Marketing and Fractional CMO Consulting
I help grow brands, drive innovation, attract the right customers and align marketing with business strategy – especially in companies that are scaling fast or navigating change.
Tools and methodologies that describe what it really takes to build marketing and innovation functions that drive revenue, from achieving product-market fit, to sharpening your positioning and executing campaigns that convert.
As a Fractional CMO, I partner with founders and leadership teams to bring clarity, consistency, and momentum – without the overhead of a full-time hire. These posts offer practical insights and proven strategies drawn from my experience in CPG, food and beverage, home appliances wellness, and service-based businesses. Think of it as your roadmap to smarter, more effective marketing and innovation.
Most CPG founders only think they’ve made it when they reach $20M. But the real achievement isn’t $20M it’s $2M...
Running a small or mid-sized business means wearing many hats. You move fast & make calls. But when it comes to marketing, speed and instinct aren’t enough. Marketing is different—it’s strategic, detail-driven, and requires consistent focus. That’s where a Fractional CMO can help...
To thrive during an economic turbulence, companies must change their innovation strategy. Budgets must be cut while continuing to invest in innovation. The key is having a balance and making strategic shifts. This approach can help companies emerge as leaders...
When it comes to innovation, it might seem simple—just ask consumers what they want and how much they're willing to pay, right? But the reality is far more complex...
Despite steady growth, this company's founder was dissatisfied—not with the company’s success, but with the methods behind it. Captivated by the glamor and allure of breakthrough innovation, they redirected resources towards disruptive ideas they thought would capture headlines and venture capital...
Almost every booth at the 2024 Fancy Food Show claimed they offered something new, an innovation. But I found most were not more than incremental changes to existing products; new flavors, formats or packaging. However, a few booths did stand out to me as being both innovative and aligned with...
Speed is often touted as a critical factor for success, with businesses of all sizes striving to move swiftly to capitalize on opportunities, stay ahead of the competition and save money. However, there's a crucial nuance to this need for speed: it's not just about moving fast; it's about moving...
Advising against relying solely on consumer focus group feedback in the innovation process can seem counterintuitive at first glance. After all, customer insights are crucial for designing products or services that meet market and user needs. However, there are compelling reasons why researchers and...
Innovations have no value until they are launched. The most effective way to launch more, and better, innovations is to practice innovation portfolio optimization. The issue isn’t ”if” your company is practicing innovation portfolio management, it’s “how”...
CEO’s can F-up innovation both by denying NIH is an issue in their company, and by failing to embrace outside innovations in the innovation portfolio. ...
R&D and innovation management executives are always looking to implement best practices that improve their opportunity for success. However, many practices and ‘common-sense’ innovation management decisions don’t have any correlation with innovation success or failure...
Inflection points manifest in two primary forms: expansion or contraction. However, both signify the same reality; strategies that worked in the past may no longer suffice in the future. Successfully navigating through either type of inflection point is crucial for a business's survival.
While many...
Are innovation failures always as obvious in the moment as they are post-facto? Here’s a short list of some product launches that, on paper, had all the elements needed for success, but were total failures none the less. I’m not listing head-scratching new products like Juicero, but...
A primary reason I see many small businesses fail to grow, or even fail completely, is the reluctance of their founders to embrace sales as the most critical function for their success...
The first step in launching a successful new product is to avoid the common traps that nearly guarantee failure.
Leaders need to ask themselves why failed products were launched in the first place. How did leaders NOT see that some products were certain to fail...
Making any decision about innovation is extremely challenging. Leaders are frequently confronted with the need to make definitive choices in situations where the potential outcomes are, at best, unclear.
To achieve success in innovation, leaders must adhere to these three fundamental rules when...
Innovation is fundamentally about challenging the status quo.
Challenging assumptions and decisions is critical to avoid one of the 9 ways leaders fail by innovation: Innovating for themselves...
The real business value of innovation comes from improving processes that lead to systematic efficiency, cost savings, and competitive advantages...
Growing a business from niche to mainstream requires a unique approach to brand and product development; one of assimilation instead of innovation. In general, a niche product is successful because 1) It has a feature or attribute can’t be found in...
Marketing a new product is always a challenge. Marketing a new to this world multipart system, like a “Keurig” for cocktails, water, ice cream, etc. is exponentially more difficult. These pod-based systems require consumer education, explanations of the value proposition, translations of technical...
Developing adjacent businesses is another way of saying you’re committing to doing the same thing as before. Building a growth strategy based on category adjacencies sounds like a great idea. Adjacencies are intended to leverage your company’s existing infrastructure, know-how, brands and route to...
What confidence do you have in decisions for an innovation that will launch into a market undergoing such dynamic change? How do you create alignment to act when investing in innovation is even more risky than normally?...
Many companies are reducing their innovation costs as they see sales declines and are laying people off. The COVID crisis, like every one before, is creating significant and long-lasting changes to our everyday lives...