Peter Sorckoff, Founder and CEO, Seer World

Peter Sorckoff, Founder and CEO, Seer World

Founder & CEO / Creative & Critical Thinker / Complex Problem Solver / Marketing Leader / Behavioral Strategist  

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This is the story of a guy who was an athlete in his growing up days. As he grew up, he joined a rehabilitation centre to help drug addicts and alcoholic kids to get out of their dark life. With that he also started a business. With all these three things which were separate till then, he combined all the learnings and founded a behavioural strategist company.

We are talking about Peter Sorckoff, who is also our guest for this episode of our podcast. 

Peter is a Canadian, living in Atlanta, Georgia, US for over 20 years. He is the founder and CEO of Seer World, a company that works as a behavioural strategist. Peter has worked for popular brands like Coca-cola, NBA, MBL etc. He also has a strong connection with sports. He calls himself a Weekend Warrior Athlete.

He tells us that he grew up as an athlete. He used to play sports like hockey, soccer and golf and has learnt a lot of life lessons through sports.

Seer World

Peter tells us that people often see the Seer World as an agency. According to him, they are behavioural strategists. He also tells us that the term ‘brand’ is a little overused these days and people really don’t understand it well.

Talking about the target territory, Peter tells us that Seer World works both with people and corporations to understand the behaviour of their environment. He further says that organisations are made up of people only, so when they are helping people, they are automatically helping the organisations.

Moving into the Sports Marketing

Peter tells us that there was an interlude before he started his career in sports marketing. For about five to six years he had worked with drug addicts and alcoholic kids. There he learnt about human behaviour and reshaping negative behaviour into positive behaviour. After that, he started his first business of brokering high end cars. There he got introduced to a client who was the President and the General Manager of a hockey team. He asked Peter to work with him and this is how he got into sports marketing.

Learning Leadership

Peter tells us that while he was working in the therapeutic environment, he was handling a case of a drug addict. The drug addict did well, went home but eventually slipped into the drugs again. One day in the drugged state, he killed his grandmother. Peter was deeply affected by this story. He went for a counselling session expecting consolation and empathy, but he got the exact opposite. There his counsellor told him that the work he does is not about him or the individual he was working with. 

• He made Peter understand that he is just the messenger and if the individual gets the message fine, if he doesn’t, Peter should move on with him and start helping other kids. 
• According to Peter, the counsellor also helped him right size his role there. 

Both combined, it was to look at the bigger picture and get yourself out of the way. From a leadership perspective, Peter considers these two lessons as a milestone for his career.

Connecting Branding and Leadership

In Peter’s opinion, one can connect Branding with leadership in many ways. He says that if one is talking about personal branding, he can unequivocally connect it with leadership. He also tells us that leadership can also be connected to identity and being comfortable in one’s own skin. According to him, people like those are really trustworthy.

Peter further adds that being comfortable in your own skin makes you attractive to other people, likewise, if a brand identifies itself and is clear in what it stands for, people are naturally drawn to it. 

Fandom

Discussing fandom, Peter says that sports are a fantastic metaphor for fandom. As he studied the psychological structure of fandom, they broke it down to three core needs in individuals.

• The things that we are fans of are reflective of our sense of identity.
• The things we are fans of, meet our needs around a group affiliation, and that group affiliation is where we find a lot of personal safety.
• Fandom also creates our need for self-care.

Advice to the younger generation

Peter advises the people who are starting their careers to maintain a balance between curiosity and patience.

Peter epitomizes big picture thinking. He brings his 20+ years of marketing and branding experience to the table in every interaction, leveraging his deep understanding of the human subconscious and the phenomenon he calls ‘fandom’.

Peter’s career began in a therapeutic environment which has informed his human-centric vision of marketing from the outset. That insight has served him well in his roles for major brands in the NBA, MLB, NHL and other sports franchises around the world.

Prior to the launch of Seer, Peter was Chief Creative Officer & EVP Brand for the Atlanta Hawks and Philips Arena. At the Hawks, he managed the brand, marketing, digital, creative, production/content, innovation, and retail teams. Peter built an internal agency which changed the paradigm of sports partnerships with Coca-Cola, Anheuser Busch, Diageo, Verizon and FanDuel.

Peter also led the repositioning and rebranding of the Hawks franchise, and served as design lead on the $200M ‘Experience First’ renovation of Philips Arena, where groundbreaking architecture fulfilled the needs of a millennial audience. His leadership created the $40M Emory Courts practice facility — the USA’s first cohabited professional sports practice facility, human sports science lab and sports medicine and orthopedic practice. Peter also enabled Coca-Cola to integrate their global innovation platform (Bridge Community) into the broader Hawks franchise — another first in sports.