John Sullivan

Featured · Professional work

Packaging After Plastic: Trend Brief and Client Retention Plan

Perftech laser-perforates packaging film for food companies. Food packaging is moving away from conventional plastic, and its clients will have to redesign their packs. I researched what is driving the shift and built a brief on how Perftech can keep its clients through that redesign.

Featured · Predictive analytics

Predictive Analytics for Customer Targeting

A company wanted to limit an expensive free-trial campaign to its most valuable customers. Our team took raw point-of-sale data for 256 key customers, built recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) metrics, tested clustering solutions in Tableau, and used regression in Excel to pick the segment the firm should target. I was the project coordinator and presentation lead.

"Every server knows which regulars keep a restaurant going. This was the first time I saw that in a spreadsheet."

Featured · Crisis communications

Operation Cyber Shield: Sunnylake Hospital Crisis Response

Built from the Harvard case When Hackers Turn to Blackmail. A ransomware attack locked a hospital out of its electronic medical records. Our team acted as the hospital's communications office and produced a full response: key message, stakeholder map, PR toolkit, success metrics and a $1M budget. I wrote the press release as the hospital's Chief Communications Officer.

"We argued about whether the hospital should pay the ransom. Defending that choice publicly was the most interesting part."

"Our mission is simple but urgent: protect lives and restore patients' trust in the midst of a serious cyber threat." From my press release for the campaign.

Featured · Brand strategy

Canada Goose: Multicultural Marketing and Financial Analysis on the East Coast

A brand analysis of the Canada Goose parka line in New York, Boston and D.C. I paired the company's FY2024 and FY2025 annual reports with street-level observation to argue that the product fits the East Coast, but the marketing does not reflect the Black, Hispanic and Asian American consumers who drive the region's style.

"This one mixed my own take on style with real financials, which is how I like to think about brands."

Featured · Research paper

Renewable Energy Investment and the Promise of Next-Generation Geothermal

A 4,000-word term paper in two parts. Part 1 explains why capital keeps flowing into renewables: climate risk, falling costs, the scale of money in play, energy security, pollution, regulation, belief and the political weight of EV owners. Part 2 asks whether next-generation geothermal can fill the gap that wind and solar leave when they stop producing.

"The 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis happened while I was writing this, so the paper kept changing under me."

Featured · Primary research

Con Edison Gas Safety Research

Con Edison asked for research on why people who smell gas often don't report it, after a 2014 East Harlem explosion where residents noticed the odor days before. Our team used design thinking and the 5 Whys to frame the problem, wrote and ran a survey of 77 New York residents, and coded the results into frequency tables and crosstabs to test our hypotheses.

"Writing our own survey and seeing real New Yorkers answer it was different from analyzing a dataset someone hands you."

TakeawayPut the message on subways, buses and online, where attention was highest, and keep a phone number front and center, since most people would rather call than use an app.