Understanding clients her key to shaping message

HER OWN LANE: HCC Marketing partner Kerry Chaffer joined the ownership team at the firm in 1992. She called the experience an “eye opener.” / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
HER OWN LANE: HCC Marketing partner Kerry Chaffer joined the ownership team at the firm in 1992. She called the experience an “eye opener.” / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Ten years into her career at HCC Marketing in Barrington, Kerry Chaffer learned from a confidant that the “chemistry” she engendered in making clients comfortable was not necessarily her biggest asset.
“I think I hid the smarts behind the personality and I didn’t have to do that,” she told Providence Business News in an interview about her role as partner at HCC. “I was smart and that’s what I brought to the table. It took a while to give myself permission to [promote] that.”
Chaffer, a partner at the marketing communications company, declined to name the person who advised her, noting it was somebody she respected.
“He said it to be helpful,” she said. “He was saying: ‘I recognize the strengths you have building chemistry, but you’re also really smart and you’ve got to play that card more.’ It’s made a difference in everything. It’s empowering. I took myself more seriously, and subsequently, so did everybody else.”
Chaffer’s first job after getting her degree in journalism in 1975 at the University of Rhode Island was in the public affairs office at Bryant University, when it was still known as Bryant College. After that, she worked for the United Way’s communications division until she joined Duffy & Shanley in 1979. The journalism degree was “great preparation” for marketing because it requires distilling a subject to its most salient points and telling a story, she said.
After a stint with Pagano, Schenck and Kay, she moved on, in 1989, to Mariani, Hurley and Chandler, which would later become HCC.
An avid tennis player who lives with her husband, Frederick Massie, in Warren, Chaffer, 61, says she never planned on becoming partner, which happened in 1992, and having her name added, two years later, to the company name at the time, Hurley, Chandler and Chaffer. (In 2010, the name was changed to HCC Marketing.) “Once I became partner, it really was an eye-opener, having to learn how to run a business,” she recalled. “Up until that time, I had to only worry about helping a person with their business.”
Now, she also handles personnel and company finances, and likes it, though there are always “heavy decisions to be made.”
As a leader in the office, Chaffer takes issues brought to her “personally” and tries to motivate her colleagues, she says.
“When you work at an agency, it should be fun,” she added. “There’s a high level of energy here and that’s important to me. It’s important to run this business well and treat clients well. I’m not really the kind of person that has ‘leader’ on their sweatshirt. I think I do that in actions.”
Leveraging the agency’s experience with financial services and nonprofits has allowed HCC to grow from $1.38 million to $3.3 million over the past three years, she said.
Some of HCC’s major clients include the Cooperative Bank of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Newtown Savings Bank in Connecticut and Meredith Village in New Hampshire, she said.
Marketing community banks is an area in which HCC has developed strong expertise, Chaffer said.
“We’re great at this: we really understand the category and … their needs, [taking] a lot of time to understand their market and competition,” she said. “It’s a business that’s highly regulated. There’s a creative side, but we understand what you can’t say and can’t do, and to that end I think we’re better than most.”
HCC also values the way local banks are invested in their communities, she said.
“A community bank really wraps its arms around the community and the responsibility they feel to their community is significant,” Chaffer said. “We really believe what they believe in: they’re really about not only the needs of customers but community support.” Some of HCC’s successes include a first-ever member communication program for the Warren-based Touisset Point Community Club and four years of statewide multimedia public-awareness campaigns for the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence from 2000 to 2004.
“What we did well was resonate on a message for people who were not necessarily victims of domestic violence but knew somebody who was,” Chaffer said. “We did a very good job of breaking that message down, [giving] a perspective on the impact on children and co-workers.”
Wrapping promotion around Domestic Violence Awareness Month brought a lot of attention to the organization, and they capitalized on HCC Marketing with their own public relations effort, she said.
At Touisset Point, where she is president and has lived for 23 years, Chaffer helped the organization refine its Web presence and introduced a brochure and membership drive.
The firm’s success, Chaffer said, comes from looking at a client’s business or organization from a consumer or user point of view.
“We have to put ourselves in the heads of who they’re selling to, they expect that from us,” she said. “Objectivity: that’s a responsibility. The most exciting thing for us is when a client says, ‘This campaign was a great success.’ Our concern is: Did it work?”
Chaffer, who is a twin, has two step-daughters, aged 32 and 30. Being a good role model for them is important to her, she adds.
“At 32 and 30, it’s hard to know where their careers will take them, but I think they see that it is wide open and that they are capable of great things,” she said. •

No posts to display