A draft of this post has been sitting in the queue since I started this blog. I wanted to save it until I had some readers. And today is definitely the day. I couldn't be more excited to share.
Barbara Apple Sullivan is one of my marketing heroes. She founded her own agency Sullivan in 1990. She was an early Mad Woman let alone a woman-owned business on Madison Avenue. Amazing.
Barbara specializes in business-to-business branding. She helped teach me how to create simple, meaningful messaging and product architectures. I often use messaging platforms that we created together as "templates" to each other marketers. Over the past 20 years, she has gathered and mentored a posse of men and women who believe creativity, inspiration and business can go together, like Nicole Ferry and Diana Bach. Nicole has a fantastic quote on their site:
But what I love most about Barbara is her fearless support of other women--even as I'm sure she fought not to be identified by her gender alone. How many stories have you heard about senior women making it harder for others? Not Barbara. When Virginia Rommety was named the new CEO of IBM, Barbara guest-posted on Forbes. I really remember that day. Because of Rommety's announcement, there were articles circulating on what's "wrong" with women that they aren't sitting in more top positions and worse, if the "feminism" of supporting other women publicly would hurt your career. I had just read one of those articles, when I got the Tweet about Barbara's thoughtful, quick and public support of women leaders on Forbes. Barbara supported strong women leaders publicly and outlined lessons we can all learn about breaking the rules. She talked about success and failures in the spirit of learning, not criticism. She helped refocus the online dialog to the positive, and she put herself out there to do it. I love that. I learned from that.
Follow @BAppleSullivan. You can read Barbara's full Forbes post here.
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