“I had the pleasure of working with Susie in my role as Founder/Chairman of Viscent LLC. As a key member of our management team, Susie is a remarkable marketing communications and business development professional. Her mastery of branding expertise, new media, and solid comprehension of business processes brought our company to life and turned our concept into a viable organization. She is an exceptional talent. I’d enthusiastically recommend Susie to anyone seeking marketing advancements at the highest level.”

Dr. Kevin Ellis
Chief Medical Officer
Cigna Medical Group

Objective:  Building a Business

Founded on the four cornerstones of Nutrition, Fitness, Spirit, and Knowledge, Viscent: The Art of Wellness’ main mission was to provide their members with tools needed to pursue optimal personal wellness in body and spirit.

The Challenge

A unique nutrition-based wellness company, Viscent was a company where their customers would benefit from having a physician and medical staff on call to assist them in their pursuit of optimal wellness. The founders were a well-seasoned group of veterans with demonstrated success as practitioners and/or experienced in prior ventures within the healthcare industry.

Greg Nelson, one of the founders of Viscent, had the idea to support partner Jazzercise, a $93 million-dollar fitness business with over 8,300 franchises worldwide in 32 countries, by developing a top of the line of dietary supplements and nutritional products and services for their loyal, health conscious and predominantly female following. The challenge with this start-up was the ability to effectively relate, educate, and engage with their target audience. 

Outsource the Build

I have known Greg Nelson for several years. Upon his return to the San Diego area, Greg asked for a meeting to share some of my recent work for potential employment recommendations. During our meeting, he shared his vision for a new company and encouraged me to go out on my own, naming himself as my first client. I was SO honored to have his full confidence and support. So I did some research, then met with Chief Medical Officer Dr. Kevin Ellis and ended up pitching the account – my first client partnership was born.

Ground Work: Alliances and Strategic Positioning

The successes of any business first starting out depends greatly on its approach to marketing, and with Viscent, my Q2Mark team and I were working from the ground floor. We had four months to do in-depth research, develop and launch a business, AND create products and tools necessary to secure sales for our first Jazzercise event with hundreds of Jazzercise instructors and students. 

To start, I worked with Jazzercise’s marketing team to better understand their main target audience — their most loyal instructors and enthusiastic fans. With Jazzercise on board, I then dug into identifying the opportunities and challenges that potentially faced the company while also investigating markets to determine profitability ratios. This was critical for strategic positioning, defining the category that our product and services existed within and, most importantly, mapping our key product benefits and core value propositions.

Brand Development  

When you’re a new player, branding is everything – name, logo, and even your URL need to stand out and really “mean something.” I started by developing the company name, logo, and corporate identity, focusing on creating a brand that would be loved by Jazzercise and their audience.  

The name Viscent was divided from two root words meaning knowledge and light – exactly what the Viscent team wanted to bring to wellness and their clients. From there, I worked with my designer to develop the icon highlighting the “V” to make it very approachable, charismatic and geared toward our target audience – women. We wanted to embody Viscent’s cornerstones of nutrition, fitness, spirit, and knowledge with color, so a golden hue was our answer, bringing a spa-like feel to the brand.

With our branding than in place, I continued to create the rest of Viscent’s identity and marketing platforms – everything from full product development for 16 skews to an e-commerce site, business collateral to tradeshow booth graphics and promotions, public relations to print media, personal brand development to alliance program, email marketing to customer loyalty programs, broadcast media and corporate communications. You name, it we made it happen!

Reliability: Resident Chief Medical Officer

Dr. Kevin Ellis was one of Viscent’s founders, Chairman, Chief Medical Officer and spokesperson for Viscent, interacting with our key target audience daily. For Viscent to be successful, Dr. Ellis needed a personal brand. I worked to make him approachable, loveable, relatable, and, of course, knowledgeable – the Dr. Oz of Viscent.

His photography, videos and live stage appearances in front of thousands of potential customers were key, so my focus was to coach him and position him to have the right delivery, essentially making him the Viscent authority figure.

E-commerce

E-commerce is all about the viewer’s experience of generating a sale while developing a relationship with the brand, so my next program plan was to design a lucrative retail channel in an engaging environment. I worked with my team to design and execute the whole e-commerce platform from top to bottom – working out all aspects to develop the strategy and defining metrics for building business through a direct marketing program.