604 Susan Hamilton Meier:

Creativity and strategy. Two words that seem vastly different but oftentimes go hand in hand. One important thing … … way right and left brains must balance is the world of branding. The right branding strategy will not only attract your ideal audience, but will also help to build their trust in your company. So how do you keep your branding authentic to you, while also being relevant to your audience?

MELINDA

I’m Melinda Wittstock and today on Wings of Inspired Business we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who is on a mission to dispel the myth that creativity and strategy are at odds to help business leaders electrify their work and amplify their impact.

Susan Hamilton Meier is a brand strategist, visual artist, and the founder of Susan Meier Studio. Her own creative output includes paintings, sculptures, jewelry and her children. Her art work is in numerous private collections including Pfizer and Saatchi + Saatchi Wellness.

Susan has focused on helping healthcare brands build stronger relationships with both patients and providers.  She is passionate about helping marketing and sales teams across the healthcare ecosystem grow their brands and envision innovative ways to electrify their work. Drawing on her work as an artist, she brings a fresh, creative perspective to strategy.

I can’t wait to introduce you to Susan! First

Susan Meier holds a BA in art history from Dartmouth and an MBA from Harvard – a right / left brain balance that informs her branding work to this day. Beginning her career at The Boston Consulting Group, she became fascinated by the deep emotional connections that brands can build with consumers. She went on to work for boutique branding agencies, focusing on customer research, product innovation, and packaging design and has had the privilege to work with some of the world’s leading corporations, including Unilever, Pepsico, Kellogg’s, Mars, Samsung, Genentech and Novartis.

As an accomplished visual artist, Susan has developed a unique point of view that is driven by the merger of analytical and creative thinking. She’s designed a set of processes and tools that get teams to problem-solve more creatively, helping them define their mission, vision, and differentiators with clarity and bring their brands to life in the world.

Today we’re going to talk about how to build a brand with promise and what that really means to your customers.

And creative ways to envision the new future for you, your business and your brand, and bring your creative brain into  the branding process.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Susan Hamilton Meier.

Melinda Wittstock:         Susan, welcome to Wings.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:         One of the things that you say in your bio is you have this balance between the analytic and the creative, kind of a right brain left brain balance. And I imagine that’s absolutely vital for a brand person. How does that work for you in practice?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah, it’s definitely what brought me into branding because there’s such a visual and verbal creative component to branding as well as the strategy piece, which is the logic brain. I think in practice, what that means is my approach to branding really combines those two. And I think it benefits my clients because there are other ways of approaching that, right? You can have traditional agency style, you would have the planners and the strategists kind of on one team, and then you would have the designers and the copywriters on another team and they would kind of pass stuff over the transom, often with very good results. But I think integrating it, I mean, that’s just how my brain works, so I can’t do it any other way, but what I see is that integrating it from the very beginning and all the way throughout is actually very effective. And so you don’t ever risk ending up with a creative that doesn’t actually activate the strategy, for example.

Melinda Wittstock:         This is so important because silos, I don’t think, are very effective in business and I completely agree with you, but then I would, because I’m actually divergent myself. I literally was measured in a test that I was equivalent right and left brain balanced. And it’s very rare, right? There was a whole movie about it.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         So I want to get into a lot of the mistakes that a lot of people make when they’re coming up with their branding strategy, I guess, because there’s so many different components, you’ve got to be kind of relevant to your customers obviously, and solving their needs, but it’s also got to be authentic to you. How does that balance best work in practice?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah, that’s right. And I think that for me, the way I think about the mistake or the pitfall that that can happen is focusing on your product, especially if you have a really cool product, like you have a breakthrough technology, or a life-saving therapy that’s science-based. And there’s so many cool things that you want to communicate about the product and its attributes, but in the end, what you’re selling isn’t really the product. It’s how that product lives in the world of your customer or your audience. And so one of the principles that I feel very strongly about, and it is this idea of humanizing the way you brand and that a brand is really a human connection. It’s a relationship that you’re building. It’s not just a promotional campaign, it’s not a logo. Those are elements of the expression of your brand. But what you’re building when you’re building a brand is a relationship with your constituents.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, it’s the emotional connection.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  That’s right.

