MEET KRISTEN

"It is vital to tell your own story before the world defines you."

Dream. Define. Do.
Meet Kristen, a highly accomplished, award-winning leader in brand building and reengineering. From icons of today to up-and-coming challengers and category creators, she taps into her global experience to create purpose driven companies.

Over the past 20+ years, she built her career at top global brand consultancies and agencies who are creating the industry, leading in thought and challenging their peers and clients to collectively solve real world issues, improve experiences and evolve industry. Wow, that's some serious stuff right there.

Curious. Optimistic. Intuitive.
At Canopy, Kristen builds the foundational building blocks to create meaningful brand engagement. She transforms insight into ideas, ideas into action, and action into impact along with the storytelling engine to drive it all.

What Kristen Brings
Collaborative in approach. Entrepreneurial in spirit. Kristen brings passion for what she does and courageous ambition for our clients ranging from infancy stage to Fortune 200 in B2C, B2B and non-profit verticals.

"I was once told my biggest flaw was I do the right thing. It made me laugh, but also stop and think. That idea grew into an understanding of who I am and what’s most important. My currency is not about money rather impact. It led to thinking about how to create the most. Inclusion. Having a most-vulnerable first mindset and starting from there. Life is a shared experience and it's our story to build and tell. Being a strategist has taught me so much, but more than anything I learned about what it means to be a human. And that is infused in everything I do."

FROM IDEA TO REALITY: How LAUNCH Innovation helped Persona bring some timely new products to markets

It was March 2020. Our bags were packed, and my partner and I we were on our way out to the West Coast to conduct an innovation workshop through our sister agency, LAUNCH Innovation, for Persona Nutrition. And then, everything stopped.

Literally, overnight, we had to transition from conducting a highly interactive 5-hour in-person workshop we'd prepared for with R&D, Innovation, Marketing and Sales teams, to doing it all virtually. Needless to say, we did it -- and the final results are in market, and we couldn't be prouder!

As part of our strategic partnership with LONZA Consumer Health & Nutrition, we were able to facilitate a highly engaging session that produced almost 100 new innovative product ideas for Persona Nutrition, a direct-to-consumer brand that personalizes daily vitamin supplements through a team of trained nutritionists and scientists -- really amazing products!

Fast forward a year, and three of the products we co-created have been launched into market -- man, that's fast! Kudos to Persona and LONZA for bringing the ideas to life, and fast-tracking to make this possible.

One of the products is IMMUNE BOOST
Immune boost powder combines the power of ResistAid (a LONZA ingredient) and vitamin C to offer triple action immune support that is more effective than vitamin C alone. ResistAid is a natural type of prebiotic fiber sustainably sourced from Minnesota larch trees. It works by supporting the good bacteria in your gut for a stronger, more resilient immune system. 

And the other, BEAUTY SLEEP & BEAUTY WAKE
Beauty Wake helps maintain health from the inside out. It's a small translucent pink capsule that consists of horsetail extract, magnesium and floating hyaluronic acid, along with other ingredients for energy support.

The Beauty Sleep supplement contains ingredients to help promote a more stress-free state. This formula contains collagen, horsetail extract, magnesium, floating hyaluronic acid and L-theanine, and is a complementary supplement to the Wake formula.

For starters, these are great products for immune health and beauty from the inside-out. Not only are they "instagrammable", but they're efficacious and very much needed these days -- we highly recommend.

The Missing Links of Customer Intelligence - Part One

Market research had its 100th birthday in 2020!  In that year, a fellow named Daniel Starch had a breakthrough moment. He realized that, in order to be worth the money, advertising had to be seen, noted, understood, and most importantly acted upon. He came up with the idea of what we today call “creative testing” as a way of measuring the effectiveness of ads in newspapers and magazines.

In the 1930’s, George Gallup invented public opinion polling. His big breakthrough was that you could use a small sample of respondents and project those findings to larger populations. The Gallup Poll became a pop culture phenomenon that influenced politics, entertainment, and even the library choices of the Book of the Month Club; not to mention the polling we do today.

In the 1950’s, Ernest Dichter pioneered the concept of motivational research. A decade later, Paul Green added conjoint analysis to the mix. In the 1970’s, half a century ago, Jerry Yoram Wind and Richard Cardozo came up with the notion of using different messaging to target differentiated segments of consumers; and the practice of customer segmentation was born. 

So, in the thirty years or so between Daniel Starch and segmentation, the fundamental research structures we still use a half century later were pretty much in place. Certainly other tweaks and layers have been added since; the most significant of which has been the most recent harnessing of Artificial Intelligence to the task of data analysis. We can now process columns and rows with blinding speed and with unimaginable capabilities for discerning patterns through algorithms; and therein lies the dilemma.

Simply put, the more sophisticated and powerful the data processing technology becomes, the more it calls into question the nature of the data being collected. In what other part of your life would you intentionally apply a hundred-year-old way of thinking to make the best use of the latest technology? 

The time has come to completely rethink the dimensions of what is being fed into the wondrous analytic engines of today. Starch, Gallup, et al, designed their intake mechanisms around the calculating capacities of their day – adding machines, mechanical calculators, and rudimentary punch-card processors. What questions they asked, and how they were asked, had to be conformed to, and were therefore limited by, those limitations.

We can do better. More on that in Part Two of this series – What Are The Missing Links of Customer Intelligence?