Below are brief bios of the founding BrandingWire team. The BW approach has now evolved such that the door is open for any/all marketing bloggers to participate in addressing branding challenges.
Olivier Blanchard
Olivier Blanchard is a French-born brand strategist and marketing communications specialist. He is the founder of BrandBuilder, Inc., a marketing consultancy specializing in brand development, customer experience design and new media strategies, as well as the Senior Marketing Project Director at F360, a creative branding studio headquartered in Greenville, SC.
Becky Carroll
Becky Carroll is the founder of Petra Consulting Group, a strategic consultancy focused on growth through lengthening and strengthening customer relationships. Passionate about the customer, Becky has over 20 years of experience working in and with organizations such as HP, Electronic Arts, and Ford where she has helped improve the customer experience through marketing and customer service strategies. She is also an accomplished international speaker and author of the blog Customers Rock! Prior to founding Petra Consulting Group, she was a senior consultant with industry-leading Peppers and Rogers Group. She was also part of the Hewlett Packard family for 14 years, both in the UK and in the US, as an executive in the areas of customer loyalty, customer service, and marketing.
Derrick Daye
Derrick Daye is founder and Managing Partner of The Blake Project, a leading brand consultancy. He has spent the past 17 years helping small and large organizations design, manage and build brands that drive revenue growth through differentiated customer experiences. Derrick co-authors the branding blog Branding Strategy Insider, is quoted in the business press and writes on various marketing topics for a range of industry-specific publications. Most notably, he has worked with The White House Press Corps, the National Basketball Association and Johnson & Johnson.
Kevin Dugan
Kevin Dugan is director of marketing communications for FRCH Design Worldwide, a design firm whose clients include Disney, Starbucks and Macy’s. He has 15 years experience, previously working for the full-service agency HSR Business to Business. There he helped earn national awards from PRSA and PR Week. He also worked for Sive/Young & Rubicam. Dugan created the Strategic Public Relations blog in 2002 and the Bad Pitch blog in 2006. He has won two MarketingSherpa blog awards and his opinions on marketing are aggregated by multiple sites. Fast Company magazine has selected him annually to post at its blog since 2004.
Lewis Green
Lewis Green, Chief Communications Officer & Founder of L&G Business Solutions, a marketing and communications firm, brings three decades of business management experience. L&G Business Solutions, LLC, represents his third company. Additionally, he held management positions with GTE Discovery Publications, Puget Sound Energy and Starbucks Coffee Company. He has been invited to speak in front of audiences large and small about various business practices. Lewis’s fifth book is entitled Lead With Your Heart. Lewis’ blog is bizsolutionsplus.
Ann Handley
Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of Marketing Profs, and the Primary Caregiver of the blog, the MarketingProfs Daily Fix. Before that, she was a co-founder of ClickZ.com and longtime business journalist and editor. She wrote regularly for The Boston Globe as well as a million (give or take) mainstream and trade publications.
Gavin Heaton
Gavin was born on a boat on the Indian Ocean. He was about three months early and nearly did not survive. As a newborn he was so small that his mother wrapped him in face cloths rather than nappies, and dressed him in doll’s clothes as nothing else would fit.
OK … so only some of that is true. But which parts are fiction and which parts fact? What comes first: the brand or the story? (For the curious only the first sentence is false.)
Gavin has held book editor and publishing roles at Butterworths, tutored and lectured in performance and post-modernism at University of Western Sydney, written technical documentation, marketed technology solutions, established a “knowledge factory” and run innovation teams for IBM, created comprehensive marketing and branding strategies, launched new services and run communications campaigns for Fujistu Consulting, and now heads up the Interactive division for a global marketing and promotions agency.
In his “spare” time, Gavin writes the Servant of Chaos blog which is his personal rant on the world of branding and storytelling.
Martin Jelsema
Martin Jelsema founded Signature Strategies, a fully integrated branding service for small businesses, in 1994. For almost 50 years, Martin has contributed to the marketing success of dozens of businesses as an employee or advisor. He began at BBDO and pulled stints at IBM (strategic communications) and Coors Ceramics (new product marketing manager), Marstellar Advertising (IBM acct.) and Tallant/Yates Advertising (Hewlett-Packard acct.). Martin blogs at The Branding Blog.
Valeria Maltoni
With New World attitude and Italian style, Fast Company expert publisher, The Blog Herald contributor, and Conversation Agent Valeria Maltoni demonstrates her unique talent for synthesizing marketing, public relations, and communications. See how customer relationships are always conversations, and why this knowledge is essential to doing business in the Information Age.
Drew McLellan
Drew McLellan is Top Dog at Iowa-based McLellan Marketing Group. He created his own branding/marketing agency in 1995, after a stint with Young & Rubicam. Drew gets branding and marketing and he desperately wants you to get it too.
So he tells stories, asks questions, and milks sacred cows. All to help clients discover their brand so they can create authentic love affairs with their customers. Drew has lent his expertise to clients like Nabisco, Kraft Foods, Meredith Publishing, John Deere, Make-A-Wish and a wide array of others. He blogs at Drew’s Marketing Minute and contributes to several other marketing blogs.
Patrick Schaber
Patrick Schaber is a small business marketing manager with 12 years of experience working for both large and small organizations. His marketing experience has given him keen insights into many facets of marketing including branding, advertising, search engine marketing and more. His site, The Lonely Marketer, focuses on the diverse activities and culture related to the small business marketer.
Steve Woodruff
Steve Woodruff is a consultant with expertise in branding, marketing, training, and communications. He has 20 years of experience working with firms in the life sciences sector, and counts among his clients many of the top pharmaceutical companies. Steve’s branding blog, StickyFigure, addresses a variety of branding and marketing themes (he also maintains a second blog, Impactiviti, with a narrower focus on the pharmaceutical industry).
Hi guys,
I just wanted to invite you all to join in with http://www.pleasewalkonthegrass.com .
Having just published a book for small businesses (imaginatively entitled ‘Marketing & PR’ – A&C Black, 2007) and having established the beginnings of our online brand, we want to build up a node that genuinely challenges the rhetoric of marketing – especially the big business (big business school) ‘strategic’ narrative.
Nick and I are academics in the UK teaching in a marketing subject group at the University of Greenwich. Nick’s work focuses on sports marketing and I’m lookinf at nonprofits; but we find that small businesses are in exactly the same place.
We embrace innovative thinking and teaching using social theory and qualitative and quantitaive research methods. Oh, and we’re sceptical about marketing and consumerism.
And, if you email me, I’ll even send you 12 the book itself – we welcome any comments and debate.
So feel free to reply and ask for the book, and to join the forum commenting or starting new threads. We look forward to hearing from you.
Congratulations on brandingwire and good luck.
Phil