Melinda Wittstock:         And that’s easier said than done. It means that you really have to understand the context of your target customer. And this is where we go into avatars, personas, all this sort of stuff. And that’s a pretty deep dive.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah. And what you mentioned before about understanding your customer so that you can be relevant to them and also coming from an authentic place, that’s very much the framework that I use when I work with my clients, is this if you think about it as a two-part Venn diagram, right? You have this overlap between who you are and what you bring and what you do and what they care about and what their world is about, but in order to really get at that, yes, you can start with hypotheses about both of those things, by the way, because we don’t always know exactly who we are in the world. And we certainly don’t always know who our customers are. So what I advocate is doing a deep dive on both of those things as being the groundwork for building your brand.

So listening, talking directly to customers, hearing straight from their mouths, not just, “Oh, what do you want in the light bulb?” But, “What’s your world like? Walk me through your day. Who are you? What do you care about? What are your aspirations, your hopes, your dreams? Oh, now what role does the light bulb play in your life?” That’s a very different conversation. And likewise, on the who are you side, a traditional strategy would look at, you do a SWOT analysis. strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Or you would do a capabilities assessment, those things aren’t wrong. They’re good to do as well, but I try to take it to the next level of saying, “Okay, good. Those things are kind of product focused in the end, but let’s think about who we are. What’s our DNA? If our company was a person,” And sometimes I’m working with individual entrepreneurs, so that’s actually more straightforward, but even a large global organization has a kind of a human DNA to it. It has a personality, it has beliefs, behaviors, culture. And so what can we genuinely deliver on? I think Patagonia is a great example of that. They eat, sleep and breathe, their company DNA and everything they do is about bettering the planet and their sourcing strategy, their product materials, their advocacy in the world. Everything aligns with what they’re talking about.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. So there’s no dissonance, because some brands have this separation between these lofty goals to improve the world. And then you actually look at their practices and well..

Susan Hamilton Meier:  It’s much more than writing that mission statement because everybody … You read the values, the pillars, the mission statement, and they’re all motherhood and apple pie and everybody wants to, and genuinely wants to be those things. But who are you really? How can you actually activate that in the world? And I think that’s very important.

Melinda Wittstock:         One of the exercises that’s I’ve done in some of my companies is to really get deep into “What do we stand for?” and “What do we stand against?” What are the implications for how we make decisions or who we’re being with each other, who we’re being with customers, how we communicate the decisions we make, all of that stuff? Your brand isn’t just your logo or what you present to the world. It’s literally who you’re being.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah, absolutely. And I use that phrase a lot, what do we stand for? I also think about it as who we are and who we’re not. You don’t have to be everything. In fact, it’s fine to be just one or two things and stand for just one or two things. There’s a whole world out there of other people who are fighting for other things and standing for other things. And that’s okay. And so that also helps you identify your audience. You can’t be all things to all people. That’s 101 marketing. And so to find your so-called minimum viable audience, it really helps to narrow in on what it is that you stand for.

I think also, so a really easy example of who we are and who we’re not is when you think about everybody wanting to be good value. … There are some brands who really are, the cheapest option That can be a tricky position because it can be a race to the bottom, Or do you want to stand for highest quality or leading edge technology or most innovative or mindful or all of those different things. And so while it’s very tempting to want to stand for something that sounds really appealing, you need to really look at yourself and say, but is that who you are?

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. Is it really?

Melinda Wittstock:         So when you’re working with a brand, it’s really a group of people and some companies are really good at getting their culture right and getting every single person in the company aligned with that mission, but most aren’t. Most don’t necessarily make it a priority to live their values every day. So when you’re working with a company to go through this exercise to figure out what does everybody stand for, and what does everybody stand against, how do you do that? What are the challenges of that, say in a company that’s already pretty well established and needs to really get to the heart of figuring this out, to improve their branding and their marketing generally?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah. I love that you asked that question, especially in a kind of creative industry like branding, people are not always so process-focused and I actually am really into process. I think it’s extremely important. And so some of the things that we do from a process perspective to address that is I always start out with stakeholder interviews. Interviewing people throughout the organization, not just the ones who run the marketing team, who are touching this project, but people from all the different aspects of the company of the brand to understand their perspective. And by the way, then they’re part of the project, even if they’re not on the working team or the core team they’ve touched the project, they’ve given their input. And sometimes there are really serious misalignments that there’s a voice and an ongoing conversation. Usually, people are sort of slightly different perspectives and we can weave those in and kind of bring people on board.

