In 2017, she received the Gary McCormick Lifetime Achievement Award from the Volunteer Chapter of Public Relations Society of America. She graduated from Meredith College in Raleigh, NC with a bachelor’s degree in communications with a concentration in public relations.
Kelly is extensively involved in the East Tennessee community, having served in various leadership positions including board appointments with Second Harvest Food Bank, Knoxville Opera, Women’s Fund of East Tennessee, Susan G. Komen and Project GRAD.
Mom of Fletcher Kress (no, he’s not Fletcher Fletcher), Kelly is a lover of travel, football and all things culinary.
Kelly Fletcher: How our firm came to be
While living in Atlanta at the age of 28, I set out to purchase my first new car. It was one of the most frustrating experiences in my young consumer life. The predominantly male salespeople at the dealerships treated me like a second-class citizen and wanted to know when my husband was going to come look at cars with me.
I was so humiliated that I started calling dealerships to ask if they had a female salesperson I could speak with. I finally found one at CarMax, and she treated me with the level of respect and consideration I deserved.
That’s when I began to notice a void in the way marketers were communicating with female consumers. I was already in the agency business and became increasingly curious about how I could grow my knowledge around female consumer behavior and how women think and process information differently from men.
How did women make consumer purchasing decisions? Why were we an underserved market? Why did brands and businesses talk to us like we were delicate and needy?
Enter Jewelry Television, the national home shopping network based in Knoxville, TN. I made the move to Knoxville as the first director of corporate communications and public relations. Here we studied female consumer behavior, listened to what customers were saying and built actionable campaigns around the research. Fundamentally, this is how marketing communications should always be done.
After a few years, I grew weary of the corporate environment. I had always dreamed of starting my own agency, and I joked with former colleagues that if I was ever able to realize that dream, I was going to call it “My Agency,” because we were going to do things differently.
I launched Fletcher in 2008 as a single mom when my then-employer agreed to sign on as my first client. Talk about scary times!
Fletcher initially existed to help brands connect with female consumers. We still do that, but we’ve come a long way since 2008 and our experience and expertise is far deeper.
Still headquartered in Knoxville, TN, we employ highly experienced communications professionals in several states. We serve businesses from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies in the business-to consumer, business-to-business and non-profit sectors.
Our culture is driven by my personal desire to help amazingly intelligent, working moms find their place in a business hierarchy that historically has not been kind to us. By fostering a sense of transparency, autonomy and humanness, we are doing just that.
And I could not be prouder.