Susan Oguche fell in love with public relations in college. Now the self-declared “nerd” is the chief communications officer for Rock Entertainment Group.
By Sharon Broussard
Photography by Jason Miller
Purpose. Community engagement. Personal and professional growth.
Those are the touchstones in the nearly 20-year communications career of Susan Oguche, who last year became the executive vice president and chief communications officer for the Cleveland Cavaliers, Rock Entertainment Group, and the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse.
“For me, purpose is my biggest thread – and contributing and learning, entering spaces that stretch and challenge me,” says Oguche, who has worked for Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, the health tech giant Abbott, and Nike, Inc.
The new Shaker resident has been able to do all that and more during her first year at the communications helm for Rock Entertainment Group, the umbrella for Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s sports and entertainment companies.
During a tour of Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, which includes Cleveland Cavaliers’ arena and corporate offices, we watched as employees carefully laid down the basketball floor like a huge jigsaw puzzle. Underneath the flooring is an ice rink for the ice hockey team, the Monsters, which also plays at the arena.
In addition to the Cavaliers and the Monsters, Oguche and her communications team of 10 are also responsible for the Cleveland Charge, an NBA affiliate basketball team formerly known as the Canton Charge, the Legion Gaming Club (an esport team), and myriad events at the Fieldhouse.
A Higher Purpose
On Cleveland Cavaliers’ game night, you can find Oguche, a passionate basketball fan, sitting with the media – “just in case I am needed” – or roaming the arena, greeting people because she is in “an introductory phase,” she says with a laugh.
The Fieldhouse has something happening “200 days a year,” including weddings. But the married mother of two, who just bought a home in Shaker, came to Rock Entertainment for a bigger reason. “Honestly, what sold it were my initial conversations with Nic Barlage, who is also a Shaker Heights resident,” she says. Barlage is CEO of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Rock Entertainment Group, and Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse.
“Honestly, what sold it were my initial conversations with Nic Barlage, who is also a Shaker Heights resident,” she says. Barlage is CEO of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Rock Entertainment Group, and Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse.
“Nic started talking about the role that our team has in the community and the way he saw our arena as a community asset, how he saw the organization as important community champions,” says Oguche. Her career has “always been trying to work with organizations that have a higher purpose.”
It’s apparent that Rock Entertainment is a great match for her. Barlage says Rock Entertainment is doing more than just counting “wins and losses.” It’s also helping to make the Cleveland area a better place, a message straight from owner Dan Gilbert.
Since she started in 2022, Oguche has been all in, doing everything from serving as a board member of Providence House, Cleveland’s crisis nursery, to meeting people in the community and telling the company’s story, says Barlage.
“I think she’s great,” he says. “She has a positive attitude, a cando attitude. We have this saying, ‘Yes before no,’ and she absolutely embodies that. She’s been a ball of energy for us in a great way.
“Soul Work”
And Oguche hasn’t been disappointed in Rock Entertainment. She’s proud that the company’s second annual Wine and Gold Gala recently raised $1 million to support nonprofits and programs for Northeast Ohio youth. She eagerly talks about Hoops After Dark, a program sponsored by Rock Entertainment and the City of Cleveland that strives to prevent crime by keeping basketball-loving teenagers off the streets.
“Our North Star is to be a force for good in the region,” she says of her company.
And she likes to be hands-on. It’s why she became a Providence House board member. The agency, which offers short-term care for the children of struggling parents, partners with the Cleveland Cavaliers and other sports teams, says Natalie Leek, the president and CEO of Providence House, who was pleased to get a phone call from Oguche asking if she could serve on the board.
Oguche calls it “soul work.”
“I feel like I’m joining Providence House at such an important time as well because it has historically been focused on Cleveland’s West Side and now they’re like five minutes from my house in Shaker with their new Buckeye neighborhood location,” she says. “So the proximity of that and the opportunities that open up to rally my neighbors and my friends around this mission, I think are really important as well.”
“She has such an interesting background in her own career path,” says Leek, who points to Oguche’s public relations work at Procter & Gamble, which sells diapers among other products, and Abbott, known for its infant formula. “It’s providence that