It’s taken me such a long while to kick off this blog. As a marketer looking to start one’s consulting and training business of course I know the importance of blogging towards enhancing content marketing and building-up readership and relationships. I suppose like many people, we get “stuck” with the idea that everything has to be perfect. Things have
to be in the perfect timing, quantity, and form before we can start to take action. But if I were to put myself in the shoes of the hundreds of marketers I’ve coached over the years who would give me the excuse of imperfect conditions to take any action, I would say “get real and get going!”
I’ve been a marketer as long as I can remember. From illustrating “also for sale” signs for my grade school science project to speaking on stage at large conferences, when an opportunity where creativity meets communications appears, my eyes light up and I just want to share and get involved. I officially began my career as a marketer in the early 2000s when I went to go work at IDG in San Francisco as a marketing coordinator for Infoworld magazine and later moved onto working on titles, events, and websites such as PCWorld and Macworld. I eventually became the marketing director for CMP’s Game Group that hosted the world’s largest gathering of videogame developers called Game Developers Conference (GDC) as well as their other global conferences and editorial products.
One of the greatest accomplishments of my career was moving to Hong Kong in 2011 and serving as the VP of Marketing & Corporate Communications for Informa Markets (then UBM Asia) –Asia’s largest trade fair organizer. Throughout these years, I got the chance to work on some 200 events covering every industry imaginable from food to jewellery to pharmaceuticals. During this time, I coached some 400+ marketers across 14 cities in Asia towards greater marketing success. Myself and my team developed dozens of bespoke training courses ranging from all forms of digital marketing, to content marketing, to Public Relations. We even authored two books for the company the 2014 Introduction to B2B Marketing and 2020’s Asia’s Journey to Digital Events. I decided to take a break from corporate life at the end of 2020 and work on my MBA at the University of Hong Kong.
While getting my MBA, naturally I took all of the available marketing and branding courses available in the program. I thought I would be updated and potentially awed by some of the advancements of marketing today. And indeed, though many of these courses offered examples and insights of million-dollar KOLs and integrated WeChat mini programs and O2O2O campaigns, I found many of the principles that make marketing great still haven’t changed. In fact, I argue that in the age of digital razzle dazzle and the race to gain clicks, and followers, we lose sight of some of the most fundamental principles towards creating great marketing. I find that companies and marketers today jump too quickly to spend with big agencies on make large media buys without getting really important things down first. What are these important things? Well, they are aspects of fully understanding one’s customers, what they need, and the best modes or channels to reach them.
Today I serve as the CMO of one company as well as the owner and consultant of my own company – BVM Consulting. I hope to continue to help businesses and individuals understand that thought marketing is wonderfully complex, working towards achieving your marketing goals and understanding does not have to be.
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