Brand Journey— Bess Creator, Christy Mack’s, Story: California Beginning in Branding Companies (Part 3)
For Christy, California was love at it first sight.
Christy smiles when she describes her move, “The California mindset allows me to pursue anything I dream up, nothing has to fit in a box. I can challenge old models and create new ones. I can do all this deconstructing and reconstructing that I love so much. California has freed me creatively more than anything else, and made more entrepreneurial too.”
Christy first called Berkeley home, later Palo Alto then on to San Francisco. Her science background plus creative bent helped land a post university job with McAfee in the Silicon Valley. Christy’s hour-long plus commute in her dark blue, four-door Mazda 626 from Berkeley to the Valley marked her start.
At McAfee, Christy began creating brand portfolios via new technology development, M&A and integration. She practiced making brands fit together by experimenting with product naming, marketing, design, packaging, and documentation to ensure product portfolios could be easily recognized and understood.
“I felt like I was working on puzzles all day. Product brands had to meet in a logical way to protect people from cybercrime, the point of everything we were doing at McAfee at the time.”
Christy loved that even in the Silicon Valley, a mecca for science and technology, companies saw the importance of putting people at the center of brands, and often did. Her next opportunity took her beyond the Silicon Valley to Nokia, where she would spend eight years ‘Connecting People’ to the Nokia brand.
“Working with Nokia was the brand education of a lifetime, which I am endlessly thankful for,” Christy shares. “Not only was I in a global role with a progressive Finnish company, but when I started at Nokia they were ranked one of the top brands in the world. My job was to help retain their top five Interbrand Best Global Brand ranking, valued at over $35 billion.”
“I was able to meet people; hear their needs and listen to their dreams, something I’ve loved since childhood. I also had to anticipate what they couldn’t yet imagine,” Christy says excitedly. “This led me to work with agencies all around the globe. I traveled to places I had only read about in my humanities studies in college or seen in movies or on television. It was a cultural high for me and a fundamental shift in my thinking.”
Christy was tasked with determining how people could benefit from using their mobile phones not just in their personal lives, but for business too. Success meant growing the reach of the Nokia brand by introducing new products for new purposes in European, Asian and American markets.
Christy goes on to say, “Given the global nature of the Nokia brand, I had to uncover the universal benefits people would experience from using their mobile phones for business no matter where they were from. I also had to understand the differences because conducting business in London is culturally unlike Tokyo, San Francisco or Paris, for example.”
Christy elaborates on this revelation, “I now fundamentally understood brand was all about people and that the best brands were human centric. My number one job was to bring products and services to people to enrich their lives; to live the Nokia brand promise of ‘Connecting People’ in business too.”
Christy went on to co-lead teams at Landor, Contra Creative and the Grey Group; managing million dollar plus budgets to conduct brand research, and develop communications and advertising campaigns.
It was in this work that Christy had one of her most serendipitous “ah-ha moments.” She was engineering a Nokia campaign aimed at business people. The campaign asked “What do you want to create?” and “What do you want to build today?” Christy asked herself these questions, and the answers became glaringly obvious.
“I realized brands were my art; my creative expression. By this time I also understood the paradox and phenomenon of brand; that they are way more than just logos. Instead, brands can shape entire experiences and outcomes for people and the planet. So why not use brand, my art, for good more locally – closer to home and as activism? And why not make these brands creatively beautiful while I am at it because good doesn’t have to be boring or bland?”
And that’s exactly what Christy started doing.