BRANDING PROFESSIONAL: managing expectations and solutions-driven. All backed by 20+ years in web, creative, and the marketing field.
Understanding your user’s expectations and anticipating their needs is what successful brand experiences are all about. However, having them feel like family starts with listening.
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Greg is an autodidact who loves to learn and has a drive guided by his passions and interests, all ruled by uncompromising integrity. His career reflects his dedication to refining and building brands and businesses.
Over two decades of experience working in the web and creative fields, with the last decade and a half as a marketing director. Four years dedicated to UX research, and the last half-decade investing in and building businesses, brands, and communities.
“I do not do what you do, but I do put in the time to understand what you do, how you do it, and what you bring to the table to differentiate yourself from the competition—which is your brand.”
You cannot effectively communicate a brand if you do not understand what the brand stands for, because branding is not simply graphic design.
My process starts with understanding what the brand stands for because that gives a company its direction and what users will come to love and expect from the brand.
Who You Are
Using Apple as an example, the brand is known for developing software and hardware that are visually appealing but simple and easy to use.
Once I know what the brand is about, I can communicate and create experiences in both the physical and digital worlds to convey that message.
Communicating Who You Are
Apple’s stores and most successful advertisements consist of a simple white background and a silhouette with minimal text, which carries over what the brand is about, which is simplicity, as opposed to tech specs and jargon.
The brand and the marketing strategy must be integrated into the user experience because that is what the user expects from the brand.
Your Brand Experience
Almost a decade later, the hardware design is simple, but the iOS and iPhone’s user interface has remained consistent with their brand—intuitive and easy to learn and use. Tech specs and jargon mean nothing if the user does not experience it.
Worked towards avoiding “coming up with solutions to a problem that does not exist.” Without it, it is all too common to see cookie-cutter solutions that are aesthetically driven rather than solutions addressing real issues, users, customers, and challenges that align with your brand.
“The most significant limitation to most SMBs is the small business owner/management mindset of trying to prove their worth at the cost of the objective.”
Putting ego aside and utilizing the resources and knowledge/experience of others unleashes the potential of the team and business.
20+ Years of Experience
SMB
Brand Strategist
Collaborating with Founders and Co-founders
Digital Marketing Specialist
Marketing Director
Product Marketing
User Experience Design/Research
ENTERPRISE
Brand Strategist
Product Marketing
User Experience Design/Research
Born and raised in Denver, Colorado (4th generation)
10 years in the SF Bay Area: San Jose and Hayward, CA
14 years in Los Angeles: Newport Beach, Orange County, CA
Aerospace
Especially: Military, SpaceX, Hermeus, ULA (Colorado-based and .06 miles away from my family home), and Joby. Greg’s uncle Albert works for JPL and his late cousin Lance was at Lockheed Martin.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Architecture
Automotive/Motorsports
Biking
Boating
Firearms
Food
Geopolitics
Stock Market
Entrepreneur: Not going out of business was a key criterion, and all my recent endeavors aided others in not going out of business by emphasizing each action and dollar spent has a consequence (no cookie-cutter solutions).
Graphic Design: packaging, print ads, iconography/visual identity, basic infographics, and events.
Web Development: HTML, CSS, to PHP/SQL (PHPBB, vbulletin, to eCommerce platforms), via Wordpad to WYSIWYG (Dreamweaver) and WordPress.
Photography: product photography and post (photoshop/lightroom).
Digital Marketing: SEO, SEM, FB/IG ads, email, and social media: IG and Facebook.
Model Making to Carpentry: spent a summer fabricating Japanese shoji screens to industrial design courses in model making and furniture design.
Food/BOH: Italian, Mexican, and Southern, and specialization of Japanese cuisine.
Mechanic: A focus on Japanese automotive imports from tuning, diagnostics, and specialized knowledge in engine and suspension tuning to safety equipment and brakes.
Greg worked in several industries, but in the last decade-and-a-half, the focus was on building these leading companies/brands, many of them #1 in their respective segment.
“As a brand specialist, it requires working side by side with the founders and key stakeholders to understand (listen), envision (iterate), and create (implement) these industry-leading brands, with a lot of good times in between.”
Anybody can come up with ideas, but you have to come up with ideas that you can implement with the resources you have.
