Hello!

To me, the best way to kick off a blog is to jump right in. So — here goes. 

I’m Arielle, and I’m passionate about building passion. What does that mean? I’m a marketer who is psychology-obsessed and I thrive on building impactful connections between brands and the audiences they serve. Funnel optimization is at my core, but digging into the why of consumer actions is really what gets me going. If that sounds like you, too, I’m glad you’re here. 

Where I’ve been…and where I’m going

Looking back

To give you a glimpse into my background: I’m a co-founder and former CMO in the healthtech space (more on my experience prior to that below). Born out of my own struggles to conceive, I built Cofertility originally as a content site that shared resources and tools to “un-complicate the fertility journey.” At the time, there was no other brand out there providing useful, trustworthy fertility education and content while maintaining a brand personality to connect with the 1 in 6 individuals facing fertility challenges. 

Since then, Cofertility has evolved significantly. In 2021, I joined forces with my two-co-founders, Halle Tecco and Lauren Makler, to build the next iteration of the company — as a tech-enabled fertility ecosystem providing more accessible egg freezing, even free when women donate half of the eggs retrieved to another family who can’t conceive. The best time to freeze your eggs is when you can least afford it and nobody’s talking to you about it, and as someone who had built a career connecting with young women through effective marketing, I knew I had to help build this solution. Helping grow other families and matching intended parents with incredible egg donors made Cofertility’s next phase all the more exciting.

Back before the Cofertility brand was what it is today, we tested every marketing tactic — including canvassing on college campuses.

After closing our seed round, we built in stealth for almost a year, publicly launching in October 2022. I couldn’t be prouder of where Cofertility is today, all the families we’ve helped grow, and all the young women we’ve empowered to preserve their fertility future. While I am no longer Cofertility’s full-time CMO, I remain an Advisor to the company. 

Prior to building Cofertility, I led social media and brand partnerships on Victoria’s Secret PINK’s Digital Marketing Strategy team, overseeing organic social, paid media (brand), content partnerships, and more. I built PINK’s micro-influencer program and led some truly incredible activations. Unlike other retail brands, where marketing teams simply execute a creative team’s vision, we were a marketing strategy team, developing, creating, and executing seasonal concepts that led the brand to connect with a squarely collegiate target (women 18-24). I feel lucky to have worked with a team of such smart, talented women to give the brand its explosive heyday.

On site for content production at one of the many PINK Bus university stops

Before PINK, I was on the Global Social Media team at Coach. With organic social media storytelling, we took the brand through its significant transformation by connecting with new audiences — younger and more fashion-forward than Coach was used to — across the US as well as global markets, all while making sure to not alienate the brand’s core consumer. Our audience-specific approach laid the groundwork for a multi-year rebrand that has strengthened Coach’s iconic history into what it is today. 

Previously, I worked on the marketing agency side on various consumer brands, focusing on social strategy and analytics. Through these varied experiences, I’ve learned that what gets me excited as a marketer isn’t necessarily an industry or a specific client. It’s a feeling. A feeling of empowerment, excitement, and impact. That, somehow, I’m understanding an audience enough to make the lives within it better — whether that’s helping women preserve their fertility, helping intended parents grow their families, or helping young adults feel their best in what they’re wearing. 

The here and now

Currently, I’m taking on limited marketing strategy consulting projects for other brands. My interests are industry agnostic. Again, what excites me is the impact potential. 

Throughout my career, I’ve worn many hats, so my freelance work (and the types of challenges I tackle) is pretty broad in scope. Here are a few areas I’ve helped brands with:

• Brand development: crafting messaging, refining your audience, and creating a look and feel 

• Funnel optimization: identifying pain points and cross-platform solutions to get your conversion flow un-stuck 

• Marketing team challenges: flipping unhappy, inefficient marketing teams into high-performing verticals with clear swim lanes, strong output, and happy employees

• Marketing process optimization: playbooking standard operating procedures for key marketing processes to help your team stay organized and avoid spin 

• Growth strategy: building out a paid media strategy with reporting for ongoing optimizations (creative, targeting, and more), developing SEO-rich content frameworks and affiliate programs

• Organic marketing programming: crafting social media strategies and content calendarization frameworks, creating influencer and advocate programs, strengthening consumer retention via email marketing, planning experiential activations  

From navigating the complexities of huge, layered organizations to being a one-person marketing team, I understand the nuances of corporate bureaucracy while maintaining a sharp focus on driving meaningful results. No fluff, just data-driven strategies that move the needle. 

