It’s What I Was Born to Do

Four decades after a mentor at Sugarloaf taught her PR with no boundaries, The PR Maven® opens a new chapter of Maine Thrive Voices — and explains why old-fashioned public relations is exactly how a Maine business gets found by AI.

Nancy Marshall trademarked herself. The PR Maven® — maven meaning expert — has been doing public relations for more than forty years, and this year her agency, Marshall Communications, celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary with a team of six women serving clients that read like a tour of the Maine economy: the Maine Office of Tourism, Orvis, Wyman’s Wild Blueberries, Puritan. “It’s what I was born to do,” she says — and this episode is the story of how she figured that out, and what every Main Street business can borrow from it.

Pittsburgh, Then Sugarloaf

The discovery came early. Nancy’s father, an engineer for Westinghouse, recognized something in his teenage daughter and arranged for her to fly to Pittsburgh and job-shadow the woman who ran PR at Westinghouse headquarters — staying two nights in her home. Nancy came back to Maine and announced: “That’s what I’m doing.”

The refinement came at Sugarloaf, working for marketing VP Chip Carey, a PR dynamo who taught her to operate with no boundaries. Together they brought a live two-hour Good Morning America broadcast to the mountain — marching band on the slopes, freestyle backflips, synchronized skiing — and landed a page-one Wall Street Journal story when ski helmets became fashionable. They’d ride to New York and walk into The New York Times, Ski Magazine, The Today Show — sometimes without an appointment. The state’s tourism office noticed what she was doing at Sugarloaf, and that became the Maine Office of Tourism contract she still holds today. In 1991, she hung out her own shingle: a one-woman operation in an A-frame on the banks of the Carrabassett River.

How Can I Create a Circus Parade?

Chip Carey’s other lesson was visuals — and Nancy traces that instinct all the way back to P.T. Barnum, one of the original masters of public relations. When the circus came to town, the clowns and elephants and wagons paraded down Main Street. “I have that in my mind,” she says, “and every time I’m trying to do PR, it’s like, okay, how can I create a circus parade?”

Sometimes literally. Representing Northern Outdoors — where she became a licensed whitewater rafting guide, part of her total-immersion trademark — she invited News Center Maine’s Bill Green (a Bangor boy, as Sandy points out) up for “Flip Day,” the day you intentionally flip a raft in the Class V rapids. Bill lived to tell about it. It made for a great story. And there’s nothing more visual than a raft going over in boiling whitewater.

Taking Her Name Off the Door

In 2018, Nancy renamed the firm from Nancy Marshall Communications to Marshall Communications and hand-selected a leadership team — deliberately shining the light on the people around her, like Charlene Williams, who served twenty-nine years, and Whitney Raymond, fifteen years in and now running the agency. Nancy still confesses she loves being in the trenches making media outreach, but she focuses where she adds the most value. As she puts it: “Your network is your net worth.”

That network has been tested. From the early Sugarloaf years — including a chairlift derailment that sent skiers to the hospital — she learned crisis communications the hard way: never say “no comment,” never speculate, gather every fact you can verify, and tell what you know. It’s now one of the firm’s core specialties.

Known by the Right People

For the plumber in Hermon or the shop owner in Old Town wondering what any of this has to do with them, Nancy’s answer is direct: personal branding isn’t just for CEOs. You want to be the plumber people talk about — the one whose story they know, whose father and grandfather were plumbers, who’s the trustworthy one. “You give others the script so others can talk about you,” she says, because word-of-mouth is still the most powerful marketing there is. Sugarloafers — proudly waving their blue-triangle stickers up and down the turnpike — are her proof that a brand community will drive right past the competition.

The biggest branding mistake she sees? Wanting to be known by everyone. “I can’t be Oprah, even though I might wanna be Oprah.” But she is known in Maine by the right people, built over a long period of time — and accepting that you only need to be known by your targeted audience is, in her words, the first hurdle in business. Her advice for the owner with one hour a week and no budget: fish where the fish are. Figure out where your people’s eyeballs already are — the Little League ball field, the community radio station, the right social platform — and meet them there.

Found by AI

Nancy’s third book, due out within weeks of this recording, is about the renaissance of public relations because of AI — not a book about using AI, but about using PR to be found by it. The ill-informed think PR is dead because nobody reads the newspaper. Nancy’s argument runs the other way: AI systems lean on trustworthy sources — newspapers, television, podcasts like this one — precisely because they carry journalistic ethics.

Her example is a Maine one. She recently introduced the two young women who own Tides to Pines, a Midcoast vacation rental company, to a longtime Boston Globe freelancer — and the result was a gorgeous digital feature that will feed AI answers about Maine vacations essentially forever. “That is priceless,” she says. It’s the same lesson Chip Carey gave her at Sugarloaf in her twenties: “Briggs” — her maiden name — “this technology is really gonna impact public relations, and you gotta stay on top of it.” She has, for four decades — while still keeping a basket of handwritten letters behind her desk, because some old-fashioned connections are worth preserving.

Asked what it means to see Maine thrive, Nancy goes straight to children: parents who never put limits on what their kids can dream of, the way her own parents sent a teenage girl to Pittsburgh to find her profession. And her parting advice for every business owner comes from thirty-five years of grit: it’s not all cocktail parties and circus parades. Persist. Be tenacious. Be a friendly competitor. And when her book launches, she’s promised to come to Bangor and do the next episode in person — IRL.

Maine Thrive Insights is produced by Smith Digital Solutions, LLC in Bangor, Maine. This Insight is a companion to Maine Thrive Voices, Episode 13.