination and leveraging successful strategies from one sector to benefit another resulting in unique and effective marketing initiatives.
Business environments are increasingly complex and unpredictable. COVID taught that in a big way. A marketing executive with a diverse background is more likely to have encountered different challenges, risks and market conditions, and their exposure to these situations equips them with a more nuanced understanding of risk management. They can identify potential pitfalls others may not see and are often able to navigate uncertainty with a more varied set of solutions. This versatility – the agility to switch gears by finding innovative solutions -- often results in first-mover advantage within an industry clogged with insiders.
But what about the old mantra “Jack of all trades, master of none”? Well, first, the “trade” in this case is still marketing. I’m not suggesting hiring someone for a senior marketing role with no (or limited) experience in marketing. This is someone who has been in marketing most, if not all, of their career. They have mastered it, they are just bringing a great deal more diversity of experience to the role.
The bottom line? When hiring for senior marketing positions, don’t stop at inherent diversity (race, gender, sexual orientation). Those are definitely important, but you should also look for diversity of acquired experience. Find smart, experienced marketers who have succeeded with multiple brands outside of your category; ones who have done so during up and down markets. Look for talent who can learn quickly, have proven their ability to adapt to changing market conditions and have a portfolio of differentiating work. After you’ve done that, do it again. Build an entire team based on that philosophy, a team with complementary skills and a flat culture where new ideas and innovation are embraced.
I promise you, your brand will be unstoppable.
Why Startups Fail (And What You Can Do About It)
According to research, there are six major reasons why most startups fail:
They run out of funding
Inadequate Customer Research & Market Sizing
Ineffective Targeting
Inconsistent Messaging
Failure to Measure & Adapt
Poor Marketing Strategy
Said differently, if I told you there is a way to substantially reduce the risk of your startup failing and that it 1) is something you can initially outsource 2) is something that takes very little of your time away from your day-to-day focus and 3) is affordable, doesn’t that seem like a no-brainer?
Building an effective brand strategy IS that insurance policy. As a startup, building a cohesive and compelling brand is the single most important thing you can do for the long-term health of your business, yet many companies undervalue the need or are unsure of when to begin. Founders come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but many from very technical fields – computer science, engineering, physics, biology, etc – may not shift their focus to marketing until their product is “final” and ready to be commercialized, well after the point of maximum benefit. This is no slight to anyone. Startups are a LOT of work, and most people choose to focus on their areas of specialty. That’s exactly why outsourcing brand strategy can be so effective.
To clarify, I’m not just talking about your logo or your brand colors and font. A holistic brand strategy encompasses your values, your mission, your identity, your positioning and your brand promise. Yes, it’s critical to the effectiveness of the marketing and sales teams, but it also provides inspiration and direction to R&D, focus to operations, guidance to external vendors and can also attract investors and partners. Investing in brand strategy lays out who you are and why you exist as a business. It defines the market you expect to compete in and the size of that market. It defines your target customer and lays the groundwork for how to find them most efficiently. It provides guidance on what to say and how to say it to your audience. A brand strategy also lays out how to position your brand in the marketplace against your competition and can guide pricing strategy. It can clarify your own strengths as well as identify weaknesses in your competition that you can exploit. Last, and perhaps least considered, is that it SAVES you time & money in the long run by creating much needed focus. An effective brand strategy gives your brand differentiation, consistency and credibility, and investing in it as early as possible can even surface barriers that could sink you at launch if not addressed.
Even understanding all those things, a startup can’t risk running out of funding either and bringing on senior headcount too early can put a significant strain on cash flow. That’s where outsourcing comes in. Outsourcing your brand strategy with a trusted vendor can provide your business with senior-level marketing thinking and set your brand in motion well before you have to think about an executive search, equity packages and building out a marketing team (PS – not all CMOs are experts in brand strategy either). And while the work WILL require the input of key stakeholders, the amount of time you’ll need to invest is hours, not days, weeks or months.
