Angelo Ponzi
Founder at The Ponzi Group
Website Address: www.theponzigroup.com
Each week on “Media Champions,” our host Mary Jo Van Horn speaks to experts within the vast media community. This week, Mary Jo spoke with Angelo Ponzi from The Ponzi Group, a marketing support company that provides consulting, interim, and fractional marketing and leadership services for small to medium size companies.
Tell us a bit about you and your company.
Sure. So what we do is we provide interim, fractional or consulting, marketing, and leadership services to small to medium sized businesses, and we focus on the strategic and analytical side of marketing. And we use a lot of market research to help drive our insights and how we position and mess and build our strategic plans for our clients. We also work as kind of like a general contractor, in a sense, role based on when we have the plans we’ll partner with external vendors to execute the programs we have in place. I started this company, focused on the things I really like to do. A lot of my career has been in the advertising industry where I’ve worked for large organizations as well as grew and sold my own, at one point in time.
When I was preparing that you talk about taking a holistic approach to marketing. What does that mean for you and your clients?
Well if you think about it, we’re going to have an impact on everybody in the organization. So it’s important for me to make sure that, as we’re developing our programs and our plans, that the sale — I’ll pick on one of my clients in the manufacturing and distribution industry. I need to know that if we’re doing a messaging certain ways that we have the capacity to actually fulfill, we have the people to do it, we have the finances to back it, and inventory to meet the sales. So making sure that we’re just not working in a silo and achieving our goals then only to find out internally we actually can execute. So I like to embrace the entire organization and the major strategic thinking. So everybody knows what we’re trying to achieve and can be there to support those efforts when the programs and sales are successful.
What has been your biggest take away from COVID-19?
Well that’s interesting. You know, marketing is so many times viewed as an expense as opposed to an investment. So what I saw, and experienced quite frankly, is companies cut back on their marketing to drive dollars to the bottom line. But I’ve been on this educational campaign and a lot of speaking events and webinars that this was the mistake that companies make. They cut their cash, save their cash, cut their marketing. But history has shown in other recessions, and I’ll call it recessions, that those that found an operational balance between saving cash and investing in marketing or innovation actually come out of these recessionary times much stronger than they went in and usually farther ahead of their competition. So strategically it’s to their advantage to find that balance. And so that’s probably the biggest thing that I saw is get cut in preserving that cash to preserve the company, and I get that and that’s a great strategy. But going back to marketing took way too long.
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