Climbing a mountain.
It is uncommon for CMOs to become CEOs. To understand the unique challenges marketers face as they ascend to the top position, I connected with Teri Lucie Thompson, CEO and co-founder of Fizz Enterprises – Find Your Fizz. Prior to founding Fizz Enterprises, Thompson worked as the CMO and Associate Vice Chancellor Marketing and Communications of the University of Texas system.
Her decision to leave her CMO post and create Fizz was driven by an ongoing desire to help women and a passion for entrepreneurship cultivated from her childhood on the family farm. She was on a mission to put to good use the life experience she gained during many transitions in her life, most notably becoming a widow even before retirement age. “I had experienced success with co-founding a non-profit in the early 2000s, The Marketing to Moms Coalition, which executed proprietary research and honored companies with the H.E.R. (honor, empower, respect) award. This led to authoring ‘Tuning into Mom: Understanding America’s Most Powerful Consumer.’ Both were part of an important trend to recognize women—especially moms—as the chief procurement officer of their households. I also benefited by the information I was sharing in several CMO roles, training insurance distributors to speak to women, not just men, about financial services, and creating communications vehicles at universities to help moms feel more informed, especially about the safety of their children. After a hiatus from ‘extracurriculars,’ as I devoted all my extra capacity to serving as caretaker for my husband, including moving the household twice to be closer to the specialized treatment he needed, and changing jobs, I felt hungry to do more after his passing in 2018. Launching The Texas Women’s Summit in 2019 fed that need, but Covid killed the opportunity to run the Summit again in 2020. A chance encounter with a former State Farm colleague, Andrea Bjorkman, in 2019, during which we both shared a strong desire build a business ultimately led to the creation of Find Your Fizz.”
As Teri built her company, she realized that her experience in branding, marketing strategy, and market research was invaluable: “Many entrepreneurs worry first about infrastructure and their product. Due to an early career role in qualitative research and my A,B, C’s of marketing mantra, which I shared with every team I led as CMO: About the Customer, Build the Brand, Combine Art & Science, I knew one of the first things we needed to do was determine if our offering had any appeal to our target audience, so we executed a series of IDI’s which informed a survey with a large sample of our target market. One of the insights from that quant work even led to the company’s name. Due to a long career with multiple institutions in varied geographies, I also had the luxury of an amazing network of resources, not the least of which was ad agency contacts. I thank my lucky stars that one of the best brand gurus, Kevin Drew Davis, who had left DDB Needham because of a decline in business, started his own firm and was willing to create a mini-brand book for Fizz. Articulating brand guidelines and positioning so early in the process provided a reliable framework for us to use in creating our social media presence, building our website, being consistent in communications, and most importantly, providing a toolkit for third party resources to help us.”
However, Thompson also indicated that there were distinct challenges. Three things stood out. “The business faced several challenges: building awareness, articulating a compelling value proposition for what is essentially a new category (probably more accurately stated a combo category), and finding automation tools that didn’t require mountains of capital. We’re bootstrapping the business, so whatever we invest in has to work hard for us.”
To address these Thompson took several steps. “Networking led us to a business incubator, NEXT Studios in Indianapolis. NEXT helps entrepreneurs use Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas tools, focusing on iteration, constantly creating and testing hypotheses, and pivoting. Participating in NEXT’s Discovery Week was invaluable, especially for articulating our value proposition. One of our instructors suggested we use an analogy to articulate our value prop, ensuring the analogy included a common reference that our target would understand. Thus, we birthed the ‘GPS for women 40+ navigating difficult life transitions.’ GPS signaled roadmap and made it easy for customers to “get” our offering. That language also led us to build a proprietary coaching tool based on the notion of a map. I would be lying if I said we’ve solved the ‘building awareness’ issue, but one important thing that has helped is to invest in experts with a learning orientation; our social media guru, Jill Potasnik of Elevate Social, has been a godsend in jumpstarting our social presence, and our virtual assistant, April Saliba, constantly experiments with new tools. Because both of them work for other companies as well, the knowledge and best practices they learn with others they share, when appropriate, with Fizz. We greedily take advantage of trial periods to test software and applications that may help us automate. Flo Desk has been a terrific tool for outbound/push marketing, even though that tactic is less effective post pandemic than pre-pandemic, due to its capabilities at an affordable price point.“
When asked how she would advise marketers looking to start their own firms, Thompson suggested: ”You’ll laugh. Start with the customer and a problem they need solved. Steve Jobs was a master at solving problems customers didn’t even know they had. I have found watching Shark Tank—as silly as it sounds—very valuable because of the questions the sharks ask aspiring entrepreneurs and the feedback they provide. Use your marketing acumen, which provides a tremendous advantage, to objectively analyze your offering. The brand you build will be the most valuable asset you own. Your skillset will enable you to manage it better than many. Finally, I’ve always loved Nike’s admonition: JUST DO IT!”
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