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Catherine Kaputa
My Story
To be successful as a corporate executive in the world of a Fortune 500 company requires careful, calculating branding; both to enter onto the playing field and to stay in the game. Also required is a substantial dose of that great universal mystery that we call luck.
I spent fifteen wonderful-difficult years as a SVP for major Wall Street icons, responsible for branding them and their products. If the old or "classic" way of looking at branding had a dominant theme or cliché example of how branding works, it would be that of the young ambitious executive on the way up, and the cliché location for the story would be New York City, and the cliché company would be on Madison Avenue or Wall Street and the cliché person would be me. I'm Catherine Kaputa and I lived that cliché.
I grew up in the 1950's and 60's like seventy seven million other Americans. If I was any more typical I'd start to become untypical, meaning I was so typical as to be almost unusual, so I think most of you can relate: because you're either part of the baby boom brand yourself or have been unduly influenced or annoyed, as this dominant brand makes its way through the last half of the 20th century and first half of the 21st.
I grew up in Miami, Florida. We rode our bikes to school and everywhere else without supervision, played marbles and hopscotch at recess and saw the future in terms of unrelenting rapid progress. Frank Sinatra sang the theme song and it came from Miami Beach too. "High hopes. We've got high hopes; high apple pie in the sky hopes."
I had high hopes too. Who can resist the brand of an era?
The culture was still branding limited roles for women, and I admit I still didn't have the courage or creativity to face the future without a role model, and the one that intrigued me was Brenda Starr, reporter; a comic strip. She was glamorous, powerful, respected, and got to travel all over. Journalism. That's the brand for me. When the college recruiters came to town, I went with a purpose. I'm going to be a journalist. Who's got a great program that will set me up to live my dream?
Northwestern University had the Medill School of Journalism, an impressive brand.
College was the usual barrage of questions and choices with the added insecurity of the times (1960's), when suddenly everything was up in the air. Some people thrive in that dynamic; I wasn't one of them. I was confused. Journalism was O.K. but I needed more than O.K. Social worker seemed to have a nice ring, but after a summer job at a notorious Chicago housing project, that ring became a siren I wanted no part of. Archeology? Another summer found me in Winchester England digging in a Roman burial ground with a small brush. I was still floundering, when serendipity knocked in the form of a Japanese American dorm mate who was high on Eastern philosophy and art. I got hooked on the art part, and for the next eight years, Japanese art became my life and brand.
I was in deep, Master's degree from University of Washington, Seattle Art Museum, books published, Smithsonian fellow, University of Tokyo. I entered the Ph.D. program at Harvard because Harvard was right for my brand. Just as I was organizing my dissertation for my Ph.D. my general uneasiness morphed into an epiphany of understanding. This is not me. This is not my brand. I want out! Dr. Kaputa was not going to happen. I took two aspirins and cried all morning.
I hope most of you will be sympathetic to my situation, because dealing with a dead end like this can be devastating, and I was devastated. Eight years is a long time to "waste" when you're thirty or when you're 110 for that matter. But life is not the destination. Life is the journey, and on my journey it was time to rebrand.
One doesn't need a connection to New York City to feel its influence but I did have a connection, and that made its gravity a force I could not resist. Heart and head were both pulling me. I still wasn't sure what I would do but I knew where I would do it. The capital of the world.
"You can't start off in New York, you need to play Peoria first." No you don't. I didn't.
So I sold my VW bug, crashed at Aunt Sophie's in the Bronx, and was determined to find my glamorous high paying job in communications. The vagueness of communications was the proper mind set since it gave me good flexibility to brand myself to an opportunity and I needed flexibility. My previous brand was a handicap.
"Why does an Asian art scholar want to be in advertising?" was the refrain. But persistence does pay and one firm interpreted my background as "creative" and my foot was in the door.
Trout & Ries was a small ad agency then, and was generally viewed as mediocre at the time. I was pretty mediocre too in a dual role of account executive and copy writer. I found my strengths were on the business side more that the creative side. Creative was the right brand to land the job but experience was pushing me to rebrand. Jack Trout and Al Ries by the way rebranded after I left. They changed their position from an ad agency to "marketing strategists", found their brand, and took off. My personal strategy was to move on to a larger, well known agency to gain experience on a high profile brand. I was already branded as a "small agency" person from my four years at Trout & Ries. The recruiters were of one stripe.
"You don't have big agency experience."
When others can't help, do it yourself! In this case, network, talk to people, find old friends, find new friends. It works and it worked, plus I got lucky. (Strange phenomena: the harder you work the more luck you have.) I landed a job at Wells Rich Greene managing the I Love NY account.
Mary Wells Lawrence had already achieved legendary status by the time I arrived there in 1982. She was a woman of style and was as clever with her personal brand as with her extremely successful campaigns. Braniff's colorful planes, Alka Seltzer's Plop Plop Fizz Fizz, Benson & Hedges 100's. She is a Francophile and the place was run like the French Court, with all the intrigue and back-stabbing that implies.
The "I Love NY" account was a wonderful piece of business to work on. The TV commercials featuring Broadway musicals and celebrities received numerous creative awards and was a flagship creative account for the agency. Part of my job was to work with the Broadway Theater League to secure the Broadway talent, and to enlist other celebrity talent to appear in the commercials.
Celebrities don't exist without branding and they're good at it, but their public brands are not always real. One of the most impressive stars who came to pitch N.Y. was Mr. High Hopes himself, Old Blue Eyes, lived up to his brand.
After four years at the ad agency, I began to have age fears and I was only in my mid-thirties! Ad agencies are notorious for wanting young people. So I decided to move my brand to the corporate side as an ad director. It seemed natural to me but not to the industry. The recruiters were no help. They only see your past, not your future.
So I was on my own - networking. The lesson in networking is pursue all leads no matter how obscure: friend of a friend of a friend of a friend and don't stop there. Salespeople will tell you it's a numbers game and they're right. Through some remote contact I got a Wall Street interview and voila! landed my dream job, Director of Advertising at Shearson Lehman Brothers, then part of American Express. I wound up staying for fifteen years. My title changed to SVP and my responsibilities grew, but the firm's name changed again and again, ending up as Citi Smith Barney when I left. You can imagine the branding challenges with all the identity change and the complex nature of Wall Street businesses.
When I left in 2002, I set up my own company, SelfBrand, as a business coach and speaker on branding, particularly how individuals can apply the principles and tactics from the commercial world of brands to maximize their personal performance and maximize their value to the companies they work for.
We have many influences that affect our brand. Many can be analyzed and explained; many cannot. The nature of cause and effect is certain only in Pure Science. Branding is an art; or a science like a social science is, where the "science" part of the name is based on the fantasy that human behavior can be quantified like chemistry can. In reality, branding's cause and effect relationship can never be certain. Be grateful for all your experiences. It's your input that makes them help or hurt.
I learned through fortune and misfortune to take control of my branding, and to try to understand branding influences in the larger world. Did I make mistakes? Of course, lots of them. The only people without mistakes are people who never did anything, and that's a mistake too, Was I successful? Well, I did what I wanted to do and I didn't get hurt, miserable, or poverty stricken in the process. Having desires or goals and then working to accomplish them is as close as we get to the idea of success, and it's available to everybody.
"High hopes. We've got high hopes. High apple pie in the sky hopes."
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