Paige Arnoff-Fenn began her marketing career in brand management at Procter & Gamble in 1990. She ran a joint venture within the Department of the Treasury for the 1996 Olympic Games as general manager of the commemorative coin program selling over $100 million of Olympic Coins in 45 countries around the world.
Paige was Assistant to Chief Marketing Officer Sergio Zyman at The Coca-Cola Company and was SVP Marketing at Launch Media helping the company go public in 1999 before it was sold to Yahoo. Paige ran marketing and e-commerce at Inc.com a spinoff of Inc Magazine that was sold to Bertelsmann and she also ran marketing and sales at Zipcar expanding the business from a local Boston firm to Washington, DC and NYC.
Paige chairs the Board of Trustees at the Sports Museum at the Boston Garden and is also Chair of the Alumni Board at Stanford University where she earned her degree in economics. She received her MBA from Harvard Business School.
What are you working on right now?
Lots of cool stuff:
Continuing my Listening Tour: Read NY Times article
Setting up Customer Advisory Boards for my clients so they can listen too.
Gearing up Sports Museum Board for our annual tradition event.
3 Trends that excite you?
Information Overload — how everyone is dealing with, how they filter, who they trust and go to.
Voice of the Customer — now that they are in control there is no turning back.
Back to Basics — recession has made people do more with less, appreciate and enjoy friends and simple things more.
How do you bring ideas to life?
Blood, sweat and tears! I have ideas all the time. I try to write them down so I don’t lose track of the good ones. Hardest part for me is to focus and prioritize but once I do I just make lists and start crossing things off. Once I wrap my head around it and can see the vision, I have to make it happen. I’m very results oriented and love to turn ideas into reality. I’m very good at the 80/20 rule and just keep going until it is done then I come back and tweak it later to make it better but I have to see it first to know it is real even if it is not perfect.
What is one mistake that you made, and what did you learn from it?
I got burned by a former colleague who tried to cut me out of my own deal. I learned that I’d rather trust someone and be wrong than never to have taken the chance and that in the end the client referred more business to me and respects my sense of professionalism and ethics. He made a donation in my name to a charity for the amount my former colleague tried to steal away, a very classy move while she lost his business and his respect.
What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
Mystery shop your own business when possible and set up your own listening tour with current, prospective and lost customers. You’ll be amazed what you find out!
How did you come up with the name for your company?
I started getting lots of requests for help right after 9/11 when marketing was the first thing to get cut across the board. I had more work and clients than I could service by myself so I started calling the best people I worked with in my career. I jokingly referred to the women as the Marketing Mavens and the guys as the Marketing Moguls and for short I called them Mavens & Moguls, it stuck and here we are 8.5 years later still going strong!
What do you do for fun?
I love sports, movies and travel. Having grown up in New Orleans I am a huge Saints fan and now living in Boston I love the Celtics and Red Sox too. I chair the Board of Trustees at the Sports Museum at the Boston Garden. Any excuse to go to France or Italy, count me in! I was an exchange student in France in high school and Italy in college so am always looking for ways to practice my French & Italian! I just finished reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and hope to see the movie this week!
Connect
Paige Arnoff-Fenn’s company: Mavens & Moguls
Paige Arnoff-Fenn on LinkedIn: LinkedIn
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.