Kim Donlan

I am a brand strategist, messaging, and digital experience expert who leads brands on the precise path to the #1 position. My book, Your Messaging Sucks – Become the Brand Your Customers Love, is a groundbreaking approach to customer-centric messaging and positioning. It is written for agencies and marketers who want to help their brands or their clients grow by looking at the company from the only view that matters — the customers.

I cut my teeth leading the first SaaS e-commerce technology start-up firm, Demandware (acquired by Salesforce), the first SaaS e-commerce order management technology, OrderMotion (acquired by NetSuite), and dynamic project collaboration technology, Prolify, winning a market leadership position for each firm while it was under my reign. I was also the brand strategist for two Boston agencies working on major initiatives for Harvard University’s Alumni Services, Nickelodeon, Esquire, Beyonce, Scholastic, Macmillan, Pearson, and many VC-backed start-ups that disrupted industries. I have led brand transformation and developed transformative customer experiences, creating game-changing applications, new technologies, platforms, services, products, websites, and campaigns that have fundamentally saved many businesses.

The Real World
In addition to teaching, I continue to serve as a consulting CMO for high-tech firms in disruptive spaces. I focus on AI-enabled secure communication, data workflow, and document sharing in highly regulated industries. Much of my engagements focused on developing a completely new brand strategy, new products, and all the change that accompanies major shifts.

The Classroom
I believe in bringing the real world into the classroom. Students learn better by applying the lessons they learn to a real problem. It is easy to be on the outside and proclaim what you think a brand should do, be, or become. It is quite another story if you need to drive brand growth from within. Changing minds, telling a new story, and getting people to believe in it enough to pay for it, is not for the faint of heart.

Project Based Learning
I have built branding, digital marketing, new product development, and customer experience courses. In addition to action-based graduate and experiential-learning undergraduate courses in Branding, I lead the MiM Digital Marketing course, which involves 120 students across 20 teams and 16 companies from around the world. Before BU, I spent eight years refining action learning at Bentley University in undergraduate and graduate brand, management, and marketing courses.