Link To Guest Website: http://mavensandmoguls.com/

Title: “Expert Marketing Advice & Innovative Ideas”
Guest: Paige Arnof-Fenn of Mavens & Moguls
Interviewer: Jeffrey Davis – MAGE LLC

Click here to read the transcript

Jeffrey (1s):
Well, welcome back and hello again, to all our Radio Entrepreneurs, Watchers and listeners. And we continue to stream stories of entrepreneurship leadership about how to deal with this economy. Over 7,000 interviews, over a million people have watched our stories, listen to our stories. And now we add this to our list. We add Paige Arnof-Fenn, founder, and CEO of Mavens and Moguls. Wow. You know, I wouldn’t mind being a Maven and myself.

Paige (32s):
You can be both.

Jeffrey (34s):
Yeah, exactly. Well, I don’t know about a mold. A lot of, you know, I’d have to think twice about being a mogul. I’d rather be more discreet, but I may even, I don’t know, but why don’t you tell us about your mavens and Moguls is and what that means?

Paige (46s):
So mavens is a Yiddish word for expertise. My great-grandmother would have said no at all, mogul, according to Merriam Webster is someone of rank power or distinction in a particular area. So what I’ve tried to do is assemble a rockstar group of marketing talent globally. And we come together and form teams based on what our clients need to help them tell their stories.

Jeffrey (1m 14s):
And what, what vehicles are you like? Are you digital advertising? You know, all the above public relations. Why don’t you give us a sense of the tools that you’re using to support your clients?

Paige (1m 25s):
So we do basically anything, a marketing department ad agency or PR agency does on an as needed outsource spaces. So today everything is digital. If you’re not doing digital, you kind of don’t exist today. But yeah, we, we do market research. We do advertising public relations, online marketing, SEO, SCM, you name it, anything under the marketing umbrella, we can help our clients tell better stories with the right words and pictures to get a compelling message to their audience.

Jeffrey (2m 2s):
And you said you were at Zipcar, but I’m just wondering, are there particular industries that you feel most comfortable addressing right now?

Paige (2m 9s):
So I always say we’re industry agnostic. My personal background. I came out of consumer marketing. I was in brand management at Proctor and gamble. That was my first chapter in my marketing career. And I was the assistant chief marketing officer at Coca-Cola back in the day. But then I headed up marketing at three technology venture backed startups. So I’ve done both B2B and B2C. Our clients are all over the map from, you know, consumer technology, software, hardware, you name it. We also work with a lot of nonprofits. We work with early stage companies. Pre-revenue venture backed startups all the way to fortune 500.

Paige (2m 52s):
The one area we haven’t done a lot of work in honestly, is medical device, pharma, biotech. That tends to be fairly incestuous. They like to hire people that come out of that world. I actually think we could be incredibly useful because I think there are a lot more best practices and similarities than differences, but they tend to be fairly incestuous. But other than that, we cross categories. You know, I’ve worked in transportation, I’ve worked in, you know, music, entertainment, cosmetics, paper, you name it. I, you know, I think good marketing principles transfer across categories.

Jeffrey (3m 35s):
Well, you know, you come from what I call the client side. And I come from the agency side originally in my career. And I love it that you mentioned P and G in both Coca-Cola would you say that there’s a difference between how they sort of see or approach marketing and those two companies as a brand? I just find it interesting as a brand X brand guy. I don’t know if you’re ever an X brand guy, but it’s going to say it’s

Paige (3m 58s):
In your DNA. You never, you know,

Jeffrey (4m 1s):
But, but here you have two strong marketing orientation companies, you know, maybe I would think one’s stronger than the other, but you know, I’m just wondering, you know, how, you know, what would you experience because you were inside?

Paige (4m 15s):
Absolutely. So P and G basically invented the concept of brand management and they compete in, you know, a million different categories and every category they compete in, they are number one. And usually also number two in that category. So, you know, bounty paper, towels, Sharman, toilet, paper, Pantene, shampoo, crest, toothpaste, you name it, tide detergent, Pampers diapers, like every category. They are the top on the top, maybe one, two. So, you know, they invented the system for how you market your, your brand and having grown up in that system.

Paige (4m 59s):
I feel like I, I joke with people that I basically got like a, a PhD in marketing at Proctor and gamble. They have a system for everything, how to drop a coupon, how to do packaging, copy how to do media plans. I mean, they have a system for everything and, you know, you can’t argue with success. I would sometimes be a little frustrated saying to my boss, can we try this? Or have you considered that? And my boss would just shake his head and say page, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. P and G has figured this out, please just do what I’m telling you to do. And I think there were probably seeds of me being an entrepreneur back then, because that was always trying to bend, break and change the rules.

