MEET OUR PRINCIPAL »

Kristi Mendez is the founder and principal of KMPR Marketing & Public Relations.
(The company name makes sense now, right?) Kristi has been working in the communications industry for more than 10 years - as a public relations pro and a journalist. She spent time at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Nashville Banner before her move to PR.

She has a master's in mass communication from the University of Georgia which she put to use at two full-service Chicago agencies before launching KMPR in 2003.

Kristi has worked in a variety of consumer and business-to-business markets, securing coverage for clients in a few rags you may have heard of like The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Crain's Chicago Business and The Christian Science Monitor. She's also landed clients on The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN and local radio and television stations around the country.

We're strategists who are smart, sophisticated, and even witty.

We've been partnering with clients across the country helping them to strategize what and how they want to communicate. And we promise you won't get lost in the shuffle like you might with a bigger agency. We're small, and we intend to stay that way to keep offering clients the best and most personal service we can. We're always working with your ultimate goal in mind, without losing sight of the small stuff. Call us anal retentive if you want. Won't be the first time.

We're not in business to make friends, but that seems to be a natural reaction for us. Why? Because we work smart, we work hard and we bring a keen insight to everything that we do. We know that clients come to us for our expertise, but we can't do our job effectively without also relying on them for access to their inner workings as we create plans and strategies.

We're not afraid to ask the tough questions. Every engagement starts with the basics: What's your business goal? What other messages compete for your audience's attention? What's known, and what do we need to learn, before we can move forward effectively? How do we define the success of the program and build upon it in an ongoing way?

Once we answer these questions we can not only create a strategy for success but a working plan on how to get there.