And then the other part of it is that working team, having more than just one client who’s leading it, but encouraging them to have a tight team, it can be as big as 10 people for a large organization, but often it’s three or four people. And again, it’s helpful to have them from slightly different parts of the organization. So at the moment, I’m working with a team where there’s somebody from sales, there’s somebody from marketing, there’s somebody from analytics. And then there’s a senior person who heads up the whole sales and marketing organization. So they aren’t the marketing and sales folks, but they have different perspectives on what they’re bringing. Then in the stakeholder interviews, we interview the product team, we interview salespeople for large accounts, small accounts. So they have varied … interviewed on staff doctors that happens to be a digital health company. So they have very different perspectives on what the value proposition is. And that’s really, really helpful as you go through the process.

The other part of that is that inherent in branding, almost always, you have different audiences for the brand positioning. I work a lot in healthcare, so this is particularly true in healthcare, but I think it’s even true in … I spent a large part of my career in consumer goods. It’s also true in I think every industry and so you can’t come up with like, “Oh, well the brand positioning for the doctors is this. And the brand positioning for the pharma customers is this. Oh, and the brand positioning for the recruiters is this.” It has to be all of a piece. And that is kind of an art and a science of bringing that all together.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s tricky. That’s kind of an interesting one that we’re working in right now, because if you have a bifurcated market in our case, say with Podopolo, listeners are a big part of our market, but so are podcasters and so are advertisers, and it’s a little bit different with each of them. And so how do you bring that together in a really cohesive way? I mean, that’s top of mind for me.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great example. So I think there’s a brand essence that sits on top of that. And that’s different from, I think, what I might call a value proposition. And people often use those interchangeably, like, what’s your brand positioning, what’s your value proposition? And I think they can be different. The business model of working with an advertiser is going to be different from the business model of working with a listener. And so that’s fine that you have a different value proposition for them, but the brand, that essence of that relationship and the DNA of that, has to be the same.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. So the one consistent thing is enlightenment, and empowerment in our case, those two things. That’s really interesting. That helps to have that kind of structure, to really think about that. So everybody sets out with this goal that they want their brand to be loved, this idea of brand love so much so that your customers become your best salespeople. So what is the thing that turns some brands into movements, as opposed to just a company?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah, it’s funny. I actually talk a lot about love in the branding process, from the perspective, it being an analogy. So if you go back to that idea of the brand being a relationship, think about love or friendship or partnership, but what is it that you’re looking for in a human relationship? You’re looking for trust. You’re looking for somebody who makes you feel like the person you want to be. You’re not necessarily looking for them to be a certain way themselves. You’re not picking your friends because of how they dress or how they throw a baseball or their attributes. You might admire some of those things or enjoy some of those things, but really the people that you connect with in your lives, you like how they make you feel. You like how they make you feel about yourself.

So I think taking that as the premise, and really thinking about what is it?, If this were a love relationship, what would I want to put into it? And what would I want to get out of it, is really, really handy to come back to from time to time. And I think that those brands that, to answer your question about what becomes a movement, sometimes it’s just a little bit of magic, right place, right time, tapping into something that really touches a nerve and that’s on trend, but the brands that are able to ride that wave are the ones that connect on that very individual level.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. So year after year after year, Apple is sort of considered the top brand. So what is it about Apple?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Well, I think, the famous example, and I think they do this with all their products, but the famous example was that when they launched the iPod and what the iPod was, and there were other products that were doing this or something similar, it was a gig of storage and it was an MP3 player. That’s what it was. And that’s what other products were talking about. And of course the engineers were pretty excited about, it’s a whole gig of storage and this MP3 players, this kind of new technology and you and I don’t know, well, maybe you do, but I certainly don’t know or really care what a gig really is, or what’s an MP3 versus an MP2 or an MP4. I don’t know. I don’t care. What they did is they said, “Forget about all that stuff. That’s not what we’re messaging. That’s not what we’re selling. We’re selling a thousand songs in your pocket.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. I remember that campaign so well. It became immediately relevant to you too, because you could see how this thing transformed your life. What was the impact of using this on your life?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Right. So you go from, what does the product do to what can I do with the product? And I think that is just a lesson for any brand. How can we make that? What’s our story that mirrors that shift? And then I think the other thing that Apple does extraordinarily well is consistency, which is another big principle of branding. Every single touch point feels, looks the same, not just visually, but your experience with them in every way, is this simple elegance, the stores, the advertising, the products themselves, the service, and that is very hard to do. And it is extremely reinforcing. So it creates that sort of tribe feeling because you’re inside the tribe and you always feel everywhere you look, it reinforces that feeling.

