About Us
Mason Strategic Marketing — The Why
When I look at today's marketplace, I see a lack of focus on identifying audience insights and connecting them to actionable strategies. That's a glaring hole in how marketing strategy works. But it's not all that surprising. Budgets are tight and marketing teams are stretched thin. They just don't have the time or bandwidth to provide the evidence-based rationale needed to both sell in their work and validate it with data once it's out in the world. It's like building a plane without a navigation system.
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I started Mason Strategic Marketing to provide this compass.
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After years of working on brand strategy I have developed an indispensable eye for uncovering unique insights into consumer targets. And I’ve leveraged those insights to develop actionable and compelling strategies that build powerful brands and maximize revenue. Deploying external and internal audience insights, I’ve been able to provide vital data that executives need to justify marketing spending in a world of too many competing priorities. And these insights have complemented the performance data that teams are using to make decisions every day.
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When you partner with Mason Strategic Marketing, you get a big-picture marketer with decades of experience across multiple industries supported by a research expert with a proven track record who can develop a customized research plan that fits your budget and your objectives.
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No matter what stage your business is in, we’re excited to partner with you to understand your needs and help elevate your work.
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Our Approach
​Understanding​
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We’ll meet with your key internal stakeholders to understand how they feel about your product/service, who they believe your highest value target audience is and how they feel that marketing can help build your business. The objective of this discovery phase is to elicit the perspective of your c-suite and stakeholders across sales, operations and other important cross-functional partners. It’s also to gain early buy-in for the work, reinforcing the importance of partnership.
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We’ll then recommend the appropriate quantitative and/or qualitative research methodology, including the best participants for your study, based on the target audience you seek to understand. The best methodology will align with your objectives, what you want to learn and how you will use the output. This aspect of the process ensures our learnings have a direct connection to actionable business strategies.
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Applying What We’ve Learned
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Once we’ve gathered key insights, we will work with you to recommend ways to apply the learning, translating it into actionable strategies and tactics for marketing as well as operations and product development, if appropriate.
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Telling the Story
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We’ll help you craft an impactful story about the process and frame our results and recommendations in a way that reinforces the value of your investment in the work. We’ll help you articulate how our insights and implications will improve your bottom-line, benefit multiple teams across your organization, and contribute to both building your brand and your business.
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You’ll be our thought partner throughout the entire project, helping us understand your product/service and the culture of your organization. Our collaboration will result in an effective plan that moves your business forward.
At Mason Strategic Marketing we customize our approach to fit your unique business challenge or marketing need. The first step is working with you to understand what problem/opportunity you want to tackle. Based on that agreement, we’ll tailor an approach that’s right for you.
Our Services
Marketing Strategy
We work with you to ensure that your marketing goals are clearly connected to business goals.​
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We help identify your high potential target audience(s) and use research to validate that they present your best business opportunity. We then pinpoint the best ways to communicate with them to motivate consideration and purchase.
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We use audience insights gathered from research to develop a unique value proposition that sets your product or service apart from competitors and communicates its most compelling benefits to your target audience.
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We help develop marketing messages that communicate your unique value proposition in a way that motivates consideration and purchase by making an emotional connection with your audience.
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We work with you to identify a roadmap for analyzing results to track changes in awareness, perception of your brand, product or service as your audience and market evolves.
Research
We partner with Sophia Gomez, the Founder and Research Director at Public Values Research. Public Values has expertise in a range of research methodologies, allowing us to tailor our research approach to each client’s individual needs, including:
​​Qualitative Research
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Focus Group Research is at the core of our ability to uncover the hidden values and beliefs that drive behavior. We know how to probe responses to reveal deeper meaning and interpret subtle cues such as intonation, body language, and tone. We listen for when participants signal a change in perspective.
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In-depth Interviews focus on individual perceptions and behaviors, using open-ended questions to facilitate a conversation.
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Laddering is a hierarchical technique for identifying the deep drivers of consumer decision making.
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Message Testing goes beyond asking respondents whether they "like" a concept to probing to understand their concerns, and what might change their mind.
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Personas are used to create distinct customer segments based on people’s lifestyle, behavioral traits, goals, and pain points. Our clients then use those insights to develop targeted messages for different audiences that go well beyond simple demographics.
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Quantitative Research
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Brand Perception and Awareness Surveys help organizations get a clear picture of where they stand in the marketplace. We measure aided and unaided brand awareness, competitor awareness, advertising recall, and customer priorities to identify where the opportunities lie.
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Customer Satisfaction Surveys specifically tailored to our clients help identify gaps in service and inform strategic planning.
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Conjoint Analyses and Discrete Choice Modeling uncover brand attributes that matter most to customers. Instead of asking customers what they feel is important and would like to have in an ideal world, we present them with a series of realistic choice scenarios to reveal the trade-offs they would be willing to make.
Stakeholder
Communications
We help you build consensus and gain buy-in for your marketing plan and investment by helping you socialize the plan, carefully considering your organization’s competing priorities and team reporting structures.
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Initial Mapping of Key Stakeholder Roles and Responsibilities: We work with you to identify individuals and teams who should be informed, play a role in planning decisions and who will be the final approvers. We help you determine when to bring each team into the process.
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Early Planning Stages: We provide talking points for stakeholder discussions designed for you to gather input and discuss objectives, including the benefits to each of your cross-functional partners.
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Throughout the Process: We support your regular internal conversations and updates to help you keep everyone informed and aligned.
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At Project Completion: We help you tell the story of why we did what we did, the importance of your project to your business, and the specific benefit to executives and cross-functional partners in sales, operations, and finance. We work with you to outline how you can monitor results including which tools to use and a timeline that aligns with your business objectives and strategies.
Case Studies
The United Way of Greater Los Angeles (UWGLA), part of the United Way national organization, is focused on education, financial stability and health. Funds are raised through workplace campaigns, individual donations and corporate support and then allocated to local non-profits. By 2008, the non-profit market had changed dramatically. Donors wanted to give directly to specific organizations and causes. UGWLA needed a new strategy to stay competitive.
Kaiser Permanente (KP), one of the nation’s largest integrated healthcare systems, was known for offering dependable, low-cost healthcare. By 2002, researched showed that 75% of people who were offered KP would Probably or Definitely Not consider KP for their healthcare coverage. KP then invested significant resources to understand what it would take to change brand perceptions among members, non-members and employees.
USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center is part of Keck Medicine of USC. The Center operates in an exceedingly competitive market, being one of multiple nationally recognized cancer centers in Los Angeles. Awareness of Norris was very low, in part because there had been no brand marketing to build awareness. To be competitive, Norris needed to reposition the brand and begin investing to raise awareness and build consideration.
Keck Medicine of USC, the University of Southern California’s medical enterprise, was positioned as the premiere destination for treating the most complex medical conditions, resulting in the best possible outcomes. In an exceedingly competitive market, Keck had much lower awareness than their well-established competitors. To successfully compete, Keck needed to reposition the brand to differentiate beyond having great doctors and outcomes, make an emotional connection, and reinforce that they put the consumer first
Get in Touch
Contact us to schedule an introductory call to talk about your opportunity.​
