Opening the eyes of business owners

is all in a day’s work at Creative Marketing
SUSAN NORD, SBT Reporter
A cornerstone of building a successful business is finding a particular niche and serving it well. For Jacqueline Moore Bowles, the owner and founder of Creative Marketing Resources, the niche was obvious.
“What we do is really focus on businesses that want to attract or provide information to urban and ethnic audiences,” Moore Bowles says. “There was no one serving that particular market.”
One of the company’s more memorable campaigns was what Moore Bowles refers to as “the baby bus” – a fully illustrated Milwaukee County bus that reminded parents to immunize their children. It featured pictures of four babies.
The company was honored in September by the MMAC’s Council of Small Business Executives as one of the Future 50, an award given to the fastest growing companies in the metro-Milwaukee area.
Little did Moore Bowles know when she started the part-time company in 1995 that it would rise to such heights. She was home after having a baby, contemplating her next career move.
“I was thinking, ‘What do I want to do now? Do I want to go back into corporate America? Or should I do something on a part-time basis?'” Moore Bowles, who has an MBA, decided on the latter, taking on small projects, consulting jobs, developing business plans and working on special events. It evolved to the point where she had to go full time or cut back on the number of jobs she accepted.
The firm now has six employees and recently moved into a 4,000-square-foot office at 1300 N. Fourth St.
Moore Bowles says the hardest thing about starting a new company, especially in the highly competitive world of public relations and advertising, is getting name recognition and breaking through the old guard so prevalent in Milwaukee business dealings.
“They’re not my neighbors; they’re not going to church with me on Sunday,” Moore Bowles says of Milwaukee’s business leaders. “So we’re not in those same environments by which other organizations or entities – they could be just as new – but they tend to have somebody who they know who looks like them, or that believes in things that they believe in that’ll say, ‘I have confidence that you can do this and we’ll give you a shot at it.'”
To counteract that hurdle, Moore Bowles takes a proactive approach in promoting her firm. By joining associations and becoming more active in those associations, she’s planted the name Creative Marketing Resources in the minds of her peers. She pointed out that her involvement with the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau has led to job bids that previously had not come the firm’s way.
Part of Creative Marketing’s success has been its ability to connect with ethnic communities, especially African American. Many times the firm does traditional marketing such as print media, but then goes the extra step to reach their targeted audience.
In one campaign celebrating National Adoption month, the firm brought in a representative of a Texas church that has adopted 60 children to speak at a special faith community breakfast in Milwaukee.
“We could do something that was personal to them as opposed to ‘Here’s why you ought to be involved with adoptions and foster care,'” Moore Bowles said of the adoption event. “We said, ‘Here’s somebody who did this, and we want you to hear what they have to say.’ It’s not just me telling it.”
Plans for the future include designing “culturally relevant” Web sites for clients.
And, as with most companies, Moore Bowles says the firm’s continued success revolves heavily around developing personnel. “As the organization grows, I recognize that I can’t do some of the things I used to do,” Moore Bowles says. “But we have to continue to develop people so they have that same attitude about what they’re doing in terms of continuing to create a personalized environment (for the clients).”