In our April Edition of Connect Magazine we featured branding strategist Melissa Murphy in a Q&A format. She is a nationally recognized branding and communications strategist and an adjunct professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, where she lectures on topics such as “Branding From the Inside Out” and “Creating and Growing Your Personal Brand.”  These are my favorite excerpts from that Q&A:

What do you know about marketing that the rest of us don’t?

It’s more about what I never forget. That begins with the consumer. You have to know your audience– who they are, what motivates them, what frustrates them, how they spend their day. You have to understand their world in its totality,
not just the product you’re trying to sell them. We multi-task more than ever, and with that comes a greater need to understand how all of the pieces of their lives fit together. How we engage with people, products and the media
has changed forever.

Exactly! Use data and speak to them personally in a 1 to 1 manner!

What traits should every good marketer have?

It’s the ability to tell a story. Every successful product, brand and campaign is about storytelling. In today’s multi-faceted media world, it’s important to tell your story across mediums that build off of one another, not just repeat the same message via various tactics. Good marketing is about making choices. It’s about having a plan to win in the marketplace. With a wishy-washy strategy, comes a wishy-washy marketing plan that doesn’t allow the effort to reach its full potential and impact your consumers.

Yes! Tell you story, be authentic and you will build trust.

What’s the one thing every marketer should do in 2014?

Stop looking at marketing by individual platforms and tactics (PR, advertising, social, promotion, etc.) and start looking at it the way the consumer does – in totality. In today’s world, it’s about synergies across multiple platforms that work together to tell a brand’s story. It is about the culmination of the touch points, not about a specific tactic. The agencies and brands that truly understand this and change how they view the world will succeed. Day-to-day execution may not be there yet, but this is certainly the wave of the future, so those who embrace it first will have a distinct first-mover advantage.

Amen! It all works together. Way to go Melissa, I couldn’t have said it better myself!