Melinda Wittstock:         This is so important. I mean, I think that’s something that Starbucks does, McDonald’s even- that consistency, where you know that it’s always going to be the same every time. And so when a brand is in the early stages of development, though, that consistency can be difficult because you’re still sort of experimenting a little bit until you find your voice in a way.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  It’s very hard as you’re growing and changing. And, by the way, it’s very hard, even for large established brands, because they want to be innovating. And every time you innovate, you risk that consistency. Do we have permission to go into this new space and what will it look like? Well, you have to go into new spaces because that’s how you grow and survive. So, yeah, it’s a big challenge for sure.

Melinda Wittstock:         And sometimes it’s taking a stand on things. I mean, back to Apple for a moment, just basically saying, “Okay, we’re on the side of privacy.” And it exposes Facebook who is clearly not- they’re in this huge fight over it. But that fight serves to elevate Apple because it took a stand on privacy. So when is the right time for a brand to take a stand on something that may or may not be controversial?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  So I’ll say when the not right time is. So, and this is I think particularly relevant right now. So I think the not right thing to do is be what my sports loving son would call a bandwagon. If you’re a sports fan, being a bandwagon is somebody who is like, “Oh, I love the Lakers because they’re doing well this year. Not because I have any relationship to that team or that city or whatever.” And then next year I’m off to somebody else because they’re now losing. And so I think this is so tempting for brands to jump on the bandwagon of, “Oh, this is the cause right now. And we all have to be part of it. And what can we …” Now, there are things that every brand can and should be doing to, for example, promote equality at the moment. That’s top of mind, but not because they’re doing it to improve their brand, but because they’re actually doing it genuinely to improve their company.

Melinda Wittstock:         This was interesting during all the protests last summer around Black Lives Matter. A lot of brands who’d never, honestly, maybe some of them had really thought of it before. Maybe it was something that was important to them, but you kind of got the sense that it wasn’t. There was a bandwagon around that a little bit as well because they were also growing new awareness, all of that, that’s good. It’s really important for people to have more awareness of this and whatnot, but there was a lot of, “Yes, we support Black Lives Matter” without necessarily understanding or figuring out how their company or organization was going to actually make black lives matter within their own organizations, within their hiring, within the way that … establishing equity or how they were going to be in the community. And it’s tricky because when you have a change situation like that, where you’re evolving as a brand, your awareness is evolving, society is changing. How do you walk that? Because that was a tricky one for a lot of brands.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  So I think, I want to come back to, what was it, 10 years ago or so, in the whole local food movement was coming up because I think that’s a more straightforward example, because I think that when you’re talking about equity, it’s so core to human experience and human values that in that case, like I said, every organization actually should be looking at how they can walk that walk. And it’s not really, to me, that’s not branding. If you’re trying to leverage it for your brand name and it’s not part of your actual DNA of your organization, that’s a whole other thing.

Melinda Wittstock:         I remember the day that I saw an ad for Kentucky Fried Chicken with the pink ribbon on it. And this pink ribbon on a box basically of carcinogens didn’t really make sense to me.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  That’s a great example. The one I was going to throw out about the local food movement was McDonald’s actually. They got in a big mess and this is when everybody was liking local ingredients farm to table. That was a kind of a new idea. And they did this big campaign in the Pacific Northwest that they were sourcing potatoes locally. And so they were now a local food brand. And while it was not untrue, that they were sourcing some potatoes from Oregon, people called BS on that, and it was a big drama and they just got it wrong. It was just tone deaf for them to say, as this global organization clearly was not part of the local food movement, to come out and say, “Hey, we’re local now.” It just didn’t sit well with people. And they didn’t have to do that. They have other great attributes as a brand. So I think, yeah, that’s the danger of sort of jumping on the bandwagon.

