Introducing Jenny Cronin, Our Chief Brand Officer

After marking our first-decade milestone and as our growth continues to surpass expectations, we are excited to share some great news about our organization. We’ve appointed Jenny Cronin to the newly created position of Chief Brand Officer. In this pivotal role, Jenny will chart the course for our brand’s evolution into the next decade. Our new colleague brings 25-plus years of experience directing marketing efforts across multiple disciplines and leading high-performance teams. She is known for her compassion, curiosity, and the ability to merge strategy and creativity for impact.

Here, we showcase four (out of many) recent instances where Jenny’s approaches have resulted in significant benefits for her clients. You’ll see why we’re thrilled to have her on our team.

Did someone mention strategy?

Yes! One of Jenny’s big-tech clients had a problem: The brand came across as outdated, hard to work with, and expensive. The brand wasn’t “cool.”

To remedy this, Jenny developed messaging that was refreshingly declarative and interactive, using real people to break down the tech-speak to get real results. She also used energy and wit as a differentiator.

Jenny’s work resulted in a highly engaged audience, and the messaging approach became standard on other platforms.

Did someone mention creativity?

Of course! Jenny took a FUF (fun, unexpected, focused) approach to a three-day event hosted for a tech company’s most valuable clients worldwide. For this project, Jenny advanced the overall goals and priorities of the client by adhering to three major directives: “Go beyond the boondoggle. Create community and dialogue. Don’t be boring.”

To pull this off, she created moments of delight that integrated the whole person and the real world — e.g., a Game of Thrones viewing party — while also ensuring connections by industry, function, and stage of evolution. She also offered subtly branded blankets as swag for an outdoor evening concert. Immediately practical, greatly appreciated, and easy to pack, the blankets showed up in a lot of photos from the event.  

This was the client’s most successful customer experience program ever, with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 4.1 and a significant new sales pipeline attributed to the event.  

And what about compassion?

Jenny’s ability to put herself in her audience’s shoes adds impact to her communications. When tasked with designing an overall experience (including a booth, presentations, and off-site hospitality) at an annual big-tech event, she knew that many of the 70,000 attendees would be fatigued and overwhelmed by the onslaught of so much activity. She cultivated interactive and personal encounters, including a custom, dynamic “Guitar Hero” experience (which highlighted the client’s offerings), a robust satellite space for relaxation, and an army of billboards, with the team wearing quippy T-shirts based on their own winning submissions.

The experience generated a four-fold increase YOY in impressions and garnered visits from nearly 200 target client domains.

Jenny excels at integration, too.

For instance, a multinational financial firm sought her expertise to streamline client communications across various platforms, including a magazine, statement inserts, a thought-leadership website, and a newsletter. Jenny created an overarching content strategy including a shared editorial calendar, ensuring much-needed clarity on the who, what, when, where, and why of each piece. She effectively leveraged content across these platforms, while delivering a unified experience that was, nevertheless, customized to each client’s needs. She developed the guiding mantra — “smart, accessible, and on your side” — as a way to ensure consistency and support the overall fiduciary brand.

Jenny’s unwavering commitment to success permeates through her personal endeavors as well. Recently, she obtained dual Italian citizenship — an epic feat that took nearly five years and required countless documents, validations, and translations.

As one who holds degrees in art and art history from Wellesley College and has lived and worked in Asia and Europe, Jenny sees the world with a lot of color and context. She is bolstered by her family and community, humbled by her attempts at painting, and energized by long hikes in Marin County, California, where she resides.