The Brand Sensei

The Brand Sensei is a growth partner for small and mid-sized businesses who want to build effective, AI-powered marketing and brand systems that drive sustainable growth - all without the big team or big budget.

We offer:

- The SMTR BRND Method: A proven step-by-step framework for developing your brand strategy, maximizing customer engagement, and accelerating revenue growth using AI and digital marketing.
- Monthly Strategy Sessions to review your progress, solve challenges, and optimize your brand and marketing performance.
- A community of growth-focused business leaders who are implementing advanced marketing strategies to scale their companies.
- Access to AI marketing training, tools, brand templates, customer insight frameworks, and our annual Brand Masters Summit.

Book a discovery call at https://brandsensei.com to learn if you qualify.

Founder / Fractional CMO

Annansi

RECENT: Future of Retail Sessions • CSU College of Business Fall Speaker Series • Retail Innovation Week • Global South Tech • Global Entrepreneurship Week • The United Nations • Columbia University • Harvard University (2010) • SXSW Interactive Conference and Festival • The Smithsonian Museum • Google.org

Keynote Speaker

• Developing strategies for emerging brands to grow their visibility, engagement and sales by using customer insights, data, and digital tech including AI

• Workshops and training for founders and marketing teams on the strategic use of Artificial Intelligence (A)I for brand and business growth

Clients include:
→ SwatchOn (retail B2B ): brand strategy, customer research & segmentation, Web3 engagement strategy
→ PUMA (retail B2C): customer research and profiling, engagement strategy
→ Bayer (health B2B, B2C ): Product positioning, messaging, go-to-market strategy, launch
→ Sysdyne Technologies (construction B2B): re-branding
→ Party City (retail B2C): digitization
→ Novartis (health B2B, B2C): division branding, positioning

Digital Brand Strategist & Customer Experience Specialist (on demand)

Various Startups

✛ Streamlytics
✛ PopCom
✛ CRE Capital
✛ The Bridge Fashion Incubator (TBFI)

Startup Investor & Advisor

IPG Health

Drove strategic initiatives resulting in the successful launch and growth of domestic and global brands, overseeing $8+ million in business. Assessed market opportunities and crafted brand strategies to achieve objectives.

VP, Engagement Strategy

JUICE

Guided clients and department leads (creative, account, project management, etc.) to conceptualize, adopt, and optimize fully integrated marketing campaigns.

VP, Director of Customer Experience

Ogilvy

Served as strategy lead for diverse B2B and B2C brands, orchestrating the planning and execution of fully integrated multi-million-dollar campaigns.

Director, Digital Strategy

McCann Health

Senior Digital & Content Strategist

Saatchi & Saatchi

Digital Supervisor

Dress Barn

Manager, Digital & Content Marketing

Various

Clients: Captain Morgan, Hugo Boss, Giorgio Armani, Party City, PUMA

Digital Marketing Consultant

Helping brands to grow Visibility, Engagement, and Revenue using AI and Digital Tech || Strategist, Technologist, Data/Insights Nerd || Ex- @Saatchi, @Ogilvy, @McCann

Ever feel like everything is moving fast and your business is two steps behind? 

Forget surviving, you still want your brand to connect with the right people and soar! That’s where I come in.

As a seasoned marketing executive with over 15 years of experience, I have dedicated my career to driving business growth through innovative, data-driven marketing strategies. 

My passion lies in 

I've been in the trenches with big players like Mercedes-Benz, PUMA, and Pfizer and also bold startups like SwatchOn, guiding them in developing and executing multi-channel campaigns that not only generate qualified leads but also accelerate sales cycles and maximize customer acquisition.

Challenges I Understand:
❗️Struggling to stand out in a crowded market.
❗️Ineffective brand messaging that doesn't resonate with your audience.
❗️Difficulty integrating cutting-edge technology into your marketing strategy.
❗️Need for a data-driven approach to understand and engage customers.
❗️Desire to increase revenue while building a sustainable, beloved brand.

