“The essential point is that we don’t come together in a real way until we set foot on U.S. soil. That’s when our “Latino” experience begins. Latino is an American identity.

It is a word to describe Americans who are drawn to each other by this intangible cultural link, the similarity of the way we run our families, our devotion to faith, the warmth of our personalities and our connection to a history that recognizes no border to the south.” – Soledad O’Brien

Tonight CNN will air its second part of “Latino in America” with Soledad O’Brien. This is a topic close to my heart because like Ms. O’Brien, I am a Latina. Very mixed, but a Latina Americana.

I grew up, in what I consider a multi-racial household. My mother is white and my father has beautiful cocoa sun-kissed skin (picture Ricky & Lucy). Me? I have a lot of freckles from my childhood sunburns because it takes my lily-white skin several days of gradual sun exposure before it will turn brown like my dad’s.

Ms. O’Brien’s account of her upbringing and background, along with Raquel Cepeda’s commentary about her mixed heritage, made me think of my own life. I never really think about my ethnicity until I have to fill in one of those check boxes. I had to do many of them in school, and since I have a career in marketing, I take a lot of surveys. It has always made me confused and mad that I have not fit neatly into one of those boxes. “Caucasian – non-Hispanic”, “Hispanic – non-white”. Or the definition of Caucasian is “of European decent”. Aren’t most of us? But does that mean we’re all white? I got so excited about a year ago when I was filling something out and one of the boxes was “Multi-Racial”. YAY! FINALLY!

I’ve never understood why, when we know how masses of people have criss-crossed this globe and landed in countries far away from their places of origin, that you had to be one thing or another. I don’t think I know anyone that’s 100% of anything. My own friends are representative of the United Nations – Vietnamese/Irish, Lebanese/Armenian, American Indian/German/African-American – and I follow with my own mixed bag of Irish and German on my mom’s side and Spanish, Italian and English via Argentina, Chile and Peru on my dad’s side. I never felt I was being properly counted because I am both Caucasian and Hispanic.

Like many Latinos in America, I straddle a fence. My house was a mix of my parent’s languages, food, music and experiences. When I was 10, my dad took me to Peru for five weeks where I got to experience the language, food, music and people that were familiar to me, but now I was one of them. All these years later, I still vividly remember that trip, and I go out of my way to find Peruvian food in LA. A few months ago, I found a tiny place in Koreatown that serves up the real deal. I ordered the anticucho and the woman behind the counter took one look and me and asked if I knew what I was ordering. “Sí, Señora. Soy Peruana!” (BTW – that is the extent of my very poor Spanish. Thanks, Dad!)

While I was raised with my mother’s Irish/German family, my heart and spirit are in my Latina roots. People don’t quite know what to make of me when they see me because I look very Italian and have the surname to go with it, but my father’s deep Spanish accent, flavorful food, rhythmic Latin music, and the beautiful spirit of Latin people is where I feel at home. It wasn’t always this way, but the older I got, the more I realized how deeply embedded my experience was.

It’ll be interesting to see how things will change as the Latino population increases. Maybe folks will start pronouncing things correctly – it’s YAMA people, not LAMA! The LL in Spanish is a Y! – or maybe the spirit of the Latin people will become contagious to all Americans. I have never met a group of people, like the Latinos, who will give you the shirt off their back, their last dollar and share their food with you because they want to and they don’t expect anything from you. Maybe our true spirit of giving and humanity will be our legacy, and we will be the glue in the name of this country; putting the united in the United States of America.

© Copyright 2009 Theresa Moretti. All rights reserved.

Last week I attended my third Brand ManageCamp, held this year at the MGM in Las Vegas.  Given that I have passed the eight month mark for unemployment, I was in serious need of some great marketing inspiration, and as they have in years past, the folks at Brand ManageCamp did not fail to disappoint.

This year was ‘a must’ for me because marketing legend Philip Kotler was one of the speakers. If you are a marketer, or ever took a college or graduate marketing class, chances are Mr. Kotler was the author of the book you were using. His presentation centered on his new book Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in The Age of Turbulence. Suffice it to say I took two pages of notes and will be ordering his book very soon. And if you care about surviving this crazy world recession/globalization/modernization, you will too. By the way, in the short conversation I had with him, he was super nice! It was great to meet the man who has helped shaped so much of where marketing has been and where it’s going.

Other marketing/branding speakers included Guy Kawasaki (founder of Alltop.com), John Gerzema (author of The Brand Bubble), Amber MacArthur (she makes social media approachable), Simon Bray (?What If! North America), Kevin Clancy (author of Counterintuitive Marketing and Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head), Jeremy Gutsche (founder of Trendhunter.com), Jonathan Salem Baskin (author of Branding Only Works on Cattle), Charlene Li (author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies), Michael Dunn (author of The Marketing Accountability Imperative).

