The question I could not answer at seventeen

In July 1992, at seventeen, I sold tickets in the terminal office of a cross-bay ferry on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. One afternoon the board behind me said only that the next sailing was delayed and that further information would follow. A woman with a hospital appointment on the far shore asked whether she should wait or drive around the bay, a journey of almost three hours. I could not tell her. The notice described the vessel's situation accurately and gave her nothing to decide with. I now lead marketing for the company that ran that crossing, and her question remains the test I apply to our communication.

I grew up on New Brunswick's north shore in a household that moved between French and English at the dinner table. I studied commerce, concentrating on marketing, at Saint-Avreline University and graduated in May 1997. My first employer, Ostrelac Research in Montreal, ran surveys and focus groups for consumer companies. As an analyst I drafted questionnaires in both languages and learnt that a faithful translation could still change the question. I spent four years learning to separate what respondents said from what our clients hoped they had said.

In 2001 I joined Bérandine Dairy Cooperative as brand manager for its specialty cheeses. A cooperative's customers include its own members and their neighbours, people who can raise a complaint with a director at the hockey rink. When a packaging change reduced one cheese by forty grams, I argued for stating the change on the front of the pack rather than letting the price per kilogram drift upward unnoticed. The sales director expected complaints. They came for a month and then stopped, along with a rumour that the cooperative was hiding something.

From 2006 I worked for the Chaleurmont Coastal Tourism Partnership, a not-for-profit organisation funded by operator members and provincial grants. We marketed a coastline of small communities to visitors from Quebec, Ontario and New England. I learnt that a campaign could succeed on its own terms and still be unwelcome. One summer our promotion filled a village campground on the weekend residents had set aside for their own festival; nobody had asked them. After that I began each season with community meetings, and our calendar improved because residents knew things our research did not.

Haulvenne Moving and Storage appointed me director of marketing in 2011. Moving is a purchase people make rarely, under stress and with little ability to judge an estimate. Franchisees priced locally, but a dispute at one location damaged the shared name everywhere. With the president and a franchisee advisory council, I replaced open-ended hourly quotes for standard household moves with written estimates that set a ceiling. Some franchisees lost flexibility they valued, and we kept hourly pricing for complex moves where a ceiling would have been fiction. Billing disputes fell by about half over two years, and customers began to treat the estimate as the price.

I returned to ferries in September 2016 as vice-president of marketing and customer communications at Marelisse Ferries. A Moncton family founded the company in 1968; an infrastructure investor has held a minority stake since 2019. Three of our four routes run under service agreements with provincial governments, which approve the fare tariffs. The fourth, the cross-bay crossing where I once sold tickets, is commercial. I became chief marketing officer in April 2021, adding commercial-carrier accounts to brand, pricing presentation, digital sales and customer communications.

Three groups share our car decks. Island residents rely on us for work, school and medical care. Visitors choose us among other holidays. Carriers bring groceries, building materials and fuel, and they plan drivers' hours around our timetable. Marketing that serves only the visitor is easy to measure and can quietly harm the other two. Much of my work is agreeing, with operations and finance, which promise comes first when a deck cannot hold everyone.

I present fare proposals, disruption reviews and our annual customer research to the board's customer and community committee, but I am not a director of Marelisse. I served six years as a volunteer director of the Brisemarée Community Foundation, a term that ended in 2023. I am now looking for a first independent seat where the confidence of customers is treated as a governance matter rather than a campaign, and where my habit of telling residents difficult things plainly might help a board hear its own customers more clearly.

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