When IS the perfect time to invest in brand strategy? Typically after your first round of funding, but before your second round. If you’re already past the second round, the answer is probably “now.” You’ll want to be sure you have a minimum viable product (MVP) and a basic business model, but any time after that is appropriate – the sooner the better. How much should you be prepared to invest? Crafting a comprehensive brand strategy for a startup (excluding design work) can take 100-300 hours depending on the type of business, the amount of competition and the target audience, so be prepared to pay a specialist between $15,000-$50,000 – but expect your investment to pay back on itself several times over. When they hand off the final document to you, you should feel comfortable in your understanding of the work AND be able to execute (or hand it off to vendors) based on the recommendations. More is not always better though! A trusted resource should right-size a strategy for your brand and also act as a mentor and coach throughout the process. You’ll want enough of a plan to launch your ship on the right course, but leave enough of a budget to be able to react to changes the brand strategy will uncover and also not delay any launch plans.
Endangered Species Marketing, LLC (ESM) is a brand and marketing consultancy established to help B2C businesses grow faster through smarter marketing. The goal of ESM is to help clients build a stronger foundation for consistent, compelling and disruptive messaging to ultimately drive greater awareness, purchase intent and loyalty.
AI: The Death of Marketing As We Know It?
Why are any of us here?
Existentialism was probably not what you were expecting in a blog post on a Monday morning, eh? After all, this IS meant to be a post about AI and marketing. But if you stop and think about that question for one moment, you may see where this is headed.
If you answered “to make money”, this post isn’t for you. For the rest, anyone with a passing knowledge of the concept of self-actualization will understand that achieving one’s full potential should be what we are all striving for. Heck, even my own religion, Judaism, has a phrase - which is also the cornerstone of why I started my new business - called “Tikkun Olam,” which translates to “repair the world”. The idea is that the world is broken and it’s up to all of us in our time here to fix it.
So that’s great Dave…what about AI and marketing? Okay, okay. Here we go. Ahem:
“AI will ultimately lead to the end of marketing as we know it.”
There, I said it. What’s worse, by adopting it ourselves, we will have no one to blame. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Really, Dave? Isn’t that a bit harsh?
Let me explain. First, AI probably has a legitimate place in marketing. Use of AI in marketing automation makes the mundane tasks much simpler, more efficient and reduces human error (I could argue it tips the scales even farther in the direction of an overreliance on data, but for purposes of this post let’s say it has a place). Marketing automation is the “white hat” of AI. Conversely, the “black hat” that will lead to my above foreboding comment is using AI as a creative tool. Believe me, I understand the attraction of typing a few words into an AI tool and seeing a letter or an article pop-out, or seeing the tool create a piece of artwork, but stop for a moment and think about what that means. Creativity is the pinnacle of human achievement, and by using AI we are ceding the most incredible thing about what makes us “us” to a machine. Why? Is there anything left we won’t do in the name of productivity?
AI is not just a tool, like a paint brush. It is both the artist AND the paint brush, the writer AND the pen – and if you’re reading this and arguing “no it’s not” because you typed some keywords in first, we can probably at least agree the automation of the creative process within AI is not that far off. By handing over the creative process to AI, we are once again diminishing quality at the expense of quantity and efficiency, something we’ve seen in marketing over the last few decades as resources are spread even thinner with 1:1 marketing. The greatest irony? AI isn’t really even “creativity”, as it relies on plagiarizing and merging the talents of the truly creative into a more watered down result that still lacks a human touch.
"Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought." - Albert Einstein
So WHY are we using AI? Well, it’s a shiny object, to be sure. But mostly because it’s a shortcut, and true creativity is HARD WORK. The pressure to perform is so cutthroat in this industry that everyone is always seeking an edge. Sure, maybe the output is of a lesser quality, but it’s just So. Damn. Efficient. maybe the client will buy it anyway and it will allow us to get more projects done and make a little more money. Until clients start using it themselves, of course. See where this is going? Once the acceptable level of quality drops further, the entire marketing process could simply be a series of automated optimization steps utilizing an AI tool, displacing virtually our entire industry. Worse than THAT, we’re also limiting our own self-actualization in the process. If creativity is the peak of human achievement, and we hand that over to AI, what is our purpose?
So what are we to do? Well, as with anything, AI is driven by capitalism. I have made a conscious decision to not use AI for any creative purpose. I realize that makes me “analog” in a digital world, but maybe more people will agree and choose the same path. We need to begin to consciously choose to protect things that are meaningful to us, and creativity is one of those things for me.
Happy Monday.
Swipe Right on Great Marketing
The old adage is that marketing is a lot like dating, but I propose we update that a bit. An even better analogy is that marketing is like a dating app. You put your brand out there, maybe even tell a few jokes, and hope consumers will swipe right and start a dialog. Knowing your audience – what they like and don’t like - is definitely important and can get you to the point where you’re having a dialog. It might even get you to the point of consideration. But knowing who YOU are – your values, your goals, your identity – is the other critical piece to really make any relationship a long-term success. Once you understand who you are as a brand and what makes you unique, figuring out what to say and how to say it to attract the right audience becomes a lot easier.
That’s where I come in. I guess in this analogy you could call me a “matchmaker,” although I call myself a “marketing consultant.” My first job is to ensure you have a clear idea of who you are as a brand. I promise I won’t sugarcoat anything either. I’ll help you understand what truly drives your business, and what makes you unique. I’ll be truthful about your strengths and weaknesses and what competitors offer so we can figure out where your brand fits in the selling landscape. Identifying and fixing the flaws is part of the process – nothing gets fixed if it gets ignored -- and no weakness needs to be permanent.
We may find that what you’ve been communicating to consumers is not what’s important to them (your messaging isn’t resonating). We may discover you sound the same as everyone else when talking to your audience (you’re not breaking through the clutter and differentiating yourself). Or maybe you just need to expand (or contract) your audience because you’re not talking to enough prospects (or too few). It’s okay. By going through the brand development process, by really understanding your own business’ DNA, we can set you brand up for a much more reliable result from your messaging efforts.
So when you think about your brand, think about it like you’re on a dating app. Start by understanding who you are, what truly makes your brand special and what you want consumers to associate with your brand. You’ve got a limited amount of time and space to tell people about what really defines you, and you need to communicate it in a way that both stands out but also reflects your identity. And if you need help, reach out to a matchmaker like me. Endangered Species Marketing exists to help businesses be better marketers, whether it’s building (or rebuilding) your brand foundation, developing a rock-solid messaging strategy that disrupts your category, or creating your next great campaign. To swipe right on great marketing simply message me on LinkedIn or click the “Contact” button on my website at https://www.endangeredspeciesmarketing.com.
“We need some ads”
Maybe you’re a startup (or a small-business entrepreneur) and you’re at the point where you’re ready to start selling but aren’t sure where to begin with regard to marketing. Maybe you’re a non-profit and can’t figure out why you aren’t driving the kind of donations you need. Most RFPs I see from businesses in these same situations are looking for help with advertising – maybe looking for a creative team to design and produce ads or sometimes even data analysts to help figure out why ads are underperforming. I’m here to tell you the answer is almost never “ads” and always branding.
If you were nodding along to that last paragraph, and that last sentence was a curveball, this article is for you! Maybe you’re thinking that branding is only for big companies and you’re not there yet. Maybe you’re not sure what branding IS. In a few short paragraphs I hope to explain to you why branding is the single most important thing you can do for yourself before you flip the switch and start selling.
Branding is like compound interest,
the sooner you start, the higher the yield down the road.
