We were lucky to catch up with Carla Dodds recently and have shared our conversation below.
Carla, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
When I decided to create my own consulting practice out a prospective client’s requirement to have only engage with formal entities vs. independent consultants in Brazil. I had only one week to create my brand, so it was not the ideal scenario. Given my expertise in branding, I knew that my consulting brand had to stay true to purpose and reflect a mission, but due to my prospective client’s timelines, I didn’t have time to do a full traditional deep dive of market study, deep analysis, benchmarking, testing, and naming validation. So I found myself connecting to my own personal purpose, passion, and mission.
My purpose has always been to help others (organizations and persons) reach the highest potential in the area they are seeking to win in. My passion is to create, build, and solve with a focus on the greater good. In turn, my mission is to catalyze growth through purposeful innovation. In this particular case, since my business was originally created to be my “individual” consulting, I also wanted it to be somehow unique to me. Therefore, I took in two key data points in determining the name:
1) At the time I was also transitioning into a “new” chapter of my life moving from full-time corporate to a consulting practice. 2) Despite the transitions, and along with “purpose” I have always been an advocate for staying “true to your roots.” My roots are Hispanic and my business was formed in Brazil. Although both countries have different cultures and languages, as any marketer knows to do, I sought out the common denominator or intersection which brought me to “Latin roots.” Portuguese and Spanish are from the Latin languages and both countries are part of Latin America.
I used the first data point combined with my purpose, passion, and mission to synthesize and simplify the “what”: New Markets. Essentially this is where I focus in my consulting and advisory services to catalyze growth for organizations. Then I incorporated the second data point of Latin roots to “New Markets” to come up with “Novo”=New in Latin and “Mercatus”= Markets in Latin. From a visual branding identity I decided to bring the two together. Looking back I really would have preferred to have more time especially to test in market with at least my network. I only say this because it seems I find myself having to explain what NovoMercatus stands for most of the time. I also did not have much time to dedicate in marketing the naming as a brand and to fully build the storytelling around it. Nonetheless, as the founder I feel connected to the brand identity and when working with clients in Latin America or who speak Spanish or Portuguese, no explanation is needed. That gives me some validation in the naming to make up for the lack of research on the front end.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am a Global customer-centric and business growth marketing executive with 20+ years of experience. Leading business and cultural transformations, turnarounds, market-entry, and integrated marketing strategies. Skilled in aligning mission-focused objectives with commercial media tactics, maximizing impact for Fortune 500 companies and start-ups across retail, CPG, financial services, health & wellness, and entertainment sectors. Excel in aligning brand initiatives with social impact to foster engagement and accelerate growth across diverse cultures. deeply committed to making a meaningful, lasting impact on communities and improving lives through strategic, purpose-led marketing. Bilingual in English and Spanish and fully fluent in Portuguese.
CORE COMPETENCIES
• Global Multicultural Marketing
• Customer-Centric Strategies
• Strategic vision
• Cultural Sensitivity
• Data Insights & Analytics
• Customer Experience
• Revenue & ROI Growth
• Brand Positioning
• Omnichannel & E-commerce
• Partnership & Alliances
• Agency management
• Change Leadership
• Product Development
• Financial Acumen
• Crisis management
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I originally started my business in Brazil as a personal need to pivot from corporate to have personal flexibility in raising my son. The demands of clients led me to expand and require a partner to bring in new skillsets and industry knowledge I didn’t have to expand into different areas such as supply chain and imports/exports. As my personal, and family needs as a working mother changed, I also had to change my approach and engagement with clients in order to provide for my family’s needs such as time and location. Having a business partner also allowed me to have this flexibility as I went in and out of corporate based on the requirements of clients who could not hire me as a consultant or advisor, but rather needed me to come in as an “in-house” employee. This also gave my business partner and me the ability to bring others in while I was on corporate assignment, which ultimately evolved our business model. Rather than being confined to consulting we were resilient in balancing consulting with corporate assignments for more of a hybrid approach that has provided us and our teams the ability to gain more experience in-house that benefited our consulting clients in the long run. Over the past 5 years, this has led us to develop a more “advisory” approach that also gives other prospect clients such as investment groups (private equity and/or venture capital) to gain from our expertise through ad-hoc calls for advice on investment scenarios versus full consulting engagements that require months at a time. We fortunately have evolved with the market conditions and needs. Our flexibility and resilience has in turn allowed us to deliver out of the box, unique solutions for our clients based on their needs for growth. Ultimately we were providing remote and interim services before they were even a coined term.
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