George Mentis, CEO, Target Public Marketing
Target Public Marketing was founded in the fall of 2002 following an investigation into why so many companies were having such a rough time getting results from their marketing.
The problem, it seemed, came down to lack of appropriate research and execution of the technology of marketing. In as competitive a business environment as exists today, knowledge of how to research a market and package, brand, promote and sell a product is crucial to success.
No one understands this more than Target Public Marketing CEO and founder, George Mentis. A savvy marketer with business in his blood, he credits his business acumen to early experiences working for his Greek-born father, a successful restaurateur. “My intention was to follow in my father’s footsteps,” he explains. “But then I discovered that my preference was not to work with consumers. It was to work with businesses and specifically entrepreneurs and top business executives.”
He cut his teeth in marketing as a teenager, working first in door-to-door sales and later in retail, where within three weeks he became the top producing representative for a national chain. In the winter of 1990 he started his first marketing agency which specialized in flier-based advertising. These experiences, as well as formal education and a lot of reading, taught him the basics of marketing.
He later refined his expertise by studying the work of industry giants and in particular, advertising executive David Ogilvy, who began his own career by working with public opinion pollster, George Gallup. As he did so, Mentis realized that the key to business success was to understand consumer needs and wants. This in turn spurred him to begin a career in marketing research. What he discovered astonished him. “Very few people in the world of advertising and marketing cared what the target audience thought or wanted to do or what they needed or wanted to buy,” he recalls.
Target Public Marketing
One book studied by all TPM personnel is "Scientific Advertising," written by one of the greatest advertising geniuses in history, Claude C. Hopkins. He invented market testing and other breakthroughs, as first published in his book in 1923.
The more he worked in the field, the more Mentis also realized that few companies—outside of advertising agencies—knew what to do with the survey data he produced. It was then that he conceived of developing an organization centered on person-to-person marketing research that could help companies prosper in both online and offline business environments.
Critical to his vision was the idea of isolating and understanding a specific audience and then carefully crafting messages—using all available methods and technologies—to target the needs and wants of that group.
This attention to gathering details about consumers and their opinions about products and services is only part of what makes TPM unique. Mentis and the TPM team also make it their business to get to know every client company it works with from the bottom up.
“Our job is to generate leads,” Mentis explains. “But if, for example, those leads are being wasted because a sales team can’t sell then we become incredibly interested in that.”
Going The Extra Mile
Target Public Marketing always goes the extra mile for every client because every client is a TPM partner in success. The firm actively empowers companies at all levels by educating them about what works and what doesn’t work for their particular business.
And that’s because what counts are results, not service. And good results demand personal investment. “We’re old school,” Mentis says proudly. “If there’s a problem, we’ll handle it even if it’s not explicitly in a proposal we offer a company.”
That traditional approach also forms the business ethic at TPM which is rooted in loyalty, honesty and integrity. These are values Mentis learned from his family and working with his father who immigrated to Canada from the harsh and rugged lands of Sparta in Southern Greece. Indeed, family is how he conceives of TPM in which everyone works together with clients as a tightly-knit unit. “Mutual support is the key to survival. It’s that simple.”