Gary’s management consulting specializations involve a deep focus on customer experience strategy and transformation. He has developed numerous, innovative, end-to-end customer experience transformation methodologies and has successfully applied them in numerous client engagements. Gary possesses extensive experience in generating voice of the customer programs that deliver actionable feedback for clients to improve their customer experience, customer loyalty, customer lifetime value, and market position.
In addition to his specialty in customer experience, he possesses deep expertise in marketing strategy development driven by original research addressing segmentation, targeting, branding, positioning and messaging.
Gary excels in building and leading client/consultant teams with the goal of creating excellent customer experiences for clients’ customers. He has extensive experience collaborating with C-level executives, senior managers, scientists, and engineers to design and develop new marketing strategies and introduce new products and services to market. Gary has deep experience delivering extraordinary value to clients in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific countries.
As a consultant to Disney, Gary researched and authored a groundbreaking customer experience benchmarking study highlighting the best practices of 10 award winning companies including Zappos, Lands’ End, Mercedes, and American Express. He then provided coaching to Disney executives regarding implementation of identified innovations and best practices these companies deployed.
Gary has educated, coached and helped establish customer experience teams at companies such as Microsoft, lululemon and NuVision and speaks frequently at industry conferences and blogs on a broad range of customer experience topics.
Gary began his professional career as a design engineer for General Motors in Australia. Following the achievement of his graduate degree, Gary served in senior director roles in marketing, business development and operations for high-tech start-ups. Next Gary enhanced his professional consulting career in director-level roles in consulting practices specializing in the telecom services and equipment industries and the development of indirect marketing channels for boutique consulting firms including SRI, Bridge Strategy and Adventis.
After gaining a decade of experience in top boutique strategy firms, Gary founded Marin Marketing Strategy with the objective of supporting clients in making fact-based, strategic marketing decisions. He subsequently co-founded two customer experience consulting firms: Emperia (meaning “experience” in ancient Greek) and then CX Catalyst. On his way to being a Practice Leader at Centricity, he led customer experience practices at MCorpCX and FICO. Gary has consulted in most major industries in his career most recently working in telecom, high-tech, public sector, higher education, and at the intersections of those industries.
Gary received his BSME (mechanical engineering) degree from Arizona State University and an MBA degree (with emphasis in quantitative market research) from San Francisco State University. Gary is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) by the Customer Experience Professional Association (CXPA).
