Minutes With Melissa
Hey. I’m Melissa. Citizen of the world. Brand gyal (since before I knew it was a job). Baller. I live for family and culture, and the ways they come to life in food and music. Art is in my DNA, which might be why I fiercely advocate for letting people be who they are. I treasure relationships, being real, and staying positive. Nice to meet you.
What are some of your favorite or what is your favorite childhood food memory that have so many of them?
Growing up my parents were West Indian. My mom is from Belize. My father's from Jamaica. And so culturally and growing up in Miami, like food was everywhere, whether it was Cuban food, Jamaican food, Belizian food. And my mom liked to cook and so she did a lot of different things and she was a nurse. And so she did home health nursing and South beach back in the day when it was a huge Jewish population. So she would make these crazy things. I'm like, why would I Belizian women even know what that is? And she would make these thimble cookies, which one of her old Jewish patients taught her how to make. And it was these amazing, delightful little cookies that you would punch a hole in and roll in walnuts and put jelly inside.
And we would make them every holiday. And from the time that I was a child through college, that was her thing were these thimble cookies. And she would make them and put them in pans, and give them to people. And I always thought it was so odd. People like, where did she get these from? Like, it's not like Jamaican black rum cake or whatever. And I was like, Oh, my mom got these little cookies. That was her thing. But it was our bonding moment and I think culturally just opened my mind up to so many different things.
What would be your walk up song to the court if you were a basketball player?
I'm a huge Soca music fan. And so for me, it would be anything by Machel Montano, a Trinidadian Soca artist. All of his songs are nothing but energy. And so one of the latest is called Famalay and it's kind of an ensemble song by a lot of different artists, but it's all about family and getting everybody together and being one. And that song gets me hyped because it's such an amazing song with great energy. But I also love the message.
What's the biggest problem you've ever solved and how did you solve it?
Well, I'll probably go to the most current problem I've had to solve. So when I initially came on board with the Hawks, around two weeks after I started, we had a bit of a racial crisis. We had some previous owners who said some derogatory things that were recorded. And then it ended up coming out in the media. And literally like my second week, my boss called me in his office and said, "I am so sorry. I had no idea." And I'm like, you had nothing to do with this. But at that time we were in the beginning stages of trying to brand this team. And so we had already gone through some analytics work looking at all types of data we can find, whether it was census data, television ratings, you know, ticket sales data, understanding what was happening from a corporate partnership standpoint, looking at business trends to really understand for us who should our target audience be for the Atlanta Hawks, looking at a lot of internal proprietary research that was done.
And then ultimately defining how we should set up this brand for the future and really trying to define what that target audience was. And so all of these brand positions and you know, things that we were going to go out and test in the market was like, none of that matters now because the world has shifted right before your eyes and we have to react. And so I'm in real time myself and a couple other folks on our team got together and we really started thinking of what did the city need? What did it need from the Hawks? What was this research that we found and what did we hear? And a lot of it was the Hawks hadn't really given back to the community in any major way. People felt like after Dominique Wilkins got traded at the Hawks, just stopped caring. We very quickly started doing some qualitative research and really understood that the one thing Atlanta has is there was a lot of folks who are hustling and working hard every day.
And that authenticity was really big in this. And so for a lot of ways it's like, yeah, you say what you want, but like everything is like real talk. Like, what do you really mean or feel? It's a lot about building relationships. So you said, you know, we needed to be truthful and just authentic as an organization, what are we going to do? And so at the time our CEO wrote a letter that we printed in the AJC that really just apologized, took ownership for what happened in addition to saying, you know, here's some steps that we're going to take. We're going to provide places for us to build bridges to the community through basketball. And a lot of that has resulted in us putting around 27 courts all around the city to really help kind of give back to the community, being thoughtful about ticket pricing and making sure that we had opportunities for everybody to be able to have access, hiring the first chief diversity inclusion officer, any NBA team.
And so while a lot of those things happened on my end, from a brand strategy standpoint, it's like, okay, well that's great. You put a letter in a media, but what does that mean? And so we came up with this True To Atlanta (#truetoATL) kind of tagline. And it was first it was truth in basketball and to be honest, when it's like we're true to Atlanta and then also recognizing that Atlanta is a city that has a lot of transplants or people that have recently moved in decided to stay because it's a great place to raise a family. And so we also had to recognize and be able to articulate that true to Atlanta can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So in the spirit of letting everybody come in and know that they, they matter and that they're important, you know, really trying to build a line that was more than just for a team and really helped to find the brand.