So, what is a “brand,” and why is it such a big deal? A brand is the totality of thoughts, feelings, associations and expectations a consumer experiences when exposed to your name, trademarks, products, designs and representatives. More simply put, your brand is the sum of every point of contact between your business and the end-user. The critical piece of that statement (and something even some marketers fail to understand) is that consumers partially own your brand. While you control and influence the messages communicated to consumers, ultimately it is up to them to interpret those messages, and as the old saying goes “Perception is reality.” The smaller your budget, the more critical it is for every single one of those points of contact to be speaking in harmony and reinforcing why your audience should care about you. Conversely, businesses that don’t market themselves as a cohesive brand cede too much control to the consumer to define what they stand for, and misspend their marketing budgets by far more than it will ever cost them to create a strong brand in the first place.
Pretty important, right? But that’s only the start.
Strong brands deliver intrinsic value. They allow you to charge a premium for your product or service and also garner preferred distribution at point of sale. Consider the difference between Coke® and grocery store cola. The cola inside those cans may be identical in flavor, but consumers willingly pay $1-2 more for that 12-pack. That’s because of branding. You’ll also find Coke on the end-cap displays of the store or on the most prominent part of the shelf. You don’t find many restaurants offering you generic cola either, do you?
In addition to intrinsic value, strong brands deliver relative value. They’re less reliant on price promotions because their customers are more loyal. They’re less reliant on proving demonstrable advantages and more resistant to competitors entering the marketplace.
Strong brands also have higher name recognition (meaning it takes less advertising impressions to get their message across), and are considered more credible, so each message is read with a greater sense of belief.
Okay, Dave, branding is important. So how do you do it? Well, that’s where Endangered Species Marketing can help. I can help you identify the essence of who you are and why consumers should care, and even who those best customers should be. I can also help you determine who is competing for those same dollars, what their strengths and weaknesses are, how they are currently positioned in the marketplace and where there may be gaps. Then I can help you determine how you should be positioning your brand in the marketplace based on critical consumer insights.
Then, and only then, should you truly start spending money on marketing. With a solid brand foundation in place, we can then develop your messaging strategy – what you say and how you say it. This will establish your look, tone and voice as a brand as well as your promise to your consumers - a promise you guarantee to deliver on every. single. time. These guardrails will help you stay true to your brand across all touchpoints and help your marketing team stay consistent as you grow. The more consistently you communicate to consumers, the more memorable you’ll be, driving efficiency and impact from every marketing dollar. THEN we can make you some ads!
This may all seem overwhelming. It’s not meant to be, but it IS meant to help you recognize the important foundational work that should be done before you start investing significantly in advertising. Most brand-building projects take about 4 weeks to complete, and while there is involvement from key stakeholders in terms of intake interviews and transfer of information, these projects do not take you away from the full-time work of running your business.
Post-Script: If you (or maybe your CFO) are interested in reading more about the financial value of a brand, I invite you to read this excellent article from the 2019 issue of Strategic Finance Magazine: https://sfmagazine.com/articles/2019/october/the-financial-value-of-brand/
Keep It Simple, Stupid
You’ve probably heard the term “KISS” (Keep It Simple, Stupid) before regarding marketing. To me, it applies to both messaging AND strategy. I don’t know about you, but I hate jargon. Jargon is the enemy of simplicity and the industry is making marketing more complex than it needs to be. Most marketing agencies and consultants love jargon because it’s a great sales tool – making simple things seem hard helps pad the retainer and having a “branded solution” differentiates one agency from another when what they really do is very similar. I want to help my clients solve problems, not sell them something they may never use afterwards because it’s too complex to explain to the rest of the company.
When I’m having a conversation with someone, it doesn’t matter whether the topic is something I may have 20 years’ experience with or something brand new, like a cutting-edge technology, I am most often the one in the room raising his hand and asking people to “explain it to me like I’m a 5-year-old.” I do this for two reasons and the first is obvious: I need to understand it. If I don’t understand something, I just ask – and I try to reinforce that with people I work with. You never solve a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist, and if you don’t understand something, that’s a problem. The ability to communicate and understand each other is one of the most critical things we do in life, yet we often do it poorly (I’m looking at you emails & text messaging). I not only want to hear you, I want to understand you and provide meaningful input.
