Ellen Brett

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Ellen Brett is a pioneering marketer and strategist who finds growth opportunities for brands facing challenging market forces. During a prestigious 18-year career at Pfizer, she led strategies for several of the most significant brands in the industry, including Zyrtec®, Chantix®, Viagra®, Lipitor®, and Lyrica®. Ellen’s breakthrough results propelled her to the firm’s most senior marketing leadership position. Later, as Head of Global Strategy and Innovation for a $24B business, Ellen designed the strategic assessment that identified key global commonalities, risks and growth opportunities during a time of major patent expirations and global economic instability, and also defined the organizational change required to realize them.


Prior to joining HawkPartners, Ellen led Brett Innovation, an independent consulting firm whose work focused on bringing her expertise and customer-centered methodologies to senior marketing executives seeking to improve launch and brand performance. Ellen believes that complex, value-based healthcare markets require new perspectives and patient-centered frameworks for brand development and commercialization. Ellen’s approaches and methodologies have been scaled from successful brand and local market prototypes to company-wide norms and training for brand marketing, including defining the best practice brand strategy methodology for a major Fortune 50 life sciences firm. Her work has spanned a variety of players in the healthcare industry, and she has also served clients in the hospitality, aerospace and other consumer-oriented industries.


Ellen has a BS in Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Perspectives by Ellen Brett