And so we launched the True To Atlanta line. We defined our target audiences is next generation Atlantans multicultural audiences. So that there was no question that we were absolutely for the audiences that may have been perceived as not in the past ,as well as B2B. Because we have to still, you know, look at how we make money and have our on our business. And so a lot of that work resulted in us redoing our entire arena. You know, Phillips Arena became State Farm Arena with a lot more premium products and programming to really be the place that she want to come and entertain clients. Or if you have a huge team and you're looking at perks and things like that. And we were able to provide that in the past we didn't have any of those amenities. So you know, between that and looking at the creativity of how do we make true Atlanta come to life, it was working with local artists and putting up art throughout our entire facility, working with local restaurantuers.
And so whether that's B's cracklin' or actually the swag shop with Killer Mike. A barber shop for, you know, local activist rapper or phenomenon like Killer Mike who has these swagshops in the community to provide jobs for local African- Americans in those communities. We said, "Hey, let's make this your show piece and put it in our arena where people can get their hair cut and watch a game at the same time." And so it was a really big challenge coming in literally in the second week and having a huge hurdle like that, which was national news, especially coming off of what happened with the Clippers, right around the same time, but being able to really translate that through some savvy marketing, a lot of really cool execution, a lot of work to be honest and giving back to the city. So ultimately be at the place where we are today. I think it's been a very fun ride, but just a lot of lessons learned along the way.
What breaks your heart?
You know, it's funny, I have throughout my life I have a friend that says I have spiritual whiteout, which I thought was a very interesting way to say I don't hold grudges. I'm not a person that's like, "Gosh, I don't believe he did that." And so what that has become has been very much of like, Oh everything's all right. And so for something to break my heart like it has to be next level because I am generally pretty laid back and chill. But um, I, I think what comes to mind first is probably from my childhood. My mom had me at 42 and I was her first and only child. And so she never thought she'd have kids. And growing up she was always on the bigger side. I think some of it was cultural because growing up, if you're from Belize, a traditional Sunday dinner is rice and peas, chicken and potato salad. And potato salad is not a vegetable.
However, in that world that's how the perception was. And so as I got older and she got older, her health never really, she always was trying to be on the other side of it. But I don't think there was ever a foundation on knowledge or awareness of what good health was. Even though she was a nurse, she was an orthopedic nurse. And so when I left to go away for college in North Carolina, she went out on disability and my entire adult and adolescent and adult life was spent taking care of her. My parents were divorced when I was around 12 and so I saw firsthand how morbid obesity at the highest levels can impact not just a person, but a family and almost a generation. And so it always made me super conscious of just balance. So not necessarily being super healthy.
I definitely think that everything is moderation and it's important. And I love food, good food, but it's understanding what you need and what you don't need and how you can be prepared to live your best life, especially for the people around you. So when I was in college, my scholarship money would go to helping to take care of my mom and pay her bills because she couldn't physically do anything. When I graduated school and I moved to Atlanta, she ended up needing to go into assisted living facility. She was around 5 ft, about 430 pounds. She couldn't walk. She had an oversized wheelchair. And so I saw also how most doorways wouldn't be able to fit her wheelchair. You know, and I don't know if it's from an education perspective for her or also how people, if you and treat people who are either disabled or do have some challenges.
Obesity was, it was her that was her issue to deal with. But at the same time, if she had more knowledge that she could have changed that. On another side, I know that mental illness, especially in the African American community, is something people don't talk a lot about. And there was depression that led her to that point of being that obese. And so I always think of that situation at that point in my life. And it breaks my heart because there are so many different levers that could have been pulled in order to change her life. And ultimately mine too. Because I had to bear the brunt of that as an only child and her caregiver until she passed away and had to go to a nursing home. And so, so much of my life was impacted by one, her lack of health knowledge and as well as her lack of getting help from a mental perspective. So I know that's a pretty loaded way to answer that question, but whenever I see it, I'm always trying to help others who, even myself, I have a daughter now who's five and she's like, mommy, let's exercise this morning. I'm like, all right kid, you know, let's do it. And I realized that I'm now giving her a very different view of what I saw growing up.
In your opinion, what is the leadership skill of the 21st century and why?
Leadership is so many things depending on where you are and who you're leading. But the one thing that I've found that has been very important to me, personally, is being a leader and by allowing people to be their full self and bring their whole self to work every day.
And a lot of that is understanding and knowledge, but I also recognize that then this current generation, there's so much desire for autonomy but also being able to be unique and be differentiated and not feel like you have to be something that's somebody else is.
And so personally I've found that and my current role is CMO. I would be interviewing folks for a job. One example, a young lady came in for a direct marketing position and she looked at me and someone actually introduced her to me and they're all like, she's like, you're the CMO?
And I was like, yeah. And she said you have dreads and you have a nose ring. Yes I do. And I also do great work. And she said, you know, on my last company, I went in, I did my interview, and I had a nose ring. My mom told me to take it out. And so she took it out. She got the job, and then she went in on the first day with her nose ring. And they told her that she couldn't wear it. But she was really resentful the entire time because they didn't allow her to be who she was fully.
