The Core Rules Of Branding Never Change Even When The Tools Do

A single referral can do what months of cold outreach can’t and Paige Arnoff Fenn has the story to prove it. We sit down with the founder and CEO of Mavens and Moguls, a global branding and digital marketing firm, to unpack how she went from “accidental entrepreneur” to the go-to outsourced marketing department for companies that need senior talent without the full-time overhead. Along the way, Paige shares what she learned moving from big-brand marketing at Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola to high-growth startups and eventually to building her own firm after 9/11 reshaped the market. 

We dig into the real mechanics of branding, marketing strategy, and PR that actually drive growth. Paige explains how strong market research uncovers differentiation, why a brand refresh is more than a logo update, and how targeted PR and thought leadership can be one of the most cost-efficient ways to get your story in front of the right audience. We also talk through common traps founders fall into: confusing friendly feedback for real customer insight, asking leading questions that poison the data, and posting “noise” on social media that trains prospects to ignore you. 

Then we zoom out to the bigger shift: the tools keep changing, but the fundamentals don’t. In a world flooded by content and accelerated by AI, Paige makes the case for doubling down on what machines can’t replicate your origin story, your proof, your hard-earned lessons, and the human details that make people care. If you’re trying to stand out, earn trust faster, and build a marketing engine that lasts, this conversation is a practical roadmap. 

Subscribe for more timeless business and building strategies, share this with a founder who needs sharper messaging, and leave a review with your biggest marketing question so we can tackle it next.

 Be sure to check below for links to all of Paige’s social media platforms so you can connect with her and follow her work. 

www.mavensandmoguls.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paigearnoffenn

To learn more about Tony Johnson and Timeless visit us at:
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonytimeless/

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Timeless Business and Building Strategies. Today we have Paige Arnoff Fenn with us. Paige, thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Thank you, Tony, for having me.

Paige’s Career Pivot Into Marketing

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Paige is the owner operator of Mavens and Moguls, which is a global branding and digital marketing firm. So, Paige, you're the founder and CEO. And could you tell us real quickly a little bit of background on you? How long you've been in business? What got you into this?

What Mavens And Moguls Does

SPEAKER_01 0:28

So I hung out the shingle, let's see, going on 25 years ago, which is hard to believe. And I came to owning my own business accidentally. I joke, I'm the accidental entrepreneur. I was not looking to start a company. If you had met me when I was in college or grad school, this would not have been on my dance card. Um, I graduated from college in the 80s, and Michael Douglas had just won the Oscar for the first Wall Street movie. I saw my senior year in college and I just loved it and thought that looks really fun. And I joined an investment bank as a financial analyst, thinking that was going to be my career path. And I realized a couple weeks into my new job that what makes for a great movie does not necessarily make for a great career. But I'd made a two-year commitment. So I stuck to my uh commitment and realized that I needed to find a different path. So I went back to business school and completely rebranded myself from a finance person to a marketing person. Uh I took my first marketing class, my first semester in grad school, got the top grade, got a summer internship in marketing, and I've been doing marketing ever since. So my marketing career has had three chapters. I started at Procter Gamble, one of the biggest, uh most celebrated marketing companies in the world. They invented the concept of brand management. And so I worked in marketing at Procter Gamble and Coca-Cola. Coke's probably the most uh famous brand in the world. Big budgets, big brands that everybody's heard of. And I learned a lot, all the basics. Um, then my next chapter is I I joined three different startups as the head of marketing. Um, so that was a completely different challenge because no one had ever heard of any of these companies. Um, and they all raised a lot of money and they all had good exits. So I call those my three base hits because I made a little money three times, a lot of fun. And then 9-11 happened and all the marketing jobs got canceled because people were worried uh about the economy and being able to raise money. And that's when I hung out the shingle to start helping companies independently. So I took baby steps from big company marketing to small company marketing to doing it for my my own clients. And I've been doing it ever since.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

And what what is your niche? Where where do you thrive or where do you focus on?

