Marc Durbin brings more than 35 years of management consulting experience in marketing strategy and marketing communications to his role as an independent marketing consultant. Durbin’s skills lie in a unique ability to blend his creative background with business experience gained at both startup levels and with large international organizations.
Early Consulting Experience
Durbin first gained marketing experience in 1972 as an entry-level assistant at Carter Daniel Advertising, quickly rising to the position of Art Director. Later in San Antonio he was named an Associate, the youngest to do so at the national firm of McFann Gray & Associates, management consultants to some of the world’s largest organizations, including Bank of America and the Pentagon.
International Marketing & Manufacturing
For seven years starting in 1987 Durbin was engaged in global operations as a marketing manager for the international trading group Royal Orleans. While there he was responsible for establishing distribution licenses for the German, Japanese, Australian and Canadian markets.
He also set up manufacturing arrangements at factories in England, France and Italy, throughout East Asia from Japan to South Korea in the north, across Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines along the Pac Rim, and south into Thailand. Durbin also traveled extensively throughout the United States and to Mexico and Canada, setting up distribution and production arrangements for a long list of clients.
In the U.S., Durbin worked the trade show floor of virtually every major wholesale marketplace, from the Dallas Market Center to Atlanta’s Merchandise Mart, from Los Angeles to Chicago, Las Vegas, Seattle, Philadelphia, and others. For two years he gained experience as a national sales manager for Royal Orleans, managing manufacturers’ rep agencies in 17 regional territories from Maine to southern California, and worked directly with the principals of each of the 17.
In 1990 Durbin was instrumental in bringing the first giftware trade association to Tokyo and met with U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Michael Armacost, to discuss new opportunities for American exports. In 1992 he met with parliament members of the House of Commons in London to discuss trade and tariff legislation during the establishment of the European Union.
Durbin is a highly sought-after advisor to companies interested in licensing their brands. At Royal Orleans he was the primary contact with attorneys representing the estates of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Charlie Chaplin. He also managed the Hollywood Walk of Fame license with exclusive rights to hundreds of celebrity properties. Using his art background, Durbin directed product development under license with ABC Television, 20th Century Fox, The Coca-Cola Company and Disney Studios. In 2003 he entered into a limited partnership with Joe Williams, the Williams of Keller Williams Realty, in a licensing deal to promote the KW brand in sales agent recruitment. During that time, KW went from #5 to #3 in U.S. sales agents, surpassing Prudential and ReMax in marketshare.
For the past several years, Durbin has been independently consulting. Among the many clients he advises, two are worth noting. Cygnal Integrated Products was a newly-launched VC-funded startup when Durbin entered the picture in 1999. Within four years, Cygnal was acquired by Silicon Laboratories in a stock transaction valued at more than $60 million. During that time, Durbin created their trademark, their sales literature, direct mail campaigns, print advertising, online promotions, and tradeshow graphics. His particular expertise was in helping the company communicate to a technical audience.
The second example is BusinesSuites, a national executive-suites operator owned by Ian Turpin and Luci Baines Johnson, daughter of the former President. Durbin was brought in early, when the company had a single corporate-owned center in Austin and three franchise licenses with the HQ (now Regus) brand in Dallas and Houston. After six years of Durbin’s involvement, BusinesSuites was profitably operating 15 corporate-owned centers across the United States from Baltimore to Las Vegas. Durbin’s role was to provide strategic marketing advice and to assist with branding and marketing communications. He developed their trademark and website, as well as an extensive library of sales literature.
Durbin holds an M.B.A. from the McCombs Graduate School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned a B.A. in studio art, also from the University of Texas at Austin, graduating with honors. Prior to matriculation at Texas, he attended art school in Vienna, Austria, studying under mosaicist Mario Decleva, painter Carl Unger, and printmaker Sigi Schenk. Concurrently, Durbin attended the University of Vienna for linguistics and its medical school for anatomy and chemistry. Years earlier at the age of 15 he successfully completed a three-year program in fine art from a correspondence school in southern Connecticut known for its esteemed faculty including painter Ben Shahn and illustrator Norman Rockwell.