About Tom Lanen, President, Brand & Creative Strategist

An Informal Overview

Tom Lanen founded Thomas Marketing Services Corporation, as a "full
service marketing communication agency" in 1989 with charter clients Kurzweil
Applied Intelligence (medical clinician voice recognition), ALE Systems (laser power supplies), and the Velcro companies, with whom he worked for more than 17 years.

Recently rebranded as ThomasBoston, today Tom's mission is to help business owners
and marketers solve Brand and marketing problems, online and off, that can keep
companies from fully achieving their goals.

He and his teams bring a wealth of brand marketing, messaging, and project management
experience to small businesses and retailers. He collaborates openly and transparently
with business owners and stakeholders who may not know or enjoy marketing as much
they do their primary calling, but who understand the value of current and focused
business and personal brands, and how they create and sustain markets, sales, and equity.

Part and parcel of this is to help clients express their style, improve the effectiveness of
their brand and marketing communication programs, improve customer acquisition
and sales, and reduce business costs.

Prior to starting Thomas Marketing Services, Tom worked in a number of Boston area advertising agencies, most notably Ingalls Associates (pre-BBDO), where he managed the agency's public utility accounts, Boston Edison and Public Service Company of NH. (For a career synopsis, please see Tom's LinkedIn Profile.)

He credits his late father, Teuvo "Ted" Lanen, a sales engineer (EE, Tufts - NROTC), and the owner Leo C. Pelkus Inc.,
the MA, NH, ME, and VT manufacturers' rep company for Edwin L. Wiegand and Chromalox (which at the time were Emerson Electric Co. businesses), for his ability to understand and translate both conceptual and technical subjects into the language of the customer.

He was also influenced by his Dad's avocation as a wood sculptor and oil painter, and the exhilaration of creative communication emanating from natural design. "A lot of what I am is largely from osmosis - coming of age with a self-driven engineer who was also very much a humanist," he recalls. He also has fond memories of Al Buyer, also a wood sculptor, who was an early career mentor who taught him many life lessons over the 5 years Tom worked at his pioneering recruitment and human resource advertising agency.

Today Tom has well-established relationships with a full range of expert resources, which include web and interactive developers, designers, writers, social, buzz and media experts, and ancillary service professionals  and vendors for clients who desire "one-stop shopping."

Tom Lanen's formal CV is available upon request.

A graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (B.A., English), Tom has done post-grad study at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has also been a guest lecturer in Marketing at Bentley College.

He resides in the deep 'burbs of Boston with his wife, and their three young sons whom he's coached along the way in youth soccer and baseball, and whose ever-increasing appetites are getting 'pretty scary.' His outside interests include live music events, ongoing maintenance of the family's log home, fishing with his boys, skiing, and occasional walks on golf courses. He also has a mystery novel and a children's green book series on his boards . . . in his 'spare time.'

He can be conned into going sailing on a moment's notice.

What People Say About Tom

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