Marketing Insights - The Art and Science of Creating Demand

I haven’t met Aaron in person. Although I hope to soon as we both do live in the fine city of Austin, TX. I have always been impressed with the quality of content that his marketing team at Powered delivers to its audience.

I also have been following Aaron on Twitter for some time and have really enjoyed his insights and blog posts.  So well, in fact, I am blatantly stealing his idea with this Marketing Masters series. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and so I see it only fitting that Aaron is featured first on our humble imitation.

Aaron Strout: CMO at Powered Inc.

How did you get where you are today?

Well, for an old guy like me, that’s a “bigger than a breadbox” type question. But in fairness to your project, I’ll give it a shot. It all started with waiting tables and bartending. That’s where I learned a TON about customer service and multitasking. I taught myself what I know about the Web back in the early 90’s (which had roots back to my dad’s computer programming career in the 70’s and 80’s). Fidelity Investments taught me nearly everything I know about marketing. And then in the early 2000’s, I took the people skills I acquired from aforementioned waitering/bartending jobs and started down the online “social” path with LinkedIn and Facebook. Oh, and then along came Francois Gossieaux who taught me a ton about marketing 2.0. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Barry Libert, my last boss, who taught me how to properly channel my thought leadership skills.

What’s interesting in marketing for your space right now?

The intersection of “social” and “marketing.” There are two keys to this phenomena… a) great content and b) measurement and insight. Social marketing in my mind is the future of business.

How do you get good ideas and inspiration?

From a number of different traditional and new media-esque sources like NPR, marketing blogs and Twitter. Most importantly though, getting together with friends like Dave Evans, Kyle Flaherty, Bryan Person, Peter Kim, David Armano, Jim Storer and Tim Walker – along with my super smart colleagues at Powered – helps me distill these new ideas into “implement-able” tactics.

What campaign have you seen recently that really blew you away?

Hmmm, I’m not sure there’s anything that’s blown me away. However, I’m a big fan of what smart CMO’s like Jeffrey Hayzlett of Kodak and Barry Judge of Best Buy are doing. Those guys are good people to watch.

If you were a font, which font would you be?

As boring as it sounds (love the question though), probably Calibri. It’s simple, clean but easy to read. I always try and keep things simple and make any of my recommendations to others prescriptive.

Please share with us a nugget of your marketing wisdom for our readers.

I’m a huge believer in Karma. To me, that means that I try and do nice things and be respectful of anyone and everyone, irrespective of what they might offer back to me. What I’ve found is that in the grand scheme of things, this always pays back in spades. It also makes people happy and grateful which are nice traits to see in people. I also am a big fan of work/life balance although I’m not always as good at practicing it as I would like.

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[Photo Credit: Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us]