The Root of the Root
The Root of the Root: Understanding a Company’s Why
By Stacy Ennis: An Interview with Emily Soccorsy, Director of Corporate Communication & Marketing
Every morning as she was growing up, Emily Soccorsy’s dad would wake her up and sing. Just sing. This enthusiasm spread into other areas of Emily’s life—namely, education.
“What are you going to school for?” he’d ask her and her three brothers as they ate their breakfast. “You’re going to school to learn how to think!”
“He was so enthusiastic about our educational journeys,” explains Emily, now director of corporate communication and marketing for TTI Success Insights and Target Training International. “I grew up in a world where it was great to be curious, it was great to ask questions, it was great to continue to learn, to constantly learn.”
Her curious nature has played out well in her career. Emily’s early work was in a field built on curiosity: journalism. She spent eight and a half years as a reporter and editor, learning how to interview—not to mention overcome nervousness about approaching people and diving into their lives and stories.
Later, she was the publisher of several newspapers and magazines in the Phoenix area, where she led the transition to blog-based content. The move to digital was not easy for newspapers and other print publications. Many of the people she worked with backed away from the challenge.
“I just never had that inclination,” she says. “I always thought, ‘I have no idea, but throw me in, let me figure it out.’”
This willingness to try—to see challenges as opportunities—is something Emily still uses today in her role at TTI Success Insights and Target Training International. In fact, Emily has found that challenges never stop, even when a company has been around for over 30 years. The organizations recently underwent some changes, and the brand was shifting but in a state of flux. They needed direction.
Around that time, Emily reconnected with brand strategist Justin Foster at a conference, and the two immediately agreed on the organizations’ needs: clarity, simplicity, and emotional messaging. They also needed to clarify why TTI Success Insights and Target Training International do what they do.
“I often refer to it as ‘the root of the root,’” Emily explains, quoting her favorite poet, E. E. Cummings. The company needed time to reflect on their essence—the root of the root. “That’s been incredibly helpful in articulating the changes we’ve made on the Web and in our newsletters and everything that goes out, including the design of our webinars, our topics, subject lines, all the way down through the detail chain.”
Part of creating that message, she says, is answering a simple question: Why should people care?
“Bring it back to a human level, bring it back to the clearest message possible,” Emily adds. “The world is just so fractured message-wise—communication-wise—that you have to be very focused and simple in what you’re trying to deliver.”
The first step toward that kind of clarity and simplicity? Getting to the root of the root. That, and perhaps boundless curiosity, an unquenchable love of learning…and maybe even a little singing in the morning.