What you’ll find on this blog

This blog is meant to serve as a resource for hot takes on marketing case studies, platform and product development insights, funnel optimization strategies, growth hacks, entrepreneurial learnings, and turning brand ideas into reality. I’ll also delve into the art of optimizing marketing functions and nurturing happy, efficient teams that deliver tangible value to your business. 

Connect with me

Of all company departments (maybe except for product or engineering), marketing evolves the fastest. Think about it: new platforms are introduced all the time to engage on — or at least explore — new cultural trends pop up to integrate into content strategies, new data emerges that the team needs to make use of in order to maximize the business. 

Marketing teams are often so busy that it’s tough to get off the hamster wheel and even think about how the team can get better, faster, and more thoughtful. Every marketing team has its challenges; it’s just about turning lemons into lemonade. 

If you’ve got a marketing challenge that needs fixing, or a brand that’s not reaching its full potential, reach out. You can also follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. 

Here’s to impactful growth, together. 

Anatomy of a Brand Book: A Beginner’s Guide to Crafting Your Brand Identity

Welcome to the world of brand building, where every element tells a story and every choice shapes perception. As a beginner navigating the terrain of establishing a brand identity, it's essential to understand the intricate anatomy of a brand book. At its core, your brand book will serve two functions:

1. A tangible document that provides consistent verbal and written identity direction to follow across all brand communications; and 

2. More figuratively, a safety net available for you to gut check against and determine whether something “feels right” for your brand.

You might be thinking, “a brand book sounds like unnecessary fluff!” If so, ask yourself if you’ve ever considered what your company’s logo, color palette, or website copy actually makes your customers or users think. If the answer is no, you’re probably the most in need of a good brand book than anyone. Consider some of the world’s most recognizable brands, like Apple, Nike, Coca Cola, or Amazon. Every single branding element of theirs is an intentional choice designed to make us feel a certain way about buying in. But branding isn’t just for massive companies; every brand should care about its identity. 

A brand book is something that requires quite a bit of upfront time, thought, and effort, but is incredibly useful long term. Your brand book should be your company’s bible for everything, from marketing copy and pitch decks to company culture, partnerships, and more. In working with brands to develop a brand book, my goal is for it to be a versatile artifact that can be referred back to time and time again. 

Within this comprehensive guide, I'll walk you through each crucial step, from defining your company's purpose to crafting a visual identity that resonates with your audiences. Let's dive in!

1. Defining the challenge your brand solves

At the core of every successful brand is a clear understanding of the problem it solves. Start by identifying the pain points or challenges your target audience faces, and vividly tell the story about what that challenge feels like. If you’ve faced that challenge personally, even better. You’ll be able to share exactly what inspired the launch of the company. 

For example, at Cofertility, we aimed to humanize the fertility preservation (egg freezing) and third party reproduction processes and make them more accessible. But we needed to set the stage for why those were problems worth caring about. It came down to one common thread among our three co-founders — if we could go back in time, all three of us would have frozen our eggs. But the best time to freeze your eggs is when you can least afford it, and nobody’s talking to you about it. 

Concurrently, a problem also exists in third party reproduction: the egg donation and egg donor matching processes are just…icky. They’re superficial, predatory, and rooted in cash compensation. 

The rest of Cofertility’s brand book goes into detail about how the brand solves both of those problems. More on that in the next steps below.   

2. Stating "Who We Are"

Crafting a compelling elevator pitch is key to succinctly conveying your brand's essence. You should be able to articulate what your company does in one or two sentences. But while this blurb might be short, developing it might be the hardest part about your brand book. It’ll also be the most important, because stating what your company is and does is something you’ll likely repeat to anyone who will listen. It’s paramount that you are able to communicate this clearly (so whoever is on the receiving end understands) and concisely (so they continue to listen). 

Your competitive landscape — who are you *not*?

