Executive Bios

DAVE NORTON, PHD
Founder and Principal

Dave Norton, Ph.D., is founder and principal of Stone Mantel, a leading brand and customer experience strategy consulting firm. As the head of the company, Norton is responsible for Stone Mantel’s strategy, vision and growth, as well as business development and managing major client accounts. 

His research capabilities have been embraced by entities as diverse as Fortune 500 Internet businesses, small countries and multi-billion dollar consumer goods companies. Numerous organizations with household brands, such as Campbell Soup Company, Royal Caribbean International, Smithsonian Institute, Wachovia/Wells Fargo and Yahoo!, as well as well-known destinations, like Anchorage, Colorado Springs and Pensacola, have turned to Norton for his in-depth ethnographic research, insights on how to most effectively innovate new products/services and his unique ability to provide clients with a five-year competitive advantage.

Prior to establishing Stone Mantel, Norton served as vice president of Yamamoto Moss, a strategic branding firm, for nearly a decade. Internationally recognized as the thought leader on what makes brand experiences meaningful, Norton has lectured at Harvard, Columbia Business School and at Fortune magazine’s annual summits. He was responsible for coining new mainstream marketing terminology like “brand truth” and “meaningful brand experience” to describe the shift from brand personality to purposeful branding that reflects current consumer demand for experience not just material goods. 

Norton earned a bachelor’s of English degree from Brigham Young University. He completed graduate studies at Brigham Young University for a master’s in English, and studied persuasion/qualitative research methodologies at University of Minnesota for his Ph.D. in rhetoric. Additionally, for his work in helping to reshape the marketing/branding field, Brigham Young University named Norton a 2005 Honored Alumnus (the highest award BYU gives to alumni). This elite honor was bestowed on him as one of the youngest recipients—in the university’s history. 

Read more about Dave Norton on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

B. JOSEPH PINE II 
Strategic Thought Leader

Joe Pine is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups alike. After working closely with Stone Mantel since its founding, Joe recently joined as Strategic Thought Leader, directly assisting clients in the pursuit of meaningful brand experiences.  In addition to his ongoing writing and speaking work with his firm Strategic Horizons, Joe now contributes the vision, ideas, and thinking tools from his entire body of work in the context of Stone Mantel's offerings, helping clients seek and design new customer experiences founded on deep insights into customer behavior. 

Joe’s published work has changed how the business world thinks. His best-selling book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage was the first to articulate the potential of experiences as a distinct economic offering, and literally began the worldwide shift to experience strategy.  His latest work Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier, explores how to use digital technology to stage experiences that fuse the real and the virtual, offering powerful new insights to address digital technology in customers’ experiences. Joe’s 2007 book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, recognizes that in a world of increasingly paid-for experiences, people no longer accept the fake from the phony, but want the real from the genuine.

His first book Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition, details the shift companies are making from mass producing standardized offerings to mass customizing goods and services that efficiently fulfill the wants and needs of individual customers. 

He has consulted with hundreds of companies, bringing value to tactics, strategies, and game-changing, industry-disrupting innovations. Joe’s discoveries—the new frontier, the new economy, the new consumer sensibility, and now the new ways digital technology enables us to fuse the real and the virtual—make him one of the greatest business landscape explorers of our time. 

Read more about Joe Pine on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter@JoePine.

BRYAN SEARING
Lead Strategist and Account Partner                                     

Bryan Searing, lead strategist and account partner for Stone Mantel, a leading brand and customer experience strategy consulting firm, is responsible for managing client services, leading research activities, overseeing insights development and handling project management.

Searing brings to Stone Mantel more than 20 years of experience in advertising, brand and marketing strategy, direct marketing, product development and marketing communications from a variety of industries—high-technology, petroleum marketing, transportation, business products and online services.

Since joining Stone Mantel, Searing has been involved in high-profile projects for major clients across varying industries, including the City of Colorado Springs, Colorado; Deluxe Corporation; Hewlett-Packard; Novo Nordisk; Royal Caribbean International; and SunTrust Bank. Prior to joining Stone Mantel in 2007, he held senior-level positions with the following industry leaders: Deluxe Corporation, PC Connection, Inc. and USA.NET.

Read more about Bryan Searing on LinkedIn.