About the Founder

Carol Gsell, Managing Director

Carol Gsell is a versatile marketing strategist and researcher with a wide range of expertise. She gained her skills working with and for some of the world’s most renowned brands, including The Coca-Cola Company, McKinsey & Company, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut.

Since founding Certo Marketing in 2006, Carol has developed insights, strategy, plans, and activation efforts for B2B and B2C clients, ranging in size from global to insurgent. She thrives on helping clients understand their targets, define a unique position in the market, plan for growth, and measure progress.

Her clients have included Wrigley, Kimberly-Clark, SIRVA Worldwide, Build-A-Bear Workshop, and RaceTrac.

Previous Experience

Carol has worked as a brand strategy consultant for Zyman Group (ZG). In this role, she broadened in this job broadened her expertise in developing growth solutions, optimized marketing organizations, and strategic customer planning approaches for clients, including ConAgra and EDS.

Before joining ZG, Carol was with The GEM Group, where she led and quantified sports marketing efforts for clients including Coca-Cola (NCAA) and UPS (NASCAR). She also directed communications for the first e-commerce launch for Philips Consumer Electronics, which generated millions of dollars of incremental revenue in its first year.

Carol’s client-side experience includes four years at Coca-Cola, focused on customer marketing efforts with McDonald’s. There, she leveraged joint planning and insight-based program development to increase beverage sales volume.

At Pizza Hut, Inc., Carol led the overall Kids’ Marketing platform and managed the first national launch of Sicilian Style Pizza. She then began her career at McKinsey & Company, where she honed her skills in insight and implication development as a business analyst.

Background

Carol holds a dual-major Bachelor of Arts degree from Rice University where she graduated summa cum laude. She also has a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, where she was a Dean’s Scholar. Additionally, she received training in qualitative research at The Burke Institute in Cincinnati.

Talk to Us

Carol—a committed runner, volunteer, and mom to a shaggy rescue pup—is currently based in Atlanta. If you would like to talk about marketing solutions – or running or dogs – please reach out to us.