In the world of communications, success is based on how well you articulate your message to the end receiver.  In business that means your customer, your accounts, your investors and your coworkers.  In your personal life, that involves your friends, family, love interests, even your pets.   The greatest message or product in the world will not succeed if it cannot be understood, doesn’t have a successful appeal for the end user, and can’t be found.

Professionally, I have spent over 20 years creating marketing messages that work (and, yes, a few that didn’t) for consumer packaged goods varying from cosmetics to housewares.  I’ve worked on a lot of great brands but it was as VP of Global Marketing for wet n wild cosmetics that I really was able to push the boundaries of marketing.  When you are a budget brand of cosmetics you just can’t take yourself that seriously which gave me the freedom to try a lot of really non-traditional programs, and even better, they worked, really well actually.

That opportunity got me thinking about persuasion and the power of our words; I began investigating how we create messages and how they are received and it fascinated me so much that in 2008 I decided to leave the corporate world to get my ‘mid-life’ Master’s in Persuasion and Social Change at Pepperdine University.  Okay, it may also have been partly due to the fact that I lost 2 arguments the prior year and that really ticked me off so I decided to perfect my skills to ensure that didn’t happen again!

Armed with that Master’s and my years of in-the-trenches marketing, I have learned a lot about how to create really effective messages that are not just received, but result so that the sender gets the results they want.  So now I am out here helping others figure out how to best reach, persuade and appeal to the person across from them, or their computer, or paper.  Whether a colleague, consumer, buyer, donor, investor, potential boss, employee, friend, family, or even a love interest, how you create the message and how it is received is key.  That’s not a skill we are all born with, but it can be learned and I can help.  Public speaking, sales presentations, marketing programs, appeals for money, positioning statements, product launches, business plans, even apologies – these are the things that really excite me as I know how powerful they can be when they are done right.