franklin Parrish

brand, marketing, and creative engineer

WELCOME

Thank you for stopping by!
If you're looking for an innovative, courageous, collaborative leader with the skills and the experience to integrate brand, marketing, and creative strategies into logical, market-moving campaigns, you're in the right place.

what makes me tick

my interests and competencies

brand creator + steward

I position brands to drive business growth with a focus on key competencies and value propositions, discovering new brand territories, and conquering them. I maximize the synergies between marketing, advertising, and strategic communications to amplify your message.

marketing + MEDIA strategist

I develop marketing and media strategies that answer three key questions:
What do we want the market to believe about us?
Who are the people who will believe?
How can we reach them?

creative director

I lead the creative expression that brings brand and marketing efforts to life, mindful that creative isn't the end of the strategic process, it's the beginning of the brand's conversation with the prospect.

data nerd

I place a very high value on the insights that I can glean from the audience and believe you can't have too much research or analytical data.

educator

Having taught for most of my career, I have a love for the exchange of ideas and the new approaches that can arise from it. Teaching my students helps keep me current on marketing tactics and popular culture at large.

team builder

I recruit, mentor, shield, optimize, and empower teams so that they bring their best every day. I celebrate diversity of thought and experience—it always makes for a better execution.

sharing my voice

recent podcasts and articles

Upper funnel personalization: Kaiser Permanente's path to positive recall

An article explaining my approach to delivering personalized marketing experiences on a mass scale using psychographic archetypes.

Read Now

How to use storytelling for strategic planning

Sharing with the ClickZ marketing community how a story framework can be used to develop a strategic framework that aligns the activities of multiple actors.

Listen Now

Why Gardeners Make the Best Marketers

A fun LinkedIn piece that compares two of my loves, gardening and marketing, and how they’re very related in how one approaches them.

Read Now

projects i'm proud of

case studies

Kaiser Permanente medicare marketing

How do you make a product like Medicare sexy? Through psychographics! Focusing on the Jungian benefits provided by Kaiser Permanente's integrated care model gave the Mid-Atlantic region a key competitive advantage—and unprecedented membership growth.

Georgetown university content strategy Course Development

Rather than create a course based on tactics, I built a course that focused on the key strategic pillars of any content-led campaign: audience insights, brand attributes, value proposition development, and storytelling. Won the 2020 Tropaia Award for my efforts.

Capital one Home loans rebrand and campaign

Led the development of new positioning for the Capital One Home Loans brand, focusing on the market's need for clarity, trust, and certainty in a monumental purchase. Developed a new campaign to support the refresh that out-performed the control 7:1 in test markets.

more case studies

Thoughts from those who know me

references and kudos

"Franklin is the consummate marketing leader.
As an agency partner for the last 4 years, I am amazed by Franklin’s  passion and commitment to building a brand and delving as deep as necessary into research and analytics in advance of each product launch to ensure the highest consumer engagement and market share growth. It is not uncommon for Franklin to call and say, “What if we looked at it this way?” The end result: nothing less than perfect. His teams thrive under his leadership and he is a joy to work with. Franklin has allowed me to do the best work I’ve ever done for a client in my 30-year career."
— Sharon Nevins, VP, Advertising,
Baltimore Sun Media Group

“As a creative professional and leader, Franklin combines a keen aesthetic sense with a real and sincere passion for branding. As Franklin’s colleague at Capital One, I witnessed him coming into an area of tremendous opportunity, and doing just exactly what you’d want your Creative Director to do in order to move the brand forward. He is a great listener, a wonderful presenter, an effective problem solver, and a thoughtful marketer.”
— John Taylor, Senior Creative Director,
West Cary Group

“Working with Franklin guarantees you many great things: Thoughtful and intelligent design recommendations. Innovative thinking aimed at generating better results. Deep understanding of the strategies that drive a project. Attention to details, budgets and time frames. Knowledge of competitor marketing. Energetic and persuasive presentations.But most importantly, plenty of laughs. Franklin’s talents and insights, combined with his sense of humor,brings a sense of ease to everything he touches. He’s a pleasure to work with. A true professional  major asset to any organization.”
— Bill Kopco, Senior Director, Brand Activation,  Freedom Mortgage