My Story
I started at Carter Malone Group in 2016 as a public relations associate. One of my first clients was a nonprofit whose mission was straightforward: get people to eat more seafood for heart health. The logic was airtight. Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death. Seafood is one of the simplest dietary changes you can make to reduce your risk. If you can avoid a serious health outcome by simply changing what you eat, why wouldn't you?
That question sent me into the field. I started talking to people at health events, conducting informal interviews and focus groups, trying to understand what was actually getting in the way. What I found wasn’t a knowledge gap — most people already knew seafood was good for them. What I found were friction points: the small, situational barriers that made the easy choice feel harder than it should.
Once I could name the friction, I could design around it. We built targeted content, email segmentation, and messaging that walked different audience segments through their specific points of resistance — not the general case for seafood, but the particular reason this person hadn’t made the switch yet.
That experience permanently changed how I think about marketing. It’s not enough to know who your audience is. You have to understand what they’re standing in front of when they decide — and what’s making the next step harder than it needs to be.
That’s the lens I’ve carried through every role and every engagement since.