Education marketing executive · CMO, Fusion Academy
Most CMOs specialize in one. I’ve built my career on both.
15 years taking PE-backed education companies from category creation to acquisition — launching big brand swings to get attention, and building full-funnel performance engines to convert it.
The thesis
Brand’s only job is to make performance work better. Performance’s job is to tell you, with actual data, whether the brand work is doing anything.
Marketing organizations split into two camps, and most CMOs come up through one side and treat the other as a cost center they tolerate. Run one without the other and you’re not doing strategy — you’re running half a business function and hoping the other half is fine. Every opinion I hold follows from refusing that split.
Where that lands, in six specifics →Selected campaigns
What I’m hired for
Research-backed repositioning, from the ground up
Most education brands describe what they offer instead of who they’re best for. I run the research that identifies the students, families, or institutions a company genuinely serves better than anyone, rebuild the positioning around that answer, and hold the organization to it.
Attention-getting campaigns, built to earn coverage
Positioning only works if someone actually notices it. I build the attention-getting idea that makes a brand promise impossible to ignore — a stunt, a campaign, a piece of content people share on their own — then make sure it’s saying something the research actually backs up.
Meaningful CAC reduction through incrementality testing
A demand engine managed like a portfolio, measured honestly. Mix modeling and incrementality testing establish what each channel actually contributes, a first-party attribution system recovers the signal ad platforms lost, and spend moves toward what survives the test — not what looks best on a dashboard.
The best AEO strategy is still SEO
There’s no separate playbook for showing up in AI answers. I build authoritative, bottom-of-funnel content that ranks because it solves a specific problem — and when content ranks well, LLMs pull from it naturally. No shortcuts, no tools that promise visibility without the substance behind it.
Double-digit lift in site conversion
Enrollment funnels leak in predictable places. A disciplined weekly test cadence on the site and the inquiry-to-start path is consistently the cheapest revenue in the building — a full site rebuild lifted both conversion rate and site speed meaningfully.
Building 30+ person teams from scratch
Agencies rent you capability at the cost of institutional memory. I’ve launched marketing as a functional division from scratch and rebuilt existing teams across creative, performance, operations, analytics, and customer journey — so the capability stays after I do.
“Eric is simply the best at building brands that drive business.
“Eric is an exceptional brand strategist. He challenged us to rethink our positioning and category creation opportunity, significantly sharpening our messaging.
