mStoner Welcomes Deb Maue to Our Team

Hiring at mStoner is somewhat like hiring for an interdisciplinary academic department. At one of the Ivies. Because we need to be at the top of our game, we look for people who are immersed in a particular discipline but have absorbed the methodologies and lessons from other fields so deeply that they’re second nature.

Today, this is particularly important. We live in a world where everything is connected to everything else, where the old paradigms are being questioned, redefined, or upended by new, emerging channels and empowered audiences.

And it’s even more complicated in our business because we work exclusively with clients in education. mStoner team members need to understand the culture and environment of schools, colleges, and universities, which function a lot differently from other kinds of enterprises. Without that knowledge, the advice and solutions we offer won’t be grounded in any kind of cultural or budgetary environment.

These are all among the reasons why we’re so delighted to announce that Deb Maue is joining our team as senior strategist.

Deb brings to mStoner deep experience in brand strategy and management — starting at Unilever, where she worked on brands like Suave and Axe. [That’s only part of the story, since Deb became captivated by branding and marketing as an undergraduate and earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern.]

Deb also learned firsthand what it’s like to develop an education brand: She worked at DePaul for seven years, where she played a critical role in shaping and managing the brand of one of higher ed’s leaders.

Of course, you can’t work at mStoner unless you’re thoroughly comfortable online. So it’s telling that I first met Deb on Twitter, well before I met her face-to-face — and before she left DePaul to join TRU, where she led the higher ed practice. She’s deeply immersed in the web and social media, and understands the essential role that these key channels play in contemporary marketing communications for education.

So today, we welcome Deb to our team, where she’ll be sharing her expertise with some of our existing clients who need assistance in discovering and perhaps (re)defining their online brands and taking on responsibility for some of the brand-related work in our portfolio. She’ll also help us shape other areas of our practice. I’m personally thrilled to have Deb join us.