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Creator. Challenger. Collaborator

Ryan Stoner has spent the past two decades helping leaders leverage the power of brand to uncover the most impactful levers for growth. A trusted advisor to CMOs and Founders, he has consulted some of the world’s largest brands and supported the startup ecosystem.

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Ryan Stoner is a Founder, Advisor, and Brand Strategist. His leadership experience spans startups, Fortune 100 companies, and every size of business in between. As a proven strategist and big thinker, he works with leadership teams to provide a fresh perspective on sticky problems, ranging from foundational organizational challenges to brand, sales, and innovation revenue drivers.

Ryan started Dendro in 2021 to get upstream with brands to advise founders and business leaders on addressing strategic brand and marketing challenges. Dendro was born from the idea that brands are constantly facing challenges that require new playbooks, and constant reappraisal is the only way to keep brands relevant in today’s ultrafast world. Post Dendro, Ryan’s goal is to make sure he can move our clients’ businesses forward, as well as their brands, by delivering growth solutions that address business challenges more deeply and execute on opportunities more quickly.

Ryan provides companies and startups with clarity around a strategic brand story to power integrated marketing, advertising, sales, product, and transformation. By combining storytelling with an understanding of future customer needs, Ryan endeavors to turn purpose into action to tackle the myriad marketing challenges facing clients.

Ryan’s marketing, business development, and brand positioning expertise have allowed him to work with B2B, B2C, and B2B2C clients in a significant number of industries, ranging from technology to healthcare, financial services, and consumer goods. He has worked with well-known brands such as AB InBev, Aetna, Amex, Google, T-Mobile, and Warner Bros., and has founded his own companies. With this experience, he thrives in helping teams with all aspects of their growth.

On a personal note, Ryan is a proud “girl dad,” cancer survivor, left-hander, and third culture kid with an upbringing that spreads from Asia to California.

Testimonials

Ryan’s biggest contribution was helping frame the long-term vision and articulating the story we’re going to tell for the next 3-4 years. When it comes to boiling down the complex, asking the hard questions into a compelling story, Ryan is the best.

- Startup Founder/CEO

Ryan fully grasps all-things marketing. He’s strategic and insightful – and always brings great thinking. He helped us identify what is of the most value to our customers and craft new positioning and messaging that immediately impacted our win rate.

- Fortune 100 CMO

How Can I Help You?

I’m very interested in working with ambitious people doing ambitious things. I help companies of all sizes and industries navigate marketing and brand challenges around alignment and potential. My goal is to always work collaboratively with business, marketing, and product leaders to drive growth. Reach out if I can help as a fractional Chief Brand Officer.

Below are several ways I like to add value:

Brand positioning and marketing strategy for companies looking to launch, grow or reignite their brands. I help to define the company’s purpose, better understand its audience, and drive alignment behind a shared goal and plan.

Build brand awareness and equity in new product categories, sales channels, and geographies. Collaborate with your team to create metrics for measuring the success of all marketing programs, instilling a results-oriented marketing team and culture.

Explore new growth opportunities by developing new solution selling strategies or go-to-market plans for launching new products, services, experiences, and content. My entire career has been focused on looking forward and getting ahead of challenges and opportunities. I can help spot the gaps and iterate on solutions.

Connect with customers by building a community, executing strategic partnerships, optimizing traffic acquisition, understanding user needs, and developing a feature roadmap to drive engagement.

Save time by analyzing your marketing workflows and team structure with a fresh perspective to create resources and company-wide systems to drive strategic thinking across your company. I enjoy helping companies do better work with agile teams, both within and external to your organization.

Invest and help to scale startups with intros to angel investors, and support establishing the marketing/growth function to accelerate the founder’s visions in whatever fashion I can. I currently invest primarily in Seed deals after they’ve found a lead investor, but am happy to engage and add value before then.