Ethos3 recently had the opportunity to sit down with Jeff Loper, Director of Marketing for Corporate Brands at Thomas Nelson, the 6th largest publishing company in the world.
1. Being a Marketing Director, how do you approach storytelling in your field?
Most commonly, I use storytelling to tell the story of the consumers we are trying to reach. At a recent sales conference we constructed our presentation based upon the stories of the target consumers we were trying to reach for each product we were releasing. It turned very well…so well in fact, that when we presented our marketing plan to one of the authors we actually flew in people representing our three target demographics to tell their own story and the ways our marketing would reach them.
2. Working in the Christian publishing industry, you are surrounded by old stories, do you find it difficult to tell them in a new way?
Well, fortunately that task for the most part is usually left up to the author. We then take their masterpieces and create our advertisements and promotions, which I guess you could call presentations. Of course, like most marketers, the key is to find what resonates with today’s people at an emotional level…most commonly referred to by marketers as the “felt need.”
3. I have to ask, what is your favorite book that you have marketed?
Well, there are a lot, but The Cure for the Common Life by Max Lucado is my favorite. That book really connected with me, and as a result, made it easy to do my job.
4. In your position, do you find yourself designing a lot of presentations?
Well, as I said above, every advertisement and promotion we do could be looked at as a presentation…a presentation of the product to the consumer. So, yes, all the time. But, I know you are referring to more of a public speaking type presentation using PowerPoint or Keynote. We now only do three big presentations a year to our sales staff, which is far less than what we used to do. We used to do about 16 presentations a year to our sales staff before some major changes at our company.
5. How is your industry learning to relate to the different generations of Gen X and Gen Y?
Mostly through reading and studying articles that are published on the two. One of our authors is very knowledgeable in this area and has conducted focus groups specifically on not only Gen Y, but the differences found within the broad age range of Gen Y. That has been very helpful.
6. I have to ask our “classic question,” what gets you up in the morning?
In the olden days (which is about 5 months ago) I would have normally said work, but these days it is a much different story. Our new daughter is what gets me up in the morning…sometimes earlier than what I want.
7. If you had to give any tips to other marketing directors, what would they be?
A while back I was down on my job. I was working on the biggest book in our company’s history and everybody was riding my tail. No matter what I did I couldn’t seem to satisfy people with our marketing plan. One day after a long hard meeting I was feeling beat up and my boss congratulated me on a job well done. I didn’t know what he was talking about because the meeting was less than stellar. He told me I was doing an excellent job and said that this is how you know you’re in the lead. The biggest projects get the most attention and draw the most critisizm, no matter how good of a job you’re doing. It’s how you handle it that makes the difference. This was a reminder to me that a marketers job is never done. When you think you have the best marketing plan you must remind yourself there are always ways to make it better. It was through this difficult process that great reward was found, as I went back through the marketing plan I took a fresh approach and plowed through the road blocks that were in the way of keeping me from creating the best marketing plan I could create. The next meeting we had on the project was a week later where we presented the plan again. This time it was greeted with much more enthusiasm and little criticism.