We ended with a couple different things this year that were really interesting. Rick Smith, founder of World 50 and author of The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel Your Career from Good to Great talked about how you can get to the next step in your career and life by tapping into more of who you are. He co-developed the Primary Color Assessment test in an effort to focus people much more on their strengths and passions instead of fixing weaknesses. His story can be appreciated most by those of us currently out of work. He was laid-off, had a big idea, followed through with it and the rest is everything listed above. Very inspiring!

Our final speaker was Joe Navarro, who is a 25-year veteran of the FBI and author of What Every BODY Is Saying. He was a frequent commentator on news channels during the election and gave some really good body language tips. He also had some great insights into dealing with workplace situations. He left us with a final order, “Move to Action!”  I’m trying, Joe!

I have an interview this week. I’m excited at the prospect of getting back to what I do best, and apply the knowledge and insights I gleaned from these amazing speakers. I love going to Camp.

What inspires you?

© Copyright 2009 Theresa Moretti. All rights reserved.

In my six months of unemployment, I have had one question posed to me more than any other, “what do you do?” For most people this is pretty easy, “I’m in I.T.” or “I’m an accountant.” All pretty straight-forward and you get a clear picture of what it is that person does for a living. Then you come ask me and I say, “I’m a marketer.” Next question is “what kind?”, and that is when I know we are not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Marketing is not like ice cream. It does not come in 31 flavors and cannot be segmented into specifics like tax accounting or cardiac surgeon. I realize the marketing world in the last decade or so has split off time and again. I never realized how much until I started looking at job boards and even the American Marketing Association’s job board. I have to make choices between marketing and advertising, marketing communications, branding, product management, etc., and my answer is all the above. I’m not sure when or why it became so splintered. It used to be that you were either in research or you were the implementer of the research results. From using the research data, you came up with a strategy and in that strategy were tactics for implementation.

Marketing is a skill; a process; a toolbox, if you will. It requires science and guts. Many out there would argue that it’s simply common sense. Well folks, if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it well. Case in point: in my Twitter timeline this week was a post from @brandcoach. It was a blog post written by Derrick Daye and Brad VanAuken of Brand Strategy Insider, a site that is now in my daily RSS feed because these two brilliant minds get it. Their August 19^th blog, GM Appointment Shows No Respect for Marketing, was spot on accurate about one of the biggest misconceptions of marketing: Marketing is not advertising. (Lather. Rinse. Repeat after me.)  If I may add to this, your brand is not your logo or your tagline, but so many people think that if you just show the world your pretty picture, they’ll buy your product and become your loyal customer. Hey, thanks for playing! Now go home. Wrong answer.

The worst kind of marketing is what I call inside-out marketing. GM is a prime example of that with the selection to pull Bob Lutz out of product development and near retirement, to “image czar” of GM’s advertising, communications and public relations. In an interview with USA Today, Mr. Lutz said he was “irked” by a few of GM’s recent ad campaigns and has a plan to fix them.

“I think you will very quickly see a drastic change in the tone and content of our advertising. And if you don’t, it will mean that I have failed.”

I will take this opportunity to agree with Messrs. Daye and VanAuken when they said, “Advertising at GM is not broken. Marketing is.”  I don’t care how many great ads GM puts out in the next year, it will not compel me to buy one of their cars. They think their cars are great; I have no affinity for them. Even people who drive them are having a hard time believing in them, like Michael Moore, who was born, raised and still lives in Flint, Michigan.

If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, it’s a duck. No shiny, flashy TV commercial (remember those?) or full-color print ad in the newspaper (remember that?) is going to sway me. So, let me be one in a long line to say, you have already failed, Mr. Lutz. Can I get you another glass of that kool-aid you’ve been drinking since 1963?

The really sad part is that he’s also part of long line of folks who don’t understand that marketing is strategy. It is born out of branding that takes an honest, 37,000 foot view of whatever the company’s “one thing” is and finds its unique place to make a difference to its customers. And because sales people are put into marketing roles, and product development chairmen are made image czars, marketing is relegated to the tagline/logo/pretty picture ad space, and never seen as critical or earns its rightful place at the table. We are the first to go (yours truly), and if we do get to the top job in our world of Chief Marketing Officer, we’re the ones with the shortest tenures (average 22 months).

Marketing is not a mystery, but done right, it is powerful and will move the needle for you, whatever that is. It is both science and art (not the pretty picture kind) and deserves a prominent spot in every company.

I’m a marketer. What do you do?

© Copyright 2009 Theresa Moretti. All rights reserved.