SPEAKER_01 3:25

So I feel like um we're we're basically um a virtual marketing department for companies and organizations that need access to great marketing talent, but they only need it kind of on an outsourced basis. So they don't they can't really justify the overhead and the expense of having a full-blown marketing team or staff. So they use us as like, you know, a bench when they need to tap into good marketing. Um, so we do anything a marketing department, ad agency, PR agency, or market research shop does um independently. I feel like the areas where we get called on more than anything else, it's like, you know, market research, strategy, and branding. Those are kind of our sweet spot. Most of the time when somebody picks up the phone or drops me an email and says, I need your help, those are the things that usually get people to act. Like, you know, they need a new website, they need a new tagline, a logo, they need marketing materials, they've got a trade show coming up, they have a new product they're about to launch, and they need help. They need arms and legs and experience to help them um get to that next level.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

And and when you're getting a client, how long is your normal life cycle with that client?

SPEAKER_01 5:05

So it kind of depends. We work on both a project basis and a retainer basis. So a project may be, you know, I've got a new company and I need a new, I need a website so that we can launch our business. So a website, you know, it depends. It can be very simple, it could be like a WordPress kind of, you know, template. Um, it could be an e-commerce website, it could be multilingual, maybe they need it to operate globally and they want it in a lot of different languages. So the more complex the website, the longer it's gonna take. Um, so you know, we can be pretty flexible. Sometimes we are the marketing department, and sometimes they have a skeletal crew in-house that just needs extra expertise. So we're pretty flexible when it comes to, you know, if they if they are launching something in six months and they need work over the next six months, we can do that. But if we're doing like PR for a for a business, they're probably gonna use us for six months or 12 months to put together an ongoing campaign. So in that case, that's more of a retainer business. But if they need market research, if they need us to analyze data, that might only be a three or four month engagement. So we're happy to work um any way that makes the most sense for the client. We can be pretty flexible.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

I see. So you know, as you've gone through this 25-year experience, because we're we're you're talking about, you know, from basically getting a brand off the ground to PR work to updating websites or a new uh niche rollout of an existing company. Have you have you found one to be where you guys really hit stride the best and where you get the bit most referrals and repeat clients?

The Referral That Put Her On Map

SPEAKER_01 7:22

So I have a funny story. Um so early on in my business, um, you know, I I had never started a business before, and I had never been kind of the CEO of any company before. Um, so when I when I hung out my shingle, you know, I did a lot of networking to meet people. I gave a lot of talks, a lot of presentations, and um I joined a lot of networking groups. And there was a group here in the Boston area where I'm based of a lot of professional senior women, and they either ran companies, ran divisions at companies, maybe they were a partner at a law firm. Um, and so it was like a professional women's networking group, and there were hundreds of members. And um, so I was very active in networking, and I met this woman's CEO. She had a B2B service business, and we were introduced to each other at a networking event, and she said, you know, I think I'm gonna need some marketing. Can you come out to the suburbs and I want to show you my business and see if you can help? So I said, sure. We had a great meeting. I sent her a proposal, and she needed a lot of help. And I followed up about a week later, I didn't hear anything back. She never acknowledged the email with the proposal. You know, I left her a voicemail, I followed up on email, nothing, radio silence, crickets. So about a week later, the women's group was meeting for an event, and this prospect of mine was the keynote speaker at the at the event. And I thought, oh my goodness, well, I know if I show up, she's gonna be there, but I don't want her to think I'm stalking her. Like, you know, I don't really know the line between being pleasantly persistent and feeling like you know, you're stalking this person. But I thought, you know what, I'm gonna go to the event anyway. I'll bump into her. And if she ignores me, I guess we didn't get the business, you know, I'll just roll the dice. So I go to the event, I see her across the room, but because she's the keynote speaker, everybody's talking to her. So, you know, I kind of nod my head from across the room, letting her know I see her, and I just keep networking, and then they call the meeting to order, and she gets up on the stage and she gives this talk that she had prepared. And for this audience of all professional women leaders, she said, Today I want to talk about the importance of supporting other great women-owned businesses. This needs to be a priority. We need to all support each other, you know. And she just went on and on about how important it is that we have each other's backs. And in any anything that you need for your business, there's probably a great woman-owned business. And then she announces, apropos of nothing, that because of her firm belief in this, she is proud to announce that she is hiring my firm to handle all of her marketing and all of her PR for the next year, and that she had met me at this organization. She was very impressed. I wrote an amazing proposal. I really heard her and listened to her. And I mean, I was in shock because I had no idea that she even acknowledged that she had read it.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

