Melanie Wells, a longtime business journalist, helps companies and business leaders find, shape, and share their stories. A thought leadership, communications, and content strategist, Melanie develops programs that position companies and their top executives to customers, employees, investors, journalists, and strategic partners. 

As the founder and principal of Wells Narrative Group in New York, Melanie is a brand-savvy trusted advisor to companies large and small. She helps her clients bring their stories to life through content and thought leadership programs---corporate messaging, content-rich web sites, blog posts, keynote speeches, guest bylines, and social media programs. Relevant experience includes content and executive thought leadership work for Johnson & Johnson; Xerox; ISKO, a Turkish denim maker, and a number of advertising, innovation, and branding firms.

Before becoming a communications and content counselor, Melanie banked a wealth of knowledge and a book of contacts as a high-profile business writer and editor at Forbes and Forbes.com, where she was known for spotting and writing rich, insightful stories about public and private companies, family- run enterprises, and business executives—from entrepreneurs to billionaires.

As one of the nation’s best-known marketing editors, Melanie wrote and spoke about emerging trends and practices in branding, advertising and media for many years. She chronicled the power of cult brands, social marketing, and was the first journalist to explore “neuromarketing.” Melanie created the Forbes CMO Network, a successful Forbes.com channel featuring content aimed at chief marketing officers---the first of its kind.   

Before joining Forbes, Melanie was a business reporter and marketing columnist at USA Today in New York. Earlier in her career, she worked as a reporter and columnist at Advertising Age and The Washington Business Journal.  

Melanie has written for numerous outlets as a freelancer and as a ghostwriter, including Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Inc.com, and Psychology Today, among other publications. She has frequently appeared as a commentator on business, leadership, brands, and marketing trends on ABC, NBC, CNN, CNBC and NPR’s “Marketplace.” 

While she is best known as a journalist who covers people who are passionate about business, she has written about other obsessions. In a profile of a rock-and-roll groupie for a men’s magazine, Melanie was the first journalist to make note of the roving eye of a certain politician who later became President of the United States.

Today she brings her experience in journalism, her knowledge of marketing, her passion for content, and her expertise as a communications counselor to all her work.            

Melanie graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BA in journalism. She lives in New York City.