Melinda Wittstock:         I’m curious too, Susan, what do you think about personal branding versus company branding in the context of a CEO or a founder. Is it vital that that founder has and develops their own personal brand kind  alongside the company’s brand and how do those two work together?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah. I have had several examples where I’m working with a corporation on their brands and they ask us to come in and actually help with that CEO brand. I’m not sure if every organization does it or needs to do it, but certainly a CEO who wants to have a brand. I think that’s generally where it comes from, that they want to have a presence and they want to have a voice that is kind of alongside and in addition to the voice of the company. And I think that’s great. And I think that’s one where it’s not unlike any other brand architecture project where brands that sort of sit together and sit under the same umbrella and people know that they sit under the same umbrella, need to have some relationship to each other and resonate with each other.

They don’t have to be the same, but yeah, that’s the work of the CEO brand is to say it can be different from the company that they’ve created or that they run and it should be because they’re an individual, but there needs to be some logical ties of, this person stands for the company in a way, so how did they … What is it about their brand that links to the company’s brand and sort of a backstory of how they found themselves on this path and what drew them to that organization. And I think that’s, as far as it goes, and then they can have their own messages that they want to deliver in the world, which may have nothing to do with the company, but as long as it sort of makes sense together.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, the great example of that is Steve Jobs and Apple, again, there’s other ones too look at someone like Tyra Banks say, okay, so supermodel, actually an amazing entrepreneur, but developing a personal brand has allowed her to pivot her companies very successfully while keeping kind of the trust of this personal brand. So, as she goes through all these changes in her business, people are coming along with her.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah. And that’s where, especially for an entrepreneur, having the brand reside in, you can be really handy. And actually that’s been a part of my process over the last couple of years. I’ve been developing a set of tools for entrepreneurs and small businesses, partly because they don’t have the bandwidth, the resources to do a big consulting project like a corporation. But partly because there’s this, as you said, the entrepreneurial brand can actually function as the umbrella brand and give that leverage to pivot to different projects, which then have their own brands. And so I was having people come to me and say, “Can you help me with my own … I also run a company, but can you help me with my own brand and think about what my platforms should be and what my key messages should be and how I should position myself in the world? And then we can talk about my company and my brands.”

And that’s a different evolution from what had been in the past where it was like we’re working for the company and then the CEO says, “Oh, you guys are great. Can you come help me too?” This was an individual, high-profile individual coming and saying, “Let me think about my brand. And then we can talk about the company’s.” And so, and as I developed those tools, what was really interesting is that all the same principles apply, whether you’re talking about an individual personal brand, whether you’re talking about a small business, whether you’re talking about a multi-billion dollar global corporation, all of the key principles of how to build a brand that really stands out and connects are the same. So, yeah, so I’ve got this little workbook, which has been great because now I can help a lot more people. They can sort of do it on a DIY basis, or sometimes I’ll do a few hours of coaching with people and it allows a lot more people to kind of access the tools and the process, so it’s not just for my large corporate clients. So that’s been really fun for me as well.

Melinda Wittstock:         So, Susan, what was it that made you get into branding? What was the spark where you’re like, “Yes. Okay. I’m going to be the branding maven.”?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  So I was working at the Boston Consulting Group, which is a strategy consulting firm and I liked strategy. I thought it was interesting, but back to the beginning of our conversation, it was sort of really just the one side of the brain, of course, there’s creativity involved as well, but it felt very much like mostly logic brain. And then I was working in their consumer practice and it happened to be around 2000 or so when brands were thinking about what do we mean in this other universe, which is the internet. It was this profound brand shift. And I didn’t even know the word branding at that time, but that’s what it was, when our clients were coming to us with a strategic question, which in fact was a branding question. What do we do in this new environment?

