Sharlene Sones

Founder and Chief Brand Storyteller, Brandstoria 

Sharlene Sones understands the power of a story to sell your product, advance an idea, communicate your value and build your brand. 

Sharlene connects traditional branding and marketing practices with new approaches to delight customers and meet the needs of entrepreneurs, marketers and change-makers. After working with large organizations and scrappy start-ups, she founded Brandstoria to use her innate storytelling skills to build a relationship between consumer and product. To humanize a brand in a way that speaks to the needs of today’s marketplace. 

Her book StoryWorks will release in Fall 2011, presenting ways a bigger story can create bigger results for business.

Sharlene’s background is a lot like the Neil Finn song “Four Seasons in One Day.” Her career is as diverse as the four seasons. Sports. Music. Retail. Higher Education. And More. She’s a jack of all marketing trades – and master of the good story. A brand-building specialist with a penchant for understanding, defining and leveraging stories, Sharlene has helped strengthen many well-known global brands including Benetton Sportsystem, Spalding, Forefront Records, University of Pennsylvania and the LPGA.

A native Bostonian (and long suffering Red Sox fan), Sharlene started her career developing and launching hundreds of products in sports and entertainment. The experience revealed her natural inclination to weave a unified thread throughout products and ignited an appreciation for storytelling. 

She believes that we are all the authors of our own unique story – we can edit, re-write and take it on a new course. Her passion is helping other people and organizations realize this, too.

When she’s not flying a single-engine plane, creating something on a wood lathe (Bowl? Pen? Art?), taking on another DIY home project or getting ready for her next sprint triathlon, she can be found in her office in Pennsylvania’s beautiful Lehigh Valley, or, what she refers to as the “deep, deep, deep suburbs of NYC.” 

Sharlene earned her graduate degree in organizational dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania and holds a B.S. in management from Babson College, where she currently serves on the board of the Babson Alumni Association.

Connect with Sharlene:

 

www.brandstoria.com

www.twitter.com/sharlenesones

www.linkedin.com/in/sharlenesones

Panels & Panelists

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  • Product Design and Development

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