May is Small Business Month, a time to recognize businesses building momentum and to think about what it takes to sustain that growth. As Chief Marketing Officer at Fennemore, I spend a great deal of time thinking about brands. Not just how they look or sound, but how...

Setting up a legal entity abroad costs anywhere from $15,000 to $40,000 upfront, and that's before factoring in $200,000 or more in annual maintenance. For companies trying to move quickly into new markets, that number alone can kill momentum before a single hire is...

Public relations has measured its worth the same way for forty years. Share of voice. Impressions. Coverage volume. Tier-one placements. For most of that time, those metrics mapped reasonably well to how people actually discovered brands — through the media they...

Digital PR has changed a lot in recent years. The way brands get attention online now is more connected, more ongoing, and spread across many different platforms. Search engines, niche websites, creators, and even communities now play a role in how visibility is...

The fractured nature of many companies sees departments or external agencies like sales, marketing, PR and product competing against one another, all while trying to sing from the same corporate strategy document.  Be it legacy divisions of labor, a battle for budget,...

Healthcare marketing has entered a new era where generic messaging no longer resonates with consumers the way it once did. Patients today expect more from the brands they engage with. They want communications that reflect their unique needs, interests, and concerns....

There is a persistent assumption in PR circles that brand-building is primarily a game for companies with mass-market ambitions, household names, and marketing budgets to match. The playbooks we reach for most readily were written for scale: broad media outreach, wide...

We are drowning in “authentic” brands that all sound like they were raised by the same focus group and fed a diet of corporate mission statements. This seems like a trend these days. Most companies play defense. They sand down the edges, mute the personality, and pray...

Corporate communications and public relations have always lived in the space between perception and reality. But today, that space has become louder, faster, and far less forgiving. In an era where every employee is a potential spokesperson, every customer a...

Something fundamental has shifted in how the world finds information, and if your PR strategy hasn't noticed yet, you're not just losing rankings. You're becoming invisible to the engines that now shape your industry's reputation.  ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and...

The financial services industry is in the middle of a communications revolution, and most firms are still playing by rules written in 2015.  Here's what I see constantly: a fintech company raises a Series B, hires a PR agency, gets a Bloomberg mention, and calls it a...

April marks National Humor Month, an annual reminder that laughter is not just a release valve but more importantly, a bridge.  Employees are facing an increasing sense of uncertainty, change and polarization. Humor has the ability to bring people closer and curiosity...