The second reason I ask questions may not be obvious: I want to be sure the person speaking understands it. Sometimes jargon exists because it’s short-hand for complex ideas, sometimes it exists to make simple ideas seem more complex and SOMETIMES, jargon is just so jargon-y terms start being used incorrectly. For example, how many times have you heard the words “goals” “objectives” and “strategies” used interchangeably? Or sat in a room and heard the terms “brand mission”, “brand vision”, “brand positioning”, “brand voice”, “brand identity”, and “brand promise” talked about so quickly your brain was doing all it can just to keep up rather than truly being able to absorb the content of the conversation? And those examples don’t even compare to a digital media conversation where acronyms spill out like candy from a piñata. You might hear reference to “CPA”, “CPC”, “CPM”, “CTR”, “ROAS”, “iROAS”, “CPL”, “KPI”, “ROI”, “SEO”, “SEM”, and “UI/UX” in a span of a few minutes!
As a consultant, I see myself as a resource for companies who need help creating a strong foundation for their brand (or maybe help rebuilding their brand), crafting an impactful messaging strategy, launching a new campaign and even acting as a fractional CMO before they’re able to bring on a full-time leader. I also see my role as an educator, not only executing at a high level, but ensuring clients are confident regarding the path forward after we part ways. I’ve always felt the best way to do that, is to keep it simple.
What’s In A Name?
After launching Endangered Species Marketing, friends and colleagues were curious about the story behind the name. Here is exactly what I tell them:
First, I truly believe that great marketing is at risk:
1) Companies are increasingly run as short-term concerns, under scrutiny to maximize every single dollar of spending. As both art and science, marketing is a significant expense and an element of the budget without cost surety. To reduce their risk, companies have begun prioritizing the measurable "science" of marketing over the art.
2) The proliferation of 1:1 marketing is incredibly labor-intensive. Marketing departments are stretched thin and tasked to create a large volume of consumer-facing messaging that reaches ever smaller audiences. The result often becomes quantity over quality.
3) The large volume of tactics and emphasis on the science of marketing - test and learn, analytics and optimization - results in marketing departments drowning in data. With so much data, and pressure to create ever more content, there is an inability to see the forest for the trees.
4) With the average tenure of CMOs between 2-4 years, the result becomes different marketing philosophies, followed by different agencies and sometimes even internal teams. While occasionally these changes can result in a successful brand reset, often the result is ever more churn.
(Editor’s Note: your results may vary)
I also chose the name “Endangered Species” because, when I left my role as Senior Director of Marketing & Communications at Baskin-Robbins and began looking for senior marketing roles, I quickly discovered that being over 50 in marketing made me an endangered species. While marketing has made huge, positive advances giving women and PoC access to senior roles (yay!), there is also rampant ageism. Traditional marketing experience has been devalued and replaced with the desire for Millennial “digital natives.” The new name was a nod to the status of every marketer over the age of 50 out there being told by recruiters and hiring managers we should remove our job experience to “look less old.”
Last, “Endangered Species” was born out of my desire to give back. As I began to consider my career alternatives, I realized being part of something that was making the world better needed to be part of my mission. This consultancy allows me to do both – to devote some of my time to helping non-profits be better marketers and to also earn money to donate to a charitable organization whose mission is to help protect and preserve endangered species, the World Wildlife Fund.
If you’re thinking about a name, whether it’s for a business or a product, keep in mind the following: a name should be easy to pronounce and spell, it should be something that’s not being used by competitors (or easily confused with same) and doesn’t have any unintended meanings. MOST IMPORTANTLY, a name should be memorable and have a good story.