Marketing & PR Director

Melody Appleton, Marketing & PR Director
Melody is an entrepreneur and corporate executive with a successful track record of driving revenue and growing successful business ventures. She specializes in brand building, strategic marketing, product development and marketing, business development, and guerilla marketing. Melody has managed budgets ranging from a few hundred thousand to multimillion dollars for both consumer and business-to-business markets.

As the founder of ExtremeCare, Melody developed a brand of skin care products for outdoor enthusiasts, growing the business on a very limited budget to sales of over 35,000 units through retail and wholesale channels during the market validation phase. Melody managed operations, finance, and product development in addition to marketing. To build credibility and raise awareness for the product in the outdoor industry, Melody recruited world-class professional athletes and competitive cycling and adventure racing teams to endorse the products. She also negotiated co-marketing deals with leading manufacturers, including Spyder, Cloudveil, GoLite, and Athleta, and earned rave product reviews in Outside Magazine, Skiing, Runner’s World, and many more.

Prior to founding ExtremeCare, Melody held senior marketing and business development positions at companies like Concentric, an XO Communications company, and ImproveNet, an online consumer services company, achieving stellar results. Three product launches in just over a year, a $750,000 sales pipeline within six months of launch, sought-after speaking opportunities at leading tradeshows three years in a row, hundreds of thousands of media impressions, and a bi-monthly column in a trade publication are just a few of her accomplishments as director of marketing.

Melody realized similar outcomes during her tenure as vice president at ImproveNet, propelling the brand to number one in home improvement. Partner numbers went from six to over two thousand in less than two years, with the lowest cost of acquisition companywide and program revenues far outpacing all other sources combined. Yahoo!, Knight Ridder, Hearst Publishing, Times Mirror, Today’s Homeowner, and Hometime are just a few of the online media, magazine, newspaper, and television deals that Melody developed, closed, and implemented for ImproveNet.

In addition to her marketing savvy, Melody also grasps the finer points of finance, having served as an independent financial consultant with FNIC. She holds a BA in Liberal Arts with Honors from Ambassador College and holds Series 6 and 63 securities licenses.

mappleton@avicennamarketing.com, 510-537-2220