Suzanne Mizera
I received my Masters in Classics from Washington University and my Ph.D. from Princeton in 1984. After an intensive course for Ph.Ds in Business that summer at NYU, I joined Benton & Bowles by year’s end, thus beginning my professional career in what was then called advertising. By spring 1986, I joined Young & Rubicam, where I stayed for the next 30 years, 5 in New York and 25 in Geneva, Switzerland. Initially in planning and research, I evolved these disciplines into Young & Rubicam Business Consultants, a unique branding division within Y&R Europe. Clients have included Microsoft Business Dynamics (multiple projects), DuPont (multiple divisions), Medtronic, Caterpillar, Siminn (Iceland Telecom) and Areva as well as numerous UN/NGOs and non-profits, e.g., World Economic Forum. I developed courses in branding and marketing for Webster University in Geneva, where I taught for ten years. I won two WPP Atticus Awards, which are global recognition for papers in international marketing and brand management.
In the last three years, together with my partner, James Risch, we have created TorchFish Sàrl, a strategic branding, marketing and communications consultancy, grounded in proprietary approaches to brand- and business-building. Our clients continue to number large multinationals (Dentsply Sirona Endodontics) and UN/NGOs (IOE, International Organisation of Employers), while we have added work with SMEs and start ups. These include over 50 of some the most innovative start ups in Europe in incubators at the EU, EPFL and Geneva-based hubs. We continue to publish articles in marketing and branding journals, and to serve on the editorial boards of these journals.
While I have not formally worked one day of my professional career in Classics, I feel I never left the discipline. Classics gets into your soul, and maybe is your soul. Classics forms your life view and values in the individual, knowledge, progress and science (Plato to NATO). Classics fosters continuous learning and excellence (arete) and ensures you will adapt and change in its pursuit (polytropos). Classics points the way to a happy, fulfilled and super-cool life (megalopsychos). Writing, precision, thinking, going ever deeper, coming to the essence, the pure, the truth — you learn this is the natural course. (Was truth there all along?) Words, ah words, who can resist them? Their networks of modern expansion, their core IE roots? DNA before DNA. The sheer rigours alone of mastering Greek and Latin reveal you can probably master anything if you try hard enough (pathei mathos, gnothi seauton.)
Brand in particular is my passion, but what is a brand if it is not myth itself? A key aspect of brand is personality, which we define as one of 12 archetypes, from Sage to Jester to Warrior to Earth Mother, all creations of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. Among the first Western brands I cite are the warriors’ individually-defining shields in the Iliad. The effect of branding I have always described in philosophical terms that I borrowed (heavily) from the classically-trained Walter Pater. As Pater talks of the effects of art, I suggest that so too, brands should "rouse, startle and shape new thinking, attitudes and behaviors; ignite organizations with the power of their ethos and courage; stir audiences to sharper, more eager engagement because of their convictions; help shape the communities and cultures they operate in and make a statement about the human potential they impact.” Classics forever primes you to seek out and follow the beautiful.
Occasionally you’re asked, What are the books that have most affected your life, and try as I might to find something modern, I return to the canon: Homer, Hesiod, the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle, the tragedians, Herodotus and Thucydides; Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. I remember each course, each professor, each class. Soaring. Thrilling.
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