Role: Brand Strategist/Consultant

Challenge: As a Brand Consultant, I have helped companies shape and enhance their brand to ensure a consistent and powerful presence. Maintaining a cohesive brand identity across diverse platforms and stakeholder initiatives presents a significant challenge, especially in larger organizations. Adapting and creating strategies for rapidly changing market dynamics, aligning internal departments for cohesive branding efforts, and tailoring a global brand to various cultural contexts without compromising its core essence are key hurdles. Additionally, aligning the brand with growing consumer expectations, and communicating efforts effectively, are critical tasks in today’s market. Consider these two brand initiatives that were immediate business imperatives and mandates from the CEO, where I led the strategy and developed brand guidance for each.

• Inclusive Marketing Guidance - Champion diversity, equity and inclusion across the companies global marketing community and brand experiences while developing robust partnerships with key enterprise stakeholders to collaborate and establish connections for inclusive marketing initiatives and guidance.

• COVID-19 Marketing Playbook - Develop a go-to-market strategy to help marketers and agency partners communicate with business customers effectively through out the COVID-19 pandemic.

Approach: Using a strategic mindset, creativity, adaptability, and strong collaboration and communication skills, I crafted and implemented comprehensive strategies and brand guidance to bolster and sustain brand identity, enhancing brand awareness and engagement. I approached each project differently.

Inclusive Marketing Guidance - I created a marketing enablement strategy, focusing on 3 pillars that would most reach colleagues and engage marketers, and then worked with key internal teams and our agency partners to execute on each.

• Build - Developed best-in-class resources to help marketers meet the needs of their local market and ensure an inclusive mindset.

• Drive - Promoted awareness of inclusive marketing resources and facilitate a culture of collaboration, inclusivity and openness to inspire marketers to authentically build brand affinity and relevance.

• Integrate - Partnered & collaborated across the business to integrate resources and align on key enterprise initiatives 

COVID-19 Marketing Playbooks - In creating guidance during a constantly evolving situation, I had to act swiftly and with agility to craft an effective response strategy. This required close collaboration with stakeholders and agency partners across the enterprise to ensure the guidance aligned with overarching priorities, especially in travel. I analyzed market trends and consumer behavior, using data to inform decisions. By adopting an agile marketing approach, I enabled quick strategic pivots in response to market shifts, ensuring timely alignment and feedback. The global branding strategy I developed allowed for localization, ensuring cultural relevance and regulatory compliance. Throughout, I communicated these efforts transparently, using storytelling to authentically connect with audiences and provide relevant examples.

Results: These efforts were instrumental in reinforcing the brand's market position, driving forward a mission of excellence and innovation in brand representation.

Inclusive Marketing Guidance

• Developed 8 new tools to improve inclusive marketing and help marketers build the brand across diverse audiences and experiences covering inclusive marketing principles, authentic storytelling, and inclusive writing.

•  Implemented a global learning and development plan, reaching 5,000 marketers, with resources available on-demand.

• Integrated inclusive marketing principles across the enterprise, including product inclusion and cultural platforms.

• Awarded the Brand Management Team Award for Collaboration and Partnership.

COVID-19 Global Marketing Playbooks

•  Developed a phased strategy, messaging framework, and creative guidance for global communication during the pandemic.

• Trained 200+ colleagues and agency partners across 21 markets.

• Delivered a global COVID-19 image library with 50+ images.

• Won the 2020 Best of the Best Marketing Award - Demonstration of Enterprise Thinking

Agency Partners: The Writer, dentsu mcgarrybowen