In order to really think through your brand’s “about” statement, it’s crucial to have a rock-solid understanding of your competitive landscape. That way, it’ll be easy to communicate what sets your brand apart. This doesn’t have to be within your final brand book, but is an exercise that will need to take place in order to properly develop it. There are many different ways to go about conducting a competitive analysis that range in formality, but my advice is not to overcomplicate it. 

At the very least, set aside at least a day to really dig through each competitor (I’d recommend 3-5), their offerings, strengths, shortcomings, and how they market/brand themselves. Remember, a competitor doesn’t have to be one particular brand but can be a category, partnership, or other source where your users could access alternatives to your offering. 

In some cases, your brand may actually choose to (namelessly) call out its competition to overtly communicate how you are different. Whatever your method, knowing who you *aren’t* is just as important as knowing who you are.  

Ecosystem definition 

If your brand offers various services or products, this is a must to get out on paper. It will serve as a reference point for anyone not familiar with your business and will help organize and guide the rest of the branding exploration in case there are certain areas that apply more to one business unit or another. 

In Cofertility’s case, we needed a way to document (visually and verbally) how our business units, Freeze by Co and Family by Co, interacted with each other and laddered back up to the Cofertility umbrella. In other cases, it may be a question of visually representing various product lines to see how they all cohesively fit under your brand to serve your user. 

4. Persona categorization 

Think about who your target audience is. Depending on your brand, there may be more than one. This should be based on a fair amount of research into the total addressable market (TAM) for your offering. Or, if your company is post-launch, you may have already captured some good data about who your customers are. It’s always an interesting exercise to take a look at a brand’s target audience vs. their true user base and see if and how they line up. There may be holes, or there may be hidden, unexpected opportunities that reveal themselves. 

To do this most effectively, create detailed personas that represent your target audience. This should include demographics (age, gender, location, etc.), psychographics (values, aspirations, pain points), and behaviors (where do they shop? what do they like to do for fun? what music do they listen to?). Understanding the other brands your audience may touch will be critical to eventually developing a marketing strategy for how to reach it.

This exercise should be one of the first that you do, but should not necessarily come first in your final brand book.

An example of what part of a user persona exploration would look like, depending on the brand

5. Value proposition refinement

Refine your value proposition to highlight the benefits and solutions you offer. Focus on how your brand addresses the challenges identified earlier. Note: this is different than step #2 — that’s your elevator pitch, with a sentence or two stating who you are. Your brand book should also include a page that boils down your company’s differentiating factors and what sets you apart to your users. 

For Cofertility, our value props centered around: 

• Community

• Accessibility 

• Expertise

• Founder connections 

Having a clear understanding of your brand’s value props will become important when it comes to developing marketing collateral and making sure your brand effectively communicates each of these values. You should be constantly gut-checking how each one of these values is represented to make sure you’re not incorrectly over-indexing on one vs. another. That said, if there’s one value to focus on the most, note that here.

6. Articulating a “stance”

Articulate your company's stance, which reflects what you stand for and what you're against. This statement should be bold, authentic, and aligned with your brand values. It should come authentically from step #1 and #2 — what fires you up the most about the macro challenges your company is taking on? 

Granted, this largely applies to more mission-driven companies. But almost any brand can think about frustrating competitive solutions, and take a stand for how your company will do it differently and the experience you’ll deliver. What, within your industry, needs to change? Why?

You can see more about how Cofertility addressed “Our Stance” here.

7. Setting your brand tone

Define your brand tone, which sets the mood and personality of your communication. Are you formal or informal, empathetic or authoritative? Are there certain ways you want your users to feel when they interact with your brand? You’ll need to account for that in your language. Even better if you can include specific examples of “say this, not that.”

In Cofertility’s case, the brand tone is different for Freeze by Co (speaking mostly to women in their 20s who might freeze and donate their eggs), vs. Family by Co (speaking to intended parents hoping to match with an egg donor). Both of these audiences have unique mindsets and attributes — you already know this from step #4! — and will need to be spoken to accordingly, and on the right/relevant platforms. 

8. Creating a visual mood board

Once you’ve established the brand identity you want to emulate, it’s time to think about what that actually looks like. Think about the emotions you want your brand to evoke, or even colors or textures that come to mind. Then, get Pinterest-ing to get some ideas on how that can come to life, visually (pro tip: add “aesthetic” to searches to further drill down into the results). You can simply re-pin things that resonate or go wild with screenshots if you want to save them in a different way. 