You didn't even know she opened the email.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

And she didn't get back to me on any of my messages. And when I tell you, Tony, I mean, when she came down off that stage, I felt like a rock star at a con at a concert. Like everybody was patting me on the back and coming over to shake my hand and give me a hug. And they said, Oh my God, if this woman hired you, she is tough as nails. And if she, I mean, she must have talked to every firm in the city. And I'll tell you, if she if you're good enough for her, you're good enough for me. I need to get and I felt like I couldn't have taken an ad out in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times and done better than that testimonial. And I'll tell you, the month that followed that meeting, I got more business than and it was early on in my company, and that really put us on the map. I mean, I was absolutely blown away with the power of uh, you know, uh an authentic referral of somebody who, you know, has a reputation.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Established person with a great reputation, and especially a hard-hitting reputation, like you just mentioned. That that is critical. And then for growing a business, obviously, uh a referral network is one of the strongest networks you can ever build, and that is how you get uh that's how you grow a business and establish sustainability. Um, so so that's fantastic. So tell me a bit more, because I love this story that you've started. So did you did you go through the whole year with this client and did it end at the year, or did it extend on beyond that year?

SPEAKER_01 13:04

So the proposal was for um, I don't even think it was a full year. She needed um kind of a brand refresh. She was in a very competitive industry, and she did not have a rock solid brand. Like it was it was a little muddy in terms of what her differentiation was versus the competition. And so we really had to dig in, do some research, and figure out what was her special sauce? How did she do better than the competitors in her category? What was unique, special, and different? What was the real estate that she owned that made it so that if her customers had a problem that she could help them solve, that they thought of her before anybody else? So we did a lot of you know market research to get her story straight and to find the right words and pictures to tell a unique brand story. Um, once we did that, we needed to get it incorporated into everything that she did on her website, in her marketing materials. And she she had not done any kind of real work on her brand um since she started the company, you know, more than a decade before. So we did a bit of a refresh of her logo and her tagline. So when people went to her website, it looked more current and modern. It didn't look like some dusty old brand with no personality, you know. So I think that helped a lot. And then once we got all those ducks in a row, we handled all of her PR. And when you have a great story to tell, my bias is PR is the most cost-efficient thing you can do to get your story out there. Um, so you know, what are the the media outlets online and offline where we can tell your story? You know, do you want to um be quoted in the press? Uh do you want to start writing a blog? Do you want to um start an email newsletter? You know, what are the things, you know, do you want to speak at events? Um do you have uh partners or affiliates you can work with that, you know, you're both targeting a similar target audience, um, but you're selling them very different things. But you, you know, there's power in your network because um they may have an email list, they may be active on social media, they may have a newsletter. You could write an article for them, they could write an article for you. You know, what are the trade magazines? What are the conferences that your uh audience is paying attention to? So we really did a very uh targeted effort to surround their uh audience, and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't just a single audience that you're talking about. It rarely is, you know, there's a primary, secondary, tertiary audience. The end buyer, the you know, the person who makes the buying decision can be influenced by a lot of people. They get influenced potentially by the finance people or the procurement people in their company. So they want a story about the return on the investment. Um, but the person who's buying it uh might just want things, you know, to support a new product launch or to support uh um an initiative like uh a new campaign. Um the media can be very influential. So, you know, you want the people that are writing the articles or uh putting together the um panels for for um activities for conferences and trade shows. You want them to think of your brand as a leader in the in the category or industry. So what are the things that you need to do to get in front of those people to so that you can be an influencer and a voice in your industry or category? Um so they're just a lot of levers you can play with and see which ones have the highest impact, but it's not always the ones who spend the most money who get the most notice. Um, you know, you can leverage online marketing and social media and do things in a very scrappy way. You could, you know, put a campaign together on TikTok if you have a visual story to tell. Um, and that can be very compelling and it could go viral for a great reason if you know what you're doing.

