DIY Job Titles: Role Play [Connect Magazine]

DIY Job Titles: Role Play

By Libby Hoppe

Read the original article in Connect Magazine and Collaborate Magazine.

TCG Events isn’t a new player in the event industry. The company, based in North Carolina, has been helping clients plan, design and execute events for almost 30 years. But a few years ago, company leaders decided they needed a rebranding. The result was a new logo (with a giraffe as the mascot), a new website, new business cards, a new company blog and a new tagline (“Event Differently”). The rebrand also included an update to a business mainstay rarely touched by company executives: employee job titles.

Cassie Brown, owner of TCG, and her team came together in a meeting armed with a dictionary to brainstorm ways to describe what each member really did. “Our goal is to provide amazing experiences for our clients and our clients’ guests,” she says, which led to Brown’s new title: chief experience officer. “It just felt right,” she adds.

Creative job titles are creeping into mainstream business at a slow but steady pace, led mostly by tech startups who have advocates, rock stars, trailblazers, dynamos, geeks and happiness professionals on their payrolls. Tech companies thrive on innovation, and their reputation depends heavily on their ability to change public perception and usher in new ways of thinking. It’s no surprise, then, that they jump-started a trend to change the way creative professionals talk about what they do and how they brand themselves. That trend is now making its way into other creative fields like event planning.