Elisa de Simone, Communication and Awareness Consultant

Professional and academic background

A path built at intersections.

My education and experience didn't develop along a single path. They gradually converged around the questions that still guide my work today: what really determines a choice? What makes communication credible? Why do certain dynamics continue to repeat themselves, even when everyone claims to want to change them? Where should we intervene to ensure that change produces concrete consequences?

I graduated in 2014 in Public Relations and Corporate Communications at IULM University in Milan. I chose this path based on a lifelong curiosity and talent: understanding how people communicate and what influences their ways of thinking, choosing, and acting. University provided a truly interdisciplinary method, tools, and foundation for an attitude that was already part of my way of observing the world. My skills include, but are not limited to, strategic and corporate communication, marketing, consumer psychology, sociology, sociology of consumption and media, semiotics, advertising languages, macroeconomics, and the English language, in which I achieved a C2 level (CELT) proficiency.

Among the teachings that have most influenced my way of looking at decisions are Sociology and Consumer Psychology.
Sociology provided a theoretical framework and method for something I already did spontaneously: observing people within the contexts in which they live, recognizing collective patterns, and connecting individual behaviors, culture, communication, and social change. At IULM, I explored this perspective through the sociology of social change with Rosantonietta Scramaglia and the study of cultural processes, media, and consumption, also exploring the thinking of Giampaolo Fabris and Alberto Abruzzese. This is one of the foundations of my systemic approach: it allows me to understand what happens to individuals without separating them from the relationships, organizations, and society in which they are immersed.

Consumer Psychology, followed by the professor Vincenzo Russo, professor of Consumer Psychology and Neuromarketing and scientific director of the Behavior & Brain Lab at IULM, consolidated my interest in psychology and the relationship between communication, perception, behavior, and purchasing choices: an interest that over the years has extended to decision-making processes, relationships, and organizational dynamics.

I have worked as an employee and, since 2016, as a freelancer; remotely, in-person, and in hybrid mode; as an external consultant and as a professional permanently embedded in company processes. I have collaborated in teams, reported directly to the CEO and management, coordinated activities, and served for three years as a member of the Board of Directors of a joint-stock company. I have therefore observed organizations from the inside and outside, in operational and decision-making roles, in day-to-day relationships, and in the phases where a strategic choice impacts people, processes, and results.

Over time, I've worked with companies, professionals, brands, organizations, and cultural entities on strategic communications, branding, content, storytelling, processes, sustainability, and events. Among the experiences that have helped shape my approach are collaborations with: Ravensburger, B2T and Aerre Partners, together with projects in which the issue to be addressed never belonged to a single discipline.

This variety didn't produce a random set of skills. It taught me to connect strategy and behavior, communication and culture, goals and relational dynamics, intuition and verification. my continuous training through study, observation, research and application concrete: I consider qualifications and certifications to be useful tools, while competence is demonstrated in the way one understands a problem, connects different knowledge and generates value in a real-world context.