Lee A. Barrie
Vice PresidentLee Barrie has been with Kurman Communications, Inc. since 2001. He brings more than twenty-five years experience in marketing, media management and corporate communications to Kurman Communications. He manages a broad array of KCI’s marketing, business development, account service and communications functions.
At Kurman Communications, Barrie wears many hats, from business development to writing communications material and day-to-day account management. He has been instrumental in bringing state-fo-the art technical tools, such as electronic distribution processes and customized HTML formatted press materials, to the agency.
Barrie earned his MBA in marketing at Northwestern University’s prestigious Kellogg Graduate School of Management in 1982. He then joined Carlson Marketing Group, one of North America’s largest marketing services companies. At Carlson, he worked with Fortune 500 corporations to design and implement marketing channel development programs. Focused on strengthening learning, communications and motivation throughout the sales channel, these programs helped increase dealer/retailer loyalty, helped improve their product knowledge and sales ability. His clients came from a wide range of industries including manufacturing, banking and financial services, utilities and automotive.
In the 1980s and '90s Barrie was one of country's pioneers in the use of desktop publishing technology to improve design and production of communications pieces. Having developed technical expertise in this field in the mid-eighties, and coupled with his expertise in corporate culture building, in 1989 he joined Hearst Magazines in New York City to institute a company-wide transformation in editorial production processes. By redesigning jobs and refining editorial workflow processes to synchronize with the new technologies, he helped the publications significantly improve their efficiency and editorial quality.
Barrie’s media career continued to expand as he took on greater roles at Times Mirror Magazines, the New York Times Magazine Group and later at DeskNet Inc., one of New York’s leading publishing consulting firms. He also was one of the first to pioneer cross-media publishing technologies involving CD-ROM and web publishing. He has worked a virtual who's who of national magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Golf Digest, Billboard, Adweek, Computer Reseller News, Golf Magazine, Skiing Magazine, Ski Magazine, Sports Afield, Field and Stream, Redbook, Harper’s Bazaar, House Beautiful and many others.