As a restaurateur, the pandemic (2020+) had created some new challenges.
303 Night303 Night Market was an event planned for Colorado. Taniguchi Ramen was a pop-up that started in August 2019 but shut down in February 2020 due to the pandemic. Oishii Desu is one of the largest, if not the largest, online resources (16-21k to 33-38k unique/visitors per month ) for Japanese food and culture. Stew Shack is a new venture in 2021 where Greg had partnered with this 8-year-old B2B product. His role is to take it beyond one of the items on the menu of a multi-million dollar international seafood chain based in Los Angeles.
Taniguchi Ramen pop-up: Hakata style tonkotsu ramen. Most ramen in the U.S. will be from “instant ramen stock,” but this pork broth was made from scratch, all 3 components of the stock.
Outside of coastal cities with little to no Japanese or Japanese American community, food distributors are offering instant ramen kits for the masses. Although, for my home state, I produced 90% of my components from scratch in the spirit of legit Japanese ramen.
Even pho nowadays is made from instant powder.
Contribution to the Westword article “Why is My Ramen So Milky?” about Japanese ramen by Mark Antonation.
Gyokai tonkotsu tsukemen
Race Technologies, LLC: official partner to Brembo for logistics and market management of the Brembo Sport/Performance, and Racing programs.
Brembo, S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of automotive brake systems, especially for high-performance cars (Ferrari, Lamborghini, Lexus, to Cadillac) and motorcycles (Aprilia to Triumph) based in Bergamo, near Milan.
My role: I worked with the CEO/founder throughout the entire UXR (User Experience Research) process from the research to concept/sketching, site maps, task flows, lo/hi-fidelity wireframes, to measurement.
“The comments section via social media is not a mandatory field, and it should be a reminder to myself and others to stay humble.”
Being research/data-driven, you can never know enough.
At RT, our objective was to “be the solution,” which meant RT’s role was to make the process of purchasing and servicing Brembo products as quick, simple, and enjoyable an experience as possible.
A Brembo 6-piston CNC’d nickel-plated caliper (I also shot this product).
Developing the “dealer locator” feature always takes me back to when I bought my Cannondale bike. On the Cannondale website, they have their bikes segmented into “mountain,” “electric,” “road bike,” “urban,” and “women,” yet they have their dealers lumped all together. That made it hard to locate what I was looking for since their dealers do not carry the entire product line, and many of them specialize in one type of bike more than another.
That same diversity of products and dealers was a lot like the Brembo Performance market, which was identified through user and product segmentation research (we had a staff with a minimum of 8 years’ experience). The data we gathered contributed to the development of the locate-a-dealer functionality, which allowed the user to find a shop that specialized in having their Porsche set up for a track day or to find a tire and wheel shop for a routine pad/fluid change.
This may look simple, but it is also what makes it so effective because it depicts the Brembo aftermarket product segments’ intended usage.
A marketing objective was to communicate Brembo’s capabilities, which was to juxtapose Brembo’s massive involvement in not only racing but also as an OEM supplier compared to the smaller and limited capabilities of other products in the market. To achieve this, one tactic was to have every “year, make, and model” search deliver a small brief on the product results page about Brembo specific to the “make” search, such as with Audi:
“Audi/Quattro GMBH and Brembo have had a long relationship, from supplying the original Audi R8C Le Mans Prototype all the way to the current R18 e-tron quattro. Brembo also supplies the Audi R8 LMS Ultra GT program as well. Brembo can be found on several high-performance OE Audi platforms like the Audi R8.”
User-specific product descriptions: Content was designed to match the level of experience and knowledge of the user, so for the application lists, we designed the extent of information/terms to cater to dealers. Whereas general product information was aimed at users not as familiar with the products and product lines, so we focused on the benefits over citing extensive product specs like a “355mm disc diameter, 32mm disc width, 54mm annulus, 16mm air gap, and a 48 vane curved vane design.” That was replaced with “upgrade and replace your heavy 1-piece rotor with a lightweight 2-piece disc system: comprised of an aluminum bell and outer iron disc…”
None of this would have been possible if it weren’t for the collaboration of several people inside and outside of RT.
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One of my pics from Cicalvia in DTLA (below)