Getting others involved is in Cronin’s DNA

WORLD BUILDING: Maureen Cronin, Worldways Social Marketing CEO and co-founder, works with her husband, company President Mark Marosits. Cronin says social marketing is about creating social change by
WORLD BUILDING: Maureen Cronin, Worldways Social Marketing CEO and co-founder, works with her husband, company President Mark Marosits. Cronin says social marketing is about creating social change by "using theoretical models that actually work." / PBN PHOTO/ KATE WHITNEY LUCEY

As one of two top executives at a social-benefit corporation in Rhode Island, Maureen Cronin gets hired to solve problems and create change.

She takes on that role as co-founder and CEO through her firm, Worldways Social Marketing, in Newport, and partners with her husband, co-founder and President Mark Marosits.

Founded in 1996, the social-benefit corporation works with a variety of nonprofits, providing social marketing and Web-development services. The company has completed more than 1,000 social-marketing engagements involving health and health-behavior change, the environment, fair trade and more, working globally.

Social marketing is about creating social change by “using theoretical models that actually work,” Cronin said. The firm employs 13 people, including Web developers, creative artists, social media experts and public-health specialists.

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Cronin, 60, sees her strongest skill as that of problem solver, and it’s one that emerged early in her career.

Employer Joe Vacchio of the international corporation Hart, Schaffer & Marx of Chicago chose Cronin, at the time a young, single mother working different jobs to make ends meet, to work with him in the fashion industry in Boston. She later helped open a store in her hometown of Manchester, N.H.

“He taught me the details of finance and running operations,” Cronin recalled. “He told me he thought I was a good, complex thinker and good at identifying [a] problem and solutions.”

As a young woman, Cronin had studied marketing, and became certified in health care administration. From 1994 on she also studied anthropology at the Metropolitan College of Denver, making the connection between marketing and understanding social and cultural norms.

“I consider myself a continuous learner,” Cronin said.

In 1983, at age 28, she was invited to help run communications for a local hospital in Manchester, a move that led to a lengthy career in health care.

At that hospital, the Catholic Medical Center, Cronin was public relations director, working with the CEO and the board on consensus and capacity building. While working there, she met her husband-to-be. But in 1993, the community hospital became part of a larger, more complex system.

So, in 1994, Cronin left the East Coast to become marketing director for a health care system in Denver, staying there as a merger of two health care systems evolved. She and Marosits, who moved there in the early 1990s, married in 1996, she said.

Yet as good as she was at this type of work, the impersonal nature of larger health care systems didn’t appeal to her. By December 1996, in the back of a flower shop, she founded Worldways Social Marketing, and six months later, her husband became her partner.

Marosits has been both mentor and partner, she added, teaching her to listen more attentively and ask incisive questions.

The company became an official social-benefit corporation in Rhode Island in 2015, five years after the couple dissolved the Denver office and moved to Newport from Denver.

“We feel pretty strongly that people have obligations to be involved in society, to make positive change, get out of their comfort zone, be aware and involved,” she said.

An early accomplishment involved helping develop a national model for emergency-preparedness communication after Sept. 11 by working with the Santa Clara County, Calif., health and hospital system. The model was adopted as a best practice by the National Association of City and County Health Officials, she said.

The company has been working with the state of Delaware for four years on health outcomes through their Department of Public Health. And that’s just one of 15 active projects.

Her goals for the company? “Continue doing what we’re doing now,” she said: “Be accessible [and] involved.” •

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