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Staff post about: Brett Wilson Become an Author

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Armed with both a Bachelor of Engineering and an MBA, Wilson has taken his fair share of educational courses, but the one he found the most valuable was one called "Consumer and Buyer Behaviour". "It helped me understand things like product differentiation," says Wilson, "how to make marketing memorable; advertising; the impact of brand logo and positioning, and post-purchase dissonance." To this day, one of Wilson's most reputable skills is marketing, something he gets, and wants others to get too. "I believe that a class like that should be taught within every discipline at every university," he says. "It doesn't matter if you are a doctor, scientist, engineer, or a lawyer - the tools of marketing are invaluable."

"Projects compete for capital, so you have to sell your projects. You sell your company against other companies to investors, staff and clients. It happens at every level."

But it was not that one class alone that took Wilson's marketing game to the top. Indeed, since his university days spent devouring the Financial Times from cover to cover, Wilson has been learning from wherever and whomever he could.

"I sometimes think people over worry this ‘take me under your wing' notion," says Wilson. "People can be mentored by simply observing carefully. For example, I've been mentored by Richard Branson in the marketing world, and a variety of business people in terms of their business acumen. I watch and learn. And I'm still watching and learning."

Over the years, Wilson has used several of his personal and professional relationships to better develop his marketing skills. "I had several mentors at McLeod, Young, Weir: Dan Sullivan, Jim McDonald, David Wilson - probably the brightest M&A minds in those days," he says. "It was invaluable watching them walk the walk and talk the talk and learning from them just how important relationships are in transactional business. They were the sort of people I wanted to emulate when I got my opportunity to run an investment bank with my partners."

Watching those guys in action taught Wilson two valuable lessons, among many others. First, that the biggest obstacle standing in the way of successful commercialization, according to Wilson, is "misunderstanding your target market both as the product you're delivering and the desirability in that market, but that all ties to the bottom line of understanding your market."

Second, Wilson began to think creatively of how he could tap into the new ideas for marketing, including the novel idea of using charitable causes as a marketing strategy. "From the start, FirstEnergy put charity under its marketing budget. The partners were 100 percent behind it," says Wilson. "We recognized there was a lot of goodwill to be had there." To this day, FirstEnergy continues to dedicate a minimum of 2.5 percent of its gross profits to charitable causes, more than double the one percent target of the charitable umbrella group Imagine Canada.

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