Marketing Principles Versus Changing Tools

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Absolutely. So, Paige, being in this industry for 25 years, right? So if we go back, you know, around uh 9-11 when we're talking 2001, right? And and you're getting off the ground, this is a completely different world and environment technologically. Oh my goodness, absolutely. How uh I'm interested to know how have you adapted this business to all of this change to where we are now, uh, and then how are you adapting? Because now it's adapting to AI, which is just a brand new thing, right? Absolutely. So, how has that how has that gone through? Could you go through that a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 19:14

So when I started this business, yeah, there was no Facebook or Twitter X, um, AI, there was no COVID, like it was a completely different world. Having said that, the the core basic tenants of marketing never go out of style. Um you know, you know, at its basic foundation, you you want to know, you know, who your audience is, what what's important to them, you know, what is unique, special, and different about you. How are you solving their problem? What are those words and pictures that are gonna be compelling to make people motivated to buy what it is you're selling? That has not changed. The tools and technologies change all the time. So, yeah, when I started, um, you know, when I started my marketing career, they had network television, they had print, they had uh radio, and they had outdoor advertising. That those were the um media options that you a brand could spend money on. Um then you had the explosion of like cable TV. Then you, you know, it's like so you know, it's one thing, yeah, it's one thing after.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

So you've got to be very agile.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Absolutely.

Better Research And Smarter Social Content

SPEAKER_00 20:49

So when so how do you um when you're working with a client and doing an intake? So let's say if if we were doing an intake, right? And so I'm an established business, not a huge business, right? An established business, but we're we're in high growth mode. Um, so I I just went through a reiteration on branding and brand design in the last year and kind of getting that core message. But there's but there's so many facets to this. So you can get the brand and that that can speak to your company and and get your image so they have the right understanding when they see your brand image, like what you're doing, right? Because you want to capture that quickly. Yeah, but then beyond that, then we have to go to all right, how do I get my strategic value across quickly? Right? So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