How I Help My Clients & Partners:
✅ Data-Driven Insights: Unlocking the power of data to create compelling, personalized brand stories.
✅ Digital Technology Integration: Seamlessly blending technologies into your marketing strategy for impactful customer engagement.
✅ Customized Brand Strategies: Crafting unique solutions that resonate with your audience and drive business growth.

Technical Proficiency:
From Adobe Creative Cloud to Google Analytics to ChatGPT to Web3 tolls, I help leaders understand and use the right technologies to drive brand growth.

I am excited about the intersection of creativity and data-driven decision-making, and am always open to connecting with like-minded professionals, discussing potential collaborations, or sharing insights on the ever-evolving landscape of marketing.

Eager for your brand to gain a competitive edge and dominate your market?

Let's chat!

G. Kofi Annan

What if everyone who rejected you was actually... right?

Hear me out.

My granny flew 5,000 miles to tell me I was ruining my life.
My professor compared me to an alcoholic.
My friends said my work wasn't worth $10.

They were all correct.

I spent years trying to conform.
Until my same rejected work sold for 6X more...to strangers.

The rejection was never about me.

This changed how I see every "NO" forever →

I help health brands grow clients/patients & revenue using a AI-enhanced acquisition system ✪ Fmr @Saatchi, @Ogilvy, @McCann

Finding Value in Rejection

The more you outsource your thinking to ChatGPT, the lazier you get and the more you risk losing your credibility. 

Customers, clients, and readers have access to ChatGPT too. 

They want your expertise, taste, and judgment. 

Don’t let one lazy tweet, post, or paragraph be the reason you lose their trust and kill your business.

Too many founders and owners wear exhaustion like a medal.

You built a business to help people. Now it's the thing breaking you.

60-hour weeks.
Answering texts at dinner.
"Always available" as a selling point.

But here's the truth:

Your clients and patients don't respect you more for being accessible.
They respect you more for being excellent.

And excellence requires edges.

The massage therapist who doesn't book past 6pm?
3-month wait list.

The nutritionist who doesn't answer weekends?
40% price premium.

The doctor who doesn't rush consultations?
Highest satisfaction scores in the city.

They're not working less.
They're working on what only they can do.

Everything else? It's noise disguised as necessity.

The highest-paid, most effective practitioners aren't the most available.
They're the most intentional.

What tasks are stealing your excellence?

My friend Camille is brilliant. MBA from Wharton. Built campaigns that saved millions.

But she gets ignored while people with less experience get the opportunities she wants.

It's not fair.

But in a world drowning in noise, intelligence without authority is just expensive advice nobody asks for.

That's why I'm partnering to launch Scaling Authority, a 4-month program to help seasoned professionals and ambitious entrepreneurs build authority at scale.

Your expertise is your most valuable asset. 

But if you can't make it land with authority, it might as well not exist.

If you're tired of being the best-kept secret in your space, this is your permission slip to finally change that.

Scaling Authority is limited to only 10 participants.

Early bird closes next Wednesday, Dec. 10th.

Read more ↓

View newsletter: Digital Brand Tips | By Kofi

My friend Camille is brilliant. She's got an MBA from Wharton. Built three successful marketing campaigns that saved her last company millions. Can di

Open article: The smartest person in the room often gets ignored. Let's change that! by G. Kofi Annan • 3 min read

The smartest person in the room often gets ignored. Let's change that!

Cory Hymel

Crowdbotics

* Leadership role designed to synthesize the ambitions across all areas of Crowdbotics
* Bridge between the technical, product, and marketing teams
* Create research program from the ground up with leading universities 
* Author whitepapers with industry partners
* Public speaking events to share where the future of software development is going with AI

VP Product & Research

The Human Cloud

• Advising the implementation of a competitive intelligence terminal leaders can use to access hyper relevant freelance economy insights in seconds. 
• Advising ways to leverage emerging technologies such as AI, ML, and blockchain into freelance marketplaces.
• Providing thought leadership and strategy on leveraging technology to enable the human cloud.

Strategic Advisor

Gigster

*Managing 4 departments: Platform, NetOps, Product, and MetrX (acquisition)
*Direct report to CEO
*Main goal is creating company strategy and paths to revenue

VP of Product & Research

Helping lead research with Stanford and Berkeley into how distributed teams work at scale.