And so she did end up becoming a part of our team for a while and was fantastic. And that was very cool to me. So I really saw the power and what that does and how it really transform people into what they want to bring to the table because they recognize that they're being respected for who they are and what they have right.
What world problem do you wish you could solve and why?
It's interesting because I live in Atlanta, and Atlanta is a predominantly African American city and that's awesome. And I've been able to work really hard to accomplish a lot of things and be pretty successful. But sometimes when I'm having conversations like discrimination and racism is still big, in ways that I'm like, I don't understand what that is today. And I look at my daughter and her friends who are all races, like the world is shifting. And obviously when we look at things that are in the headlines or even from an LGBTQ standpoint, like there's so many things where we are more accepting in different ways. We are, there are more laws and regulations that are all really working towards equality. But then on the flip side, sometimes you can look at what's happening with our presidential debates and you know, the election and there's still this underlying sense of almost segregation in a way.
And to me that's such a deep seated historical thing that I'm like every generation that comes, I'm like, okay, clearly we're going to be better. Oh my gosh, okay, we're going to be better. And for whatever reason we're not fully. It's almost always like almost, but not. And so if I could ever help to change something, it's really just how do we just make people more compassionate? Over anything else. It's not around like trying to make people think one way or the other this way is right or wrong. I mean, freedom of speech and thought is important, but just be more compassionate, because I think that helps so many different issues in so many different ways.
What's more important? Creativity or curiosity.
Ooh. That's so important to me. And so I honestly don't think you can have one without the other. I always say I'm an artist first. So drawing, painting from middle school, high school to college on an art scholarship, creativity was like at the core of everything. If you have a design challenge, it's "how are you going to find a creative way to attack that?" But you can just kind of approach it that way, which sometimes I look at his art for art's sake.
But if you're able to kind of take a step back and look at the world through a lens of curiosity, "Oh, well, what are other people doing in ways that aren't even artistic, that are just cool and different?" Or "if I approach it in the way that everyone else does, that's cool. But how about if I come at it from underneath the table or a completely different way?" I think that it helps you to have a better product. I think throughout my career I've been known for having the ability to be both creative and strategic. And I think that question really gets at the, you gotta be curious in order to really be able to nail the strategy but creative in order to really do something that's differentiated in the market. So I don't think you can have one without the other, but you know, I love the best creative ideas ever, but I call it the killer application. If you can have a creative idea that really hits it harder than anything else will, to me, that's when you're really winning.
What brands are nailing it right now?
Right now I'm working with a couple of different brands and a lot of different ways through my work with the Hawks, but I am looking a lot at banking. And Chase is a bank that is not really been... It has been present in Atlanta for a while, but I know that they're making a push nationally and a lot of big ways and they're doing banking a little differently than I have thought of. They're looking at their tellers and their centers where people are coming in as more experiential opportunities to 'WOW' them. I think one example I think they did in New York with the Knicks is they had Knick's players coming just to do meet and greets and talk about what financial literacy is and really using pop culture and experiential marketing as an opportunity to educate. Which I thought was really interesting because the reality is that banking is never going to be the same. Like people don't have to go into a bank to deposit a check or to take money out. You know what I mean? And just the way that things are so much more electronic and not as transactional. And so ways that they can still try to build a brand that has some sort of personal connection to people but also putting it in an environment and wanting people to come in and do - not even a transaction - but just have some engagement within a physical place. Where right now like I don't know the last time I went inside of a bank because I didn't have to.
I think that they're doing well. I am a personal fan locally of Slutty Vegan. I don't know if you're familiar at all but a young lady named Pinky Cole created this mega food truck with her vegan burgers and has taken the world by storm and she's done a fantastic job of looking at something like veganism, finding a way to one, make it super relevant, pop culture wise by getting influencers and through her social media following and just savvy of really reaching out to the right people, having them sample product and having quality product has really been able to develop locally.
Those lines are ridiculous. Trying to stand in line and I think they're actually doing better operationally. But then also other brands and things. I just saw recently that she's partnering with Rap Snacks to come out with a Slutty Vegan flavor of chips. And I was like, really? A gas station Slutty Vegan. And I remember in college, you know, I had friends who were vegetarian or vegan, especially in Jamaica. They were Rastafarian. And, and that was a normal way of life. But it was so counterculture. You know where now obviously the world is shifting, health consciousness is coming up in a very different way. And so for her to be able to really reach out to a community that would look at the word, "you don't have any meat" and look at you like you have three heads. And to really embrace what she's doing, I think that she is killing it from a brand perspective and a business standpoint and hopefully will continue to grow and evolve.
