Tina Wells

CEO, Buzz Marketing Group

Tina Wells, CEO of Buzz Marketing Group, is currently celebrating her 11th year of doing just that. Embracing her passion for fashion and her fascination with pop culture, Tina began writing reviews on companies and their products that target youth for the New Girl Times, a newspaper for young girls when she was just 16. Realizing the obvious disconnect between teens’ desires and companies’ misdirected outreach, Tina developed an innovative and creative strategy to merge the gap. She decided to submit her reviews and suggestions directly to the companies and was amazed by their overwhelmingly positive responses. They were hooked on the precocious insight Tina was able to deliver and thus, Buzz Marketing Group was born. Along with Buzz Marketing Group’s worldwide network of more than 9,000 teen consultants (“BuzzSpotters”), Tina has created innovative marketing strategies, focus groups, and youth marketing research campaigns for numerous beauty, entertainment, fashion, financial and lifestyle clients. These clients include, just to name a few: St. Martins Press, SonyBMG, And1, Sesame Workshop, and Time Inc. In the meantime, Tina earned a B.A. in Communication Arts and graduated with honors from Hood College in May 2002. She is currently in a post-baccalaureate program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business for marketing management.

Tina has also been spotlighted in numerous national print media publications. Her list of honors include: the Essence 40 Under 40 Award, Billboard’s 30 Under 30 Award, the Voices Black Women Business Leaders Top Ten List, and AOL’s Black Voices Black Female Entrepreneurs Award. Tina has also been appointed to the Kids for Kids Advisory Board, the National Board of Directors for the Friends of Orphans, The Business Women’s Network, and serves on a Christopher Reeves’ Foundation Advisory Board. Moreover, Tina has been recognized as an “Architect of Change” at the 19th Annual Governor and First Lady’s Conference on Women and Family, and named as Youth Culture’s “It” Social Anthropologist.