I’ve just finished reading a series of Tweets from @GayleHoward, award winning resume writer and personal branding strategist. As I told her, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“It should go without saying BUT the interview is not the place to text friends, eat lunch or sip the coffee you bought.”

“It should go without saying BUT don’t take a call in the middle of an interview! Turn your phone off before entering the room!”

Sadly, she Tweeted these lines because someone did in fact do these things. Now, call me crazy, but I don’t remember social etiquette ever going out of style, but I guess somewhere along the line everyone got comfortable. After all, the world is a small place and we are all just six degrees of separation from our nearest neighbor on another continent via the Facebook experiment of the same name.

I will be going on an interview myself in a few days, and as a marketer, here’s how I will approach the process.

Know your audience. I will be interviewing with a national company that provides mediation and arbitration services. You had better believe I will be in a suit that is clean, pressed and lint-free. Just because it’s California, doesn’t mean I get to be casual.

Know your audience. I already know a lot about the company from reviewing their Web site. As the days get closer, I will take more comprehensive notes, so that I can be an active participant in the interview conversation, and be prepared when the inevitable “do you have any questions” question comes up. Since this is a company that staffs retired judges, the devil will be in the details. Polished and prepared, as opposed to the texting coffee drinker mentioned above.

Oh, and know your audience. Aquent, a national talent agency for marketers, presented me with this great opportunity. I see it as my duty to represent myself well to this prospective employer because 1) I am representing Aquent, and 2) I am representing my own brand. Every time you step into a situation, whether it’s a networking event, industry mixer, or the all important job interview, you owe it to yourself to appear in the best light possible. Remember, you only get one chance to make a first, and lasting, impression.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a grande nonfat vanilla latte to sip, and I need to text my friends so I can plan my weekend. You don’t mind, do you?

© Copyright 2009 Theresa Moretti. All rights reserved.

I’m exactly at the six month mark in my current state of ‘funemployment’ and I’ve spent the last month thinking about how much the business world has changed in the arenas of job search and hiring. I’m sure I am not alone when I say that I don’t remember it ever being this hard. I did what I thought I was supposed to do, you know, looked at job board sites, updated my LinkedIn profile, and of course, applied for jobs only to join that horrifically long line of others like me waiting to hear something (anything!) back.

After five months of pure nothing, I concluded that if I kept down that path I would officially be living the definition of insanity. I decided to check out a webinar series given by Kevin Kermes, founder of Build the Career You Deserve. It was the best money I have ever spent (purse and shoe collection notwithstanding) and his information has been invaluable and life altering. Here are a few changes I made in my path, and more importantly, my thinking.

The Social Media Bullet Train

Sure, I’ve had a LinkedIn profile for years, and yes, I’m on Facebook, but Twitter? I had resisted for a year. I kept wondering how I could be compelling in 140 characters. Now, color me converted. It’s an amazing site for information; A LOT of information. You can’t possibly know every Web site or where to find every helpful tip, but those that you follow on Twitter will help pave the way. It has been an enormously useful tool in my job search and the Tweeple I follow are insightful and love to share their words of wisdom, specialties and information. With all the knowledge I’ve gained since, I presented and moderated a discussion recently at a Pink Slip Mixer. My topic was how to use social media in your job search. Here’s a Tweet about my presentation: Great presentation from @theresamoretti at last night’s @pinkslipped mixer. The room was buzzing afterward with all of her @twitter tips. Credit to all those that I follow on Twitter. You made me look good. Thank you!

Throw Away the Box

You know the old (tired?) business maxim of thinking outside the box? Just chuck the darn thing. It still does exactly what it sounds like, keeps you boxed in. You need to get out, and by out, I mean literally. I’m going to events and meetings that I wouldn’t normally attend, I’m talking with people I never thought I’d reach out to and speak with, and hey, I have a blog. Who knew?! Being in this current state of flux allows for a lot of freedom. It’s all in how you choose to think about it, and more importantly, what you choose to do about it.

Connect, Connect, Connect

In the last month I have attended a couple networking events, had lunch with several people in my network, tapped into my association memberships, asked for introductions through LinkedIn, connected people I have met with others in my network via LinkedIn and Twitter, and even took a PowerPoint class. The job search is a numbers game. Not so much with the number of resumes you blast out on the job boards (where 1-3% of people are hired), but more in the number of connections you make (where 80-85% of people are hired). Smart companies have long said their people are their best asset. The same goes for anyone in the job search arena.

Other people’s experiences have been very valuable to read, so I’d like to know what has worked for you in your job search.  Please leave a comment and let me know.

© Copyright 2009 Theresa Moretti. All rights reserved.