Head of Academic Partnerships

Leading all things blockchain. NFT's, crypto, enterprise, etc.

Director of Blockchain

Creating teams and process to build software via distributed employees. 

I also manage academic partnerships to help further research in distributed work. 

Personal areas of interest and specialization:
- blockchain                (incentive models and distributed systems architecture)
- IoT                             (sys architecture, deployment, etc.)
- embedded systems (bluetooth low energy (cypress semiconductor))
- finTech                      (international banking infrastructure, AML/KYC)

Senior Solutions Architect

Enventys Partners

....continuing to pioneer the Internet of Things.

Director of Connected Technologies

Enventys

Simble Co.

Launching iBeacons in real estate, conferences, and a consumer app.

Co Founder

Prime Notion Technologies, Inc.

Building custom enterprise mobile applications for Fortune 500 clients.

Co Founder & CEO

Pull Communications

Built platform that would allow museum curators to build self guided tours of exhibits.

Senior Developer

Resolute Games

Building 2D and 3D games for iOS and Android.

Senior Programmer / Developer

Fedex Institue of Technology

Was a member of the Dynamic Obstacle Handling Research team. Researching and building self driving tugs for FedEx.

Center for Advanced Robotics Research

VP of Product & Research @ Gigster | Innovating on the Future of Work

//--In my own words
Washed software engineer that was better at telling stories and painting visions that writing code. I usually find myself working in research or innovation teams due to attention deficient and boredom with solvable problems. I very much enjoy speaking, teaching, and sharing things I've learned with others. 


//--In my PR teams words
The root of Cory’s passion for the connected nature of tech enhancing the future of work began in the early 2000s in robotics research initiatives for the FedEx Institute of Technology. He went on to pioneer mobile helping enterprises develop strategies to mobilize staff workflows and collaboration in the pre-enterprise project management app era of “BYOD to work” in the mid-2010s. Seeing the promise of physical and digital integration, Cory brought physical products to life leading the Connected Technologies division at a hardware development firm. Beginning in 2018 Cory began researching and leading the Future of Work at Gigster as VP of Product and Research advocating for leveling outdated hierarchical structures within organizations. Cory is a futurist with the goal to continuously question the status quo. His research answers the questions that will define how the innovations of today will impact the work of tomorrow.

It was truly an honor to be invited by Hayden Brown and the Upwork team to come speak at their investor day on how AI is shaping the future of work. 

A couple key points: 

***
1. Code is no longer a defensive moat:
Operate under the hypothesis that the cost to generate code is going to $0. 

Capex to write code used to be a valid, defensible moat but with the insane progress AI code gen is making that's quickly going away. We're already seeing companies come out of Y Combinator with 2 founders and fleshed out platforms that in the past would have taken $Xm in funding to build. 

Example: 
We've been able to completely re-write a legacy java app using Cognition's Devin tool in about a day. 

***
2. The best ideas will (finally) win
Research led companies will win. Full stop. 

This doesn't mean go hire a bunch of PhD's. 
What I mean by this is companies that foster internal experimentation and validate ideas with data can now quickly accelerate on those to gain market share....and it's literally never been easier to do this. 

Example: 
We had a hypothesis that injecting business context into GitHub Copilot would improve it. So, in 6 weeks we ran a study using 300 flex talent resources from Upwork and proved it. Then we doubled down and brought that to market. 

We had a whitepaper, empirical evidence, and usage data that gave us an edge. The code was the easy part. 
https://lnkd.in/eyeZyQaE

***
***
Thank you again to everyone on Upwork team Sheri Baker, Peter Sanborn, Frisco C. and everyone else that helped prep and put on the session. 

Also, huge shoutout to my fellow panelist Gabriel Richman and Philip Rasori you guys were incredible!

VP Product & Research @ CoreStory | HCI research on AI’s impact to the SDLC

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The Battle

G. Kofi Annan

Cory Hymel

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taplio

The Battle

G. Kofi Annan

Cory Hymel

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}G. Kofi Annan's LinkedIn Performance

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