If you’re stuck, start by noting brands whose creative or logos you like. This can be tough to do in the moment, so I suggest keeping an open note on your phone so you can add brands as you see them. After you’ve added a few, see if they have anything in common that can point you in the right direction of what to even search for. There are also some cool AI-enabled tools that can help you build a mood board, but I’ll save those thoughts and recommendations for a future dedicated post. 

This mood board will help provide some direction when the time comes for step #10. But first…

9. Naming

If you don’t already have one, your company needs a name! I’ve intentionally left this part until almost the very end, because every aforementioned step will inform your naming direction. In order to come up with a name that resonates, you’ll need to have an understanding of who you’re trying to reach, your brand tone, and your brand’s value propositions.  

One suggestion here is to crowdsource. Tell several people the details about your brand and what feelings you want the name to evoke, and ask them to provide a handful of name suggestions. AI tools come in handy here too — one being Namelix, a free naming search tool that will even provide some branding direction (although my advice would be to ignore that as much as possible and not write off a name just because you don’t love how it comes together with their branding). 

A word of caution: do not fall in love with a brand name until you’re sure it’s legally available. To do this, start with some simple Googling to see if other companies with this name pop up and where they are located. Check social platforms, too, as well as GoDaddy to see what related domains are available. 

You’ll want to also check your individual state regulations, and see if anyone has already registered your company name by looking up your state’s business filing agency and searching using the tool they provide. And you’ll need to to a DBA (“doing business as”) search to find similarly named local businesses — some states don’t require businesses to register and file a DBA, so it’s important to check both. 

Lastly, you’ll need to check the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to see if anyone has already trademarked your company name (or similar). These are all things you can do yourself if you have the time — remember, this will all need to be done before moving forward with the registration process — or you can hire a lawyer or work with a platform like LegalZoom to speed it up.

10. Establishing a visual brand identity

Finally, establish your visual and creative identity, including your logo, typography, color palette, and approved photography and iconography. Ensure consistency across all visual elements to reinforce brand recognition and identity. Remember, this step should come last, as you'll need a clear understanding of your brand's essence to design effectively.

How to get started on your brand book

Now that you know the elements your brand book really needs, the question becomes…how do you get there? How do you go from these individual elements to a bright, shiny, tangible document that can be easily shared? The answer completely depends on your budget and whether or not you have a marketing expert (in-house, contractor, or friend) who can lead the process. 

Agencies

There are many incredible agencies out there who are award-winning experts in crafting the visual and storytelling identities for brands. 

Pros

• Lots of resources

• Bigger teams (the more diverse, the better!)

• May be likelier to have relevant experience within your industry or audience 

Cons

• (Usually) expensive

• Team may be spread thin across other accounts — important to ask how yours would be prioritized

Freelance experts

Many branding experts like myself work for themselves, contracting out projects (like brand book development) or time on a retainer basis. Often, these individuals are former team members at an agency or brand. 

Pros 

• If you connect with the right person, he/she might get much more excited about your brand if they have a very personal connection to your mission

• Cost effective

• Faster than DIYing

• May have a small team of resources/other experts

Cons

• Smaller teams 

• May have less relevant experience than what you’re looking for — harder to find those diamonds in the rough

DIY 

If your budget is very tight (or nonexistent), you can build a brand book yourself! Yes, even if you’re not a marketer or creative type. 

Pros

• Cheap — even free

• You know your company best and can (hopefully) tell its story

Cons

• Learning curve — lack of experience if you’re not already a designer, marketer, or brand strategist (or maybe this is a pro because you’re learning something new!)

•  Can be extremely time intensive 

You made it! 

Okay, now you know everything there is to know about what goes into a brand book and you know why they’re essential. You should be able to whip one up in no time, right? 

Just kidding. Even if you read this whole guide, you might still have questions about the process. Or, you may have already decided that, while you need a brand book, building it is something you’ll definitely need to outsource. 

As part of my consulting offerings, I help brands like yours effectively tell their stories to reach their target users, engage them, and retain them. To discuss how a brand book can help uplevel your company’s marketing — or how to tackle other marketing challenges your brand is facing, don’t hesitate to contact me here.