So, you know, when I started and you wanted to do market research to figure out what your audience, what they use, what they have now, what they need, what they are, you know, trying to build for the future. Um, when you when I started, you had to do Focus groups or you had to do surveys. Um, kind of an old school way to do it. And it took a lot of time and a lot of money because you know, um we're talking granular level data that you're trying to capture. Um, with the internet exploding, um, you had things like SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, and you could set up a survey and send a link on email. Um, and that didn't cost very much money. And you could talk to a lot of people all over the country, all over the world. You didn't have to get a focus group together in the same room and talk to 10 people at a time. Uh, you could send the link to, you know, thousands of people or you know, different age groups, uh, different psychographics, different uh demographics. Um and you know, when when you used to do um PR, that meant you had to do a press release, you had to pay to send it over the white the the wire, uh, then you had to follow up doing desk tours. Um, you know, PR in the old days, you know, you had to hire a PR agency. And it again, it, you know, you would want to go to New York or go to different markets and meet different people. Um once social media took hold, um, it changed everything because now everyone walks around with a phone in their pocket and they're on a lot of different platforms and they have an audience. You don't know how many followers these people have, how many groups they belong to. So all of a sudden, everybody's got a megaphone now, and you're not dependent. You know, people don't send out press releases to announce things anymore. They can announce things with a few, you know, clicks and then you hit send and it's done. Um, so you know, there's been a democratization, I think, um, of a lot of marketing. Now, there's a lot of noise out there, and there are a lot of people not doing it very well, but that's not stopping them from doing it. So if you want to, you know, do market research, I always say garbage in, garbage out. If you ask questions in a way that's leading the witness, um, so how much do you like my product? Well, you know, tell me three things you love about my service. That's not gonna give you a lot of real data. Um, you have to talk to people who really are your target audience, who really do spend money on the thing that it is you're selling. Um, it, you know, I've had clients come to me and say, everybody says we love what you're doing, but no one's buying my stuff. What's the problem? I said, Great. It sounds like you've done a lot of research. Can you share me, share with me the data? And they said, Well, it's not formal research, but I talk to a ton of people. I talked to my mom, my neighbor, my friend. I'm like, that's not market research. These are people that are never going to tell you your baby's ugly. They don't want to hurt your feelings. They love you and they support you, but they are not your audience. So if you're not uh able to, you know, you can use Zoom orang and SurveyMonkey, but you got to ask the right questions to the right people. Um, and you know, again, people say, well, I I put everything on social media. I don't understand why people aren't paying attention. And I'm like, all right, so I look at what they've been putting on X and I look at what they're putting on Facebook, and it's like they're in line at Starbucks and they're complaining that it's taken too long to get their uh venti uh cappuccino, or they've put all their um vacation photos on the beach on Facebook. And I'm like, well, if you're trying to get clients, they don't care that your washing machine is broken, they don't care that you had a great time on the beach or you got burned, you know, because the weather was so hot. That is not PR. You know, you you need to think about the messages that you're sending because what people are gonna do is they're gonna block you or turn you off or ignore you because you're wasting their time. You know, you have to think about the messages that you're putting out there, and you want to reinforce without being too self-promoting. You want to put stuff out there that educates people, um, that informs them, that entertains them. You want to share relevant stuff so that when they see your name pop up, they want to look and see what's going on. They're not trying to ignore you because they know it's irrelevant stuff. And when people realize that, they go, Oh, okay, well, I thought I was good at marketing because I watch TV all the time and I read magazines and I know what good advertising is. Yeah, but that's not putting together good advertising.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Yeah, I'm I'm all about you have you have to make you have to to entertain people, it's either you got to make them laugh, you got to draw interest because it's so flooded right now, you have to exactly you have to do something that's going to sustain somebody's, you know, the it over these years, right? So you you can get sustained a lot easier back then. Right now, you're flooded with so much. So you have to be able to grab somebody's attention and get five seconds. So it has to, and it has to be a little bit different, edgy, funny, outside the box. To otherwise, it's there's so much content in thrown in his face that it nothing is different, it's all just blah blah blah, and everybody just regurgitates. Once somebody sees something, they regurgitate it 400 times. So you see, and over again, and AI has made that worse, frankly.

Standing Out In The Age Of AI

SPEAKER_01 28:20

To be honest, AI doesn't originate a lot of stuff, but it what it does is it pulls from all the sea of sameness that's out there, and so in this day and age, with all the artificial intelligence tools, it's more important than ever that you really focus on your origin story, what's what is unique, special, and different about you. How do you stand out? What are you know, you've got to share the stories, the good, the bad, the ugly, you gotta be vulnerable, you gotta share your humanity. Tell those stories where you got knocked down and you picked yourself up, and what were the twists and turns? That's what people relate to. If all you're doing is showing, you know, the fancy pictures that have been photoshopped and everything's great, that's what people they their eyes glaze over it. They don't believe it, they don't learn anything from it, it's not making them laugh or smile. That kind of stuff is just a waste of time. So if you want to stand out versus the robots, you've got to like peek behind the curtain and tell those stories that only humans can tell because the robots can't compete with that.

How To Connect And Closing

SPEAKER_00 29:42

The robots, that's true. That's amazing. That's fantastic, Paige. It has been a pleasure hearing about your story, and you've put a lot of great tidbits uh for people to consider with marketing. Now, if people wanted to connect with you to get a little more information or maybe get seek you for help with their business, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_01 30:01

So you can go to my website, it's mavensandmoguls.com, M-A-V-E-N-S-A-N-D, M O G U L S dot com. I'm on LinkedIn. Um, my name is hyphenated, but on LinkedIn it's all smushed together. And one of my clients always says, because my company name has an ampersand, my last name has a hyphen. She's like, there are just too many words. All I remember is Paige and Mavens. So if you Google that, thank goodness search engine optimization has my back. You will find me that way too.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

Awesome. And we'll put everything in the show notes so people can connect with you. Paige, thank you so much for coming on today. We appreciate it. It's been very informative on the marketing aspect. We appreciate everybody joining. Have a great afternoon.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Thanks, Tony. It's been fun.