The Power of Purpose: How Alejandro Guzmán Blends Marketing with Impact

Alejandro Guzmán has transformed his career from freelance designer to a dynamic creative director, bridging the gap between corporate and cause-related marketing. In this Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight, Alejandro shares how a pivotal mindset shift enabled him to solve specific problems for global giants like Coca-Cola and Google. With 18 years of experience, he founded Azul Marketing, inspired by the blend of marketing and sustainability. His story is one of resilience and innovation, where AI plays a crucial role in achieving remarkable efficiency. Alejandro’s journey underscores the power of flexibility and owning one’s expertise.

Hi, Alejandro! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?

I partner with live marketing agencies, PR and communication firms, as well as internal marketing teams, to provide a full stack of creative services. So instead of trying to find or juggle multiple freelancers that work in their own ways, I act as a creative director who gets the right people for the right task and makes sure that my clients get exactly what they need. I've been doing this for the past 18 years, and from startup teams all the way up to world-class companies like Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, and many more. 

Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

I think for the early part of my professional career I was comfortable being an employee or a freelancer, which is a form of entrepreneurship in its own way, but I think the moment I became an entrepreneur was when I really decided to look for a specific problem and put all my efforts towards solving it. The funny thing is that it didn't mean I hired anybody or changed my focus entirely or started from scratch but it was a change in my mindset, the way I approached work and clients and growing. I think that really changed and felt like turning 21. 

Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.

After a few years of working as a freelance designer for an agency, I kept going back to the feeling that whenever the projects involved sustainability or cool causes, I felt especially motivated by that blending of the marketing and the nonprofit world. That's when I decided to create Azul Marketing, with the intention to make it all about cause-related marketing. And then when I jumped out of my desk and actually started going to meet with the nonprofits, go to the poor neighborhoods, meet the people in the streets, and those doing the hardest jobs, and seeing how could I bring their value to the corporate world and create unique marketing campaigns.

Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?

This could sound mainstream these days but I honestly think AI has been a massive game changer. The irony is that it has helped me survive the unpredictable conditions that are arising these days in part because of AI. As an early adopter AI allowed me to compress months of work that could involve tens of people into a small team and a few weeks so I was able to produce amazing results with 10x efficiency. These days AI has enabled my agency to create and deliver incredible things that, in any other time, would have taken too long to produce or would have been extremely expensive. It has augmented my capabilities in incredible ways.

We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.

I would start by agreeing 100% that failure or pivoting is crucial in entrepreneurship. And the first thing that comes to my mind would be, particularly in those early days, when I was trying to focus on cause-related marketing and started seeing that bringing the corporate world to align with values is not that hard; but having them make the investment in this type of marketing was harder than I expected. The vast majority of my projects ended up being rejected at the end because the brand manager would decide to just stick with the known and spend their money in a traditional way. I learned that I needed to be flexible and pragmatic and understand that there were going to be opportunities where I could merge the causes into a campaign. There were many more opportunities where it was going to be just purely traditional marketing. 

What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?

One thing that I did at a certain point was to own my expertise and bring it to the table. I stopped being shy about it and that actually shifted a lot in how my clients and the people I worked with perceived me. I had a ton of ideas and knowledge in my head that I was holding back. Of course with the right timing and in the right rooms, the more I started bringing those perspectives to the table, the more it opened a space for me in them. So that allowed me to move from being a good designer to being a marketing and behavior expert that could inform a group of very smart people on a point of view that they might not have considered.

What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?

I think one important thing would be that rejection is not the end of the world. Going out and putting yourself in front of people and learning is super valuable. Especially entrepreneurship and business in general are not about convincing anybody of anything. It's about finding the people who need what you have, who would benefit from what you do, and who will be happy to pay for it.

I think that shifted my perspective a lot and took a lot of the pressure out. I wish I had made that transition earlier but I'm not complaining. I actually like to think that everything was part of the journey and everything has been perfect just as it has been. 

Want to dive deeper into Alejandro's work? Check out the links below!

• Visit Azul Marketing's website: azulmarketing.co/
• Connect with Alejandro Guzmán on LinkedIn: Alejandro Guzmán