Dr. Nita Rollins

Dr. Nita Rollins is an author, futurist and business strategist who has helped over 135 leading businesses improve their brand equity and brand experience. She has industry expertise in B2B, fashion, luxury, retail, mixed use environments, entertainment, consumer goods, technology, hospitality, and financial services.

While holding executive positions at IBM IX, Fitch Worldwide (WPP agency), RPA, and other creative agencies over a 25-year career, she directed client strategy as well as the agencies’ thought leadership positioning and programs. At the nation’s largest independent digital agency Resource/Ammirati, she helped drive a decade of tenfold revenue growth as Executive Director of Marketing & Thought Leadership and co-first author of The Open Brand: When Push Comes To Pull In A Web-Made World (Peachpit Press), a digital co-creative brand handbook written during the digital watershed year of 2007, used by over 25 Fortune 500 brands, and translated into five languages.

While serving as the Futurist for R/A, she pioneered a Cultural Semiotics practice, which prepared brands for zeitgeist changes, and a Trends & Futuring practice. The latter grew into one of the first continuous innovation labs in the creative services industry, ultimately developing the first commercial use of Google Glass and the first Facebook ecommerce application. Her trends and futuring work led to a stint as futurist for national intelligence in 2010.

A humanistic and systems thinker, Nita co-directed a Global Brand Belonging Index with Ipsos Research and worked with IBM Watson Marketing to develop the diagnostic & predictive analytics of Brand Belonging—in effect bringing big data and “thick data” together. Nita’s consumer journey and brand experience frameworks have been adopted by multiple industries, creative agencies, and taught as course material at Harvard, Stanford, and The OSU Fisher College of Business, where Nita guest lectured for eight years and helped develop an MBA course based on The Open Brand.

A former magazine editor-in-chief and newspaper film critic, Nita has applied her journalistic and research talents to content creation for Fortune 500 brands, startups and leading creative agencies. Her insights have been featured in 30 marketing, design and film books, and her expert commentary, articles and bylines featured in The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Time, Business Week, US News & World Report, Financial Times, USA Today, Women’s Wear Daily, The Chicago Tribune, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Information Week, Bigthink.com Design Management Journal, Innovation:the IDSA Quarterly, New Design Magazine (UK), Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, Rolling Rorschach, Dispositif (France), Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Telematics Update, Ad Age, The Fiscal Times, Huffington Post, Bizjournals.com, CRM Magazine, Luxury Daily, Chain Store Age, OMMA, Stores Magazine, VM+SD, DDI, Restaurants & Institutions, Nation’s Restaurant News, Boston Business Journal, The Palm Beach Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Cincinnati Enquirer, and The Columbus Dispatch.

Nita was awarded the Otis Ferguson Critical Writing Award while earning her Ph.D. in Critical Studies from UCLA’s Department of Theater, Film & TV. She was also the recipient of research fellowships at The University of California Humanities Research Institute, the University of Paris III and the Collège Internationale de Philosophie.

In 2019, Nita founded Stylograph, a management and marketing consultancy.