3 Reasons Your Startup Needs a Marketing Co-Founder (or at Least a Marketing Leader on the Founding Team)

Lately, I’ve been having conversations with people on all sides (founders, investors, journalists, and more) about why companies do — or don’t — have a marketing-focused founding team member. I’ve been astounded at the number of brands (including some with significant venture funding) that consider marketing an afterthought. We’ll invest in engineering and product…and then we’ll think about how to use it.

I can’t tell you enough what a mistake that is for any company.

When I first started talking with my co-founders about our aspirations for Cofertility, we all agreed: in order to succeed, the company would need a significant focus on marketing and education. For many women in their 20s, Cofertility was the first entity to talk to them about their fertility, let alone egg freezing or donation. And for intended parents in need of an egg donor to help grow their family, they needed to understand how and why Cofertility was different than what was out there already.

Launching a startup is a thrilling, yet challenging, endeavor. And during this building phase, founders are faced with difficult decisions daily. To me, one decision should be for certain:  bringing on a marketing-focused co-founder — or, at the very least, a marketing leader on the founding team. While technical prowess and product development are undeniably crucial aspects of a startup’s journey, it’s often the strategic and impactful execution of brand storytelling and acquisition initiatives that propels a company towards sustainable growth and success.

In this blog post, I’ll dive into some of the core reasons why involving an early-stage marketing leader should be considered a non-negotiable, whether your startup is venture backed or not. Here are just a few compelling reasons why this should be a priority: 

1. Understanding your audience to achieve product/market fit

The foundation of any successful business lies in its understanding of its target audience and its needs. A marketing co-founder brings invaluable expertise in market research, customer segmentation, and persona development. They delve deep into consumer behaviors, industry trends, and the competitive landscape to uncover insights that should really shape product development and positioning. 

Without a clear understanding of who your product or service is intended for, achieving product/market fit becomes a daunting challenge. A marketing leader ensures that every aspects of your offering resonates with your target audience however they’re reached.

Bottom line: you can’t build a product if you don’t know who you’re building it for. And you certainly can’t achieve product/market fit if you don’t understand the needs of those markets. 

2. Effective brand storytelling across stakeholders

You can’t get others on board if you don’t know how to effectively tell your brand’s story.

We’ve seen it play out before: a compelling brand narrative can make or break a company. Storytelling is a powerful tool for building brand equity and fostering emotional connections with stakeholders. And a marketing co-founder usually possesses that storytelling acumen to articulate the brand’s mission and vision in a compelling manner across media. 

Whether it’s crafting a captivating brand narrative, developing pitch decks for investors, getting prospective talent excited about “who we are,” or creating engaging content for users, marketing leadership is instrumental in shaping the brand’s perception. Investors are not just funding a product; they’re investing in the vision, TAM, and potential impact of the company. A strong brand story ensures that this vision is effectively communicated, hopefully garnering support in the form of capital and growth. 

3. Strategic user acquisition and scalability 

Beyond the initial launch phase, startups face the challenge of scaling their operations and acquiring a broader user base. If you build it, well…they won’t necessarily come. Instead, you need a comprehensive marketing strategy that helps your company fish where the fish are — again, depending on your marketing leader’s research into target personas, where/how they engage, and how you’ll reach them. 

A marketing co-founder brings expertise in optimizing that marketing mix, reducing CAC (which will be essential to maintain for future fundraising), and maximize ROI from marketing campaigns. Moreover, as startups expand into new markets or introduce new products, marketing leadership plays a pivotal role in adapting the marketing strategies to suit evolving business objectives. They analyze data, track KPIs set forth collaboratively with the rest of the leadership team, and iterate strategies to drive sustainable growth and market penetration.

Summing it up

The presence of a marketing-focused founding team member is not just advantageous; it's a strategic imperative for startups aiming to thrive in competitive markets. Having synergy between technical innovation and marketing excellence will fuel your company’s trajectory of success. Strong marketing leadership enables startups to build meaningful relationships with their audience, attract top talent and investors, and scale their operations efficiently.

If you're embarking on an entrepreneurial journey or reassessing your startup's strategic direction, consider this your invitation to prioritize marketing leadership from day one. But it’s never too late to give a marketer a seat at the table. 

If you could use some help building and scaling a high performance marketing team — including leadership — I’d love to help. You can reach out here.