And yes, there are operational and finance questions around that. But really, and especially for consumer brands, which is where I was working, it was like, what do we mean in this other world where we don’t have retail stores and we don’t have tangible stuff? And so we did a ton of customer research, consumer research, focus groups, in home ethnographies, shop-alongs. And I just found it fascinating how people had these really deep, intimate, almost friendships with the brands that they cared about. And I thought, this is so cool. These guys, first of all, have a hopeful message for our clients, you are not just your stores, you live in their hearts and in their minds and you’re going to be just fine because we’re going to figure out how to make that whole thing work from a technology perspective. But the relationship that you have with them as a brand will endure.

And I thought that was super exciting. And then I started investigating the world of branding from that perspective and consumer insight work. And then I realized, “Oh, branding’s super exciting for me as a creative person.” Because if you work in a brand agency, you not only do all of that strategy stuff, but then you also help them express their brand in words, and in pictures. And that really turned on my other side of the brain. And so that’s when I migrated over to that world. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years.

Melinda Wittstock:         Fantastic. So I know you mentioned you work mostly in the healthcare space. Do you do anything else and who’s your ideal client?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Yeah, so, I mean, I spent, when I worked for, in branding agencies, it was mostly consumer goods. The usual clients in that world who have the budgets for that and the appetite for that, tend to be a lot of food and beverage, a lot of personal care. And what was cool about working with them is that they’re really sophisticated marketers. And I learned so much about that really sophisticated approach to consumer branding. And then when I started my own company 10 years ago, I was, as I think many entrepreneurs can relate to, I was like, I’m going to be agnostic about the work that I take for a while. Like anybody who will pay me to do anything.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. It often starts that way, right? It’s like, “Who wants to pay me?”

Susan Hamilton Meier:  And then, of course, as a branding person, I know that’s not a good long-term strategy, but we did. For the first couple of years, and I started the company with a partner initially. And so we kept our options open and we sort of saw what came to us. And what was interesting was that they were mostly consumer facing brands at that time.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  So it was mostly consumer facing brands, but there were a lot of brands in the technology space. So we’d spent the first couple of years doing cool work that was familiar, but also a little bit of a stretch. And then it was just like, as these things happen, a project came to us from a large pharmaceutical company that was, it was a relationship that I had with somebody who was working there. And she said, and she had worked at P&G, so she really understood consumer brand marketing, but had spent the rest of her career in healthcare. And she said, “What these guys need is a really sophisticated consumer branding approach. They don’t have that. That’s not part of the whole healthcare industry’s DNA. They have a whole world of their own research and insights and creative people that only work in healthcare. And you are going to be such a breath of fresh air. Come in, do all of your beautiful boards, do all of your rigorous research, give them your beautiful sketches for they were launching a new medical device and they’re going to be blown away.”

And I was like, “Okay, this is scary, because I know nothing about healthcare. It’s a whole new language to learn literally, but okay, I’m going to do this.” And we went in and it was exactly as she said, they were completely blown away by … I mean, I like to say we did beautiful work. I do think it was beautiful work, but it was work that a consumer goods company was used to seeing. And for them it was really transformational. They hadn’t thought about it from that, what is the benefit to the customer perspective? They hadn’t thought about connecting strategy to the visuals. And I was just like, “This is so cool. I get to really, really move the needle in healthcare. I get to bring this perspective that’s fresh, that’s different.”

By the way, it’s self-selecting because not everybody in healthcare wants to work with me. A lot of people in healthcare are like, “Oh, I only want to work with somebody who actually spent their whole career in healthcare.” So I got to work with people who were particularly innovative and creative and outside the box thinkers. And yeah, I do about, I mean, almost all of my work in healthcare, a little bit in technology and some overlap in healthcare technology. But yeah, so I never imagined that my career would go in that direction and I absolutely love it. I also love the feeling that you are touching people’s health and people’s lives in a very profound way that feels different from marketing cereal or deodorant. You’re helping these life saving therapies come to market, or you’re helping doctors connect to patients on a digital platform. And that’s very exciting to me.

Melinda Wittstock:         Ah, that’s fantastic. So how can people find you and work with you, Susan?

Susan Hamilton Meier:  I have my website, which is Susan Meier Studio. My last name is a little bit of a funny spelling. It’s M-E-I-E-R Susan Meier Studio. And there, you will find information about working with me as a corporate client and also you can download the workbook and talk to me about working together for personal branding. So it’s all there.

Melinda Wittstock:         Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Susan Hamilton Meier:  Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Melinda.