Hello! Welcome to a Day in the Life of…..me! (Except that I work in marketing and branding and there’s no such thing as a typical day!)

I began my career in marketing as an undergraduate at Northeastern Illinois University. Writing and working as the News Editor for the school paper, I figured I was going to go into writing for a paper, and would have to leave the big city (Chicago at the time) for a small town, when I was offered a part time marketing job. I’d never thought about marketing before, except for the fact that I knew it worked on me – to this day, show me a commercial of something and tell me I’ve ‘got to have it,’ and it’s mine.

For the past 10 years, I’ve mainly worked in the beverage industry, starting at Red Bull. I have always found beverage marketing to be pretty ‘glamorous marketing’ as opposed to marketing products I don’t care much about, like gas. Currently I’m the marketing manager for ONE Coconut Water and have been here since March of 2009. My role has changed considerably in the past three years, when I started; I was only the 11th employee, so we all wore many more hats. At this point, I actually have a full marketing team and now have moved into handling all our sponsorships, all the social media, national events, celebrity events, and all of our ONE Athletes.

My day generally starts around 6:30 am, I’m usually in the office by then, having walked the dog, gotten him into the car (he works with me too) and made coffee. I start with emails that come into our website, answering questions, providing coupons, working on details for any upcoming events we’re involved with….then I reward myself by spending a good 1-2 hours on Facebook, Google +, and Twitter, ensuring EVERY SINGLE consumer gets a response no matter what their comment/tweet is, checking out new trends, news, and reading up on the competitions activities.

If I’m lucky, around 9 am the phone calls will start coming in. I still get a chill of excitement hearing, “Hello? Is this ONE Coconut Water? This is Dwayne Wade/Courtney Cox/Shaun Phillips…” Throughout the day, I’ll field more sponsorship calls, chat a bit about branding/new products in development with our VP of Marketing, walk the dog a couple times, shoot out some press releases/PR nuggets, take some pictures of people with ONE, read some fabloids, and hope to get my emails below 50 before leaving. Knowing and learning our consumer base is of huge importance to me, and most of the personal tweets come in after dinner, so I spend a couple hours then chatting with our “followers” on Twitter.

Every day, I get to share health with people – that is the best part of my job. I get to share a product with people that literally can (and will!) change their lives. I work seven days a week, have events, meetings, and seminars almost every night of the week. (The more I can learn daily, the better!) It’s all very rewarding. At the end of the day, seeing a child pick up ONE Coconut Water rather than a Coke, makes all the difference. Still being a small office, we also get the benefit of our Founder, Rodrigo Veloso, working in the office with us, and getting to speak with him each day is incredibly inspiring. You can chat with me, too! Find me easily @onecoconut.