Paige (5m 44s):
But it was an excellent foundation to learn the basics. Coca-Cola again, Coke is probably the most recognized brand globally. And again, they, they kind of know what they know and they do it really well. The thing that P and G and Coke do very consistently and similarly, they’re two of the biggest advertisers in the world. So they are spending a lot of money every day, 365 days a year in every country where they operate, my clients don’t have that luxury

Jeffrey (6m 19s):
Market or correct.

Paige (6m 21s):
Well, it’s sipped car. I became an incredibly good guerrilla marketer because we had literally no budget. So, you know, I’ve worked at both extremes to be honest, but you know, P and G and Coke, they can’t afford to run ads for the super bowl they can afford to sponsor the Olympics. That’s a luxury. Most businesses don’t have, you know, our clients tend to be 2 million to 200 million in revenue, kind of mid-market emerging market firms. As I said, a lot of them are pre-revenue venture back startups. So you have to be very scrappy, very resourceful, and very entrepreneurial to get as much bang for the buck out of that marketing budget.

Jeffrey (7m 5s):
So I have another question for you, so sorry. I keep directing it. You know, one of the most common stomping feet on the ground statements I get from people is Jeffery B2B marketing is not like consumer brand marketing. Oh, you’ll love it again. Can you, do you want to tackle that one?

Paige (7m 26s):
So I’ve heard that a million times as well. So, you know, like I said, I started my career in consumer marketing and I had heard the exact same thing. And my first foray into B2B was the second startup I worked for was strictly B2B. And people used to shake their head and say, Paige, you don’t really get this because you’ve spent your entire career in consumer marketing. This is different. I will tell you there are differences, but ultimately marketing basics still apply. As I said with pharmaceuticals, I mean, I feel like there are way more similarities than differences.

Paige (8m 6s):
You have to have, you know, a great story. You have to understand what your features are, what your benefits are, what your value proposition is, who your target audience is. There could be a primary, secondary, tertiary audience. What are your core messages? You can’t stand for everything you need to pick one or two things that you’re going to really stand for. What are the support points? What’s the data to back that up that does not change whether you’re talking B2B or B to C. So at the end of the day, I think good marketing principles apply no matter who the end user and end customer is. So I, I am very much a fan of, you know, do your homework, get your story straight, find the right words and pictures that are compelling your audience and drill it in every day, you know, in every single touch point, be very consistent and constantly reinforce those messages.

Paige (9m 6s):
If you do that, right, it doesn’t matter if you’re B2B or B2C, you will get your story out.

Jeffrey (9m 12s):
Well, my, and I would just add when you’re building confidence of a consumer and user or B2B purchaser, building confidence and brand awareness, or just confidence to make them get them to make a decision that is a similar psychological process, regardless of the category. Absolutely.

Paige (9m 33s):
And the, the other thing I would say is whether you’re B2B or B2C, every business is P2P it’s person to person. And ultimately there’s a person behind there making a decision and you’re building a relationship. So if you’re not building a relationship, you’re not doing very good marketing.

Jeffrey (9m 53s):
Well, everybody, you know, if you can’t tell, I like speaking with Paige Arnof Fenn because she has grown up on a similar field. But on the other side of the tracks, from where I got my original training, I was in the agency side and a very famous agency. Is that, I mean, when you were, if you watch mad men, they probably talked about the agency I came out of more than any other, but page. If someone’s looking for you and your expertise in this very, very fast changing world of marketing, digital marketing, and economy, how would they find you? So

Paige (10m 28s):
The best places, mavens and Moguls website, mavens and Moguls dot com, M a V E N S a N D MOG uls.com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn, Paige Arnof hyphen Fenn with a name like mine. It really is me. If you Google me, it’ll come up. So I, I have a client that once said to me, with my hyphenated, last name and the kind of alliteration of mavens and Moguls, all she could remember was Paige and mavens. And she Googled it and I popped right up. So I’m not that hard to find.

Jeffrey (11m 4s):
Well, that’s good. And I’m glad that, that you had reached out to me before we even met and showed your proactiveness. And we, we know we’re going to have page back on Radio Entrepreneurs. So stay tuned for more stories from Paige Arnof and on Radio Entrepreneurs.

Paige (11m 21s):
Thanks so much, Jeffrey. It’s been a lot of fun.

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