About

This blog is loosely affiliated with my consulting practice at Informing Arts, a strategic marketing firm in the Seattle area that serves high-tech North American clients.

I’m the author of this blog, as well as the principal consultant at Informing Arts. My insights and expertise build on 15 years’ experience as a strategy consultant, following a successful career as a marketing exec with innovators like Apple and Aldus/Adobe.

You can follow my occasional tweets via @Christine_T.

Christine Thompson, Informing Arts

So Why Blog?

I began blogging a few years ago in response to a business development obstacle that Informing Arts was facing. As with most boutique consulting firms, new opportunities for project engagements come to us via referrals from delighted clients. Good old-fashioned, face-to-face or phone-based referrals: VC to CEO, CEO to CxO, former client to a new boss or colleague, etc. Clients have a lot at stake when they engage a consulting firm to help with strategic challenges. There’s a lot of trust required, so social networking sites like LinkedIn have limited impact in getting new clients over the “can-we-trust-you” hurdle.

Our Motivation

What does Informing Arts do? We help clients overcome challenges to their marketing or “revenue engine” that are strategic and therefore highly confidential. These tend to be thorny challenges that relate to their strategies for products, brands, markets, segments, marketing-sales alignment, go-to-market, etc. Sometimes we serve as marketing coaches to help marketing organizations “up their game” and become more effective, particularly those that aspire to become Marketing 2.0 practitioners.

NDA agreements limit what we can disclose to prospective clients about the work we’ve done for others. This means it’s not possible to publish our work, reveal case studies and client results, or even describe the specific projects we’re working on with a given client. Unlike a typical marketing services agency, we don’t have a gorgeous portfolio to display online — our work tends to be more conceptual, the deliverables too confidential. We’ve figured out some NDA-compliant work-arounds, but they are not web based.

Our Approach

Blogging provides a way for prospective clients to get a sense of how we think, what matters to us, and how we might approach an engagement with them. My personal blog gives people a sense of who I am, what’s on my mind, and the values that drive me. (It also gives us something to talk about over dinner or coffee if we share interests in things like yoga, travel, artisanal wine, great books, etc.)

Why This Blog?

I’ve learned that mixing personal and professionally oriented posts in the same blog has become too confusing for intended readers, as well as people who happened to arrive at my blog via organic search results. Thanks to Google Analytics for those insights.

Going forward, posts on topics that are relevant to business situations or Informing Arts’ consulting practice will appear here; things of interest to friends and family will be posted in my original and now more personal blog.

In the meantime I’ll import a few of the more popular business-oriented posts here.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or opinions of our clients.