Born to Brand and Manage Demand

I was born a brand guy. In the 1970s, I distressed my father with how much TV I watched. What he didn’t understand was that I wasn’t just watching Chips, BJ and The Bear, Gilligan’s Island and The Dukes of Hazard. I was also watching the commercials. I loved them.

To me, a good commercial is better than a half hour show. To be able to tell a humorous story in less than thirty seconds and at the same time convince someone to buy something appealed to my budding sense of both storytelling and capitalism.

In college, I studied PR, but during a summer internship at an ad agency, fell in love with writing commercials. After graduation, I worked for an agency in Cincinnati writing TV spots and running focus groups. Then I moved to the west coast. It seemed to me that the best creative in the early to mid nineties was coming out of Seattle. But instead of getting back into agency work, I happened into a position with a start-up wakeboard manufacturer and became their customer service manager.

It was natural for me to use my marketing and PR experience to handle service issues. Converting complaints into sales opportunities was my specialty and it got me noticed. One year in, I was asked to manage our international sales efforts.

PR to Advertising then Service to Sales may sound all over the place but the transition from one to the other seems natural to me. I view these disciplines as more connected than not.

I spent the next ten years in sales and became an advocate of the technology and processes around Customer Relationship Management (CRM.) Some of my peers thought that being a successful salesman meant having a winning personality and being able to dodge or counter objections. My opinion is that what really matters is understanding customer needs, following up when you say you're going to, and tracking your progress.

Today, I’m doing advertising again and thanks to digital media, my ads are lead generation focused. There is a direct and measurable correlation between my ad work and the top of the sales funnel. For the past five years I've done demand generation for RightNow, a cloud based CRM software provider. Here, all of the brand disciplines I’ve learned have intersected.

I think that Service, Sales, Advertising, PR, CRM, Customer Experience Management and Lead Generation can all be considered what I call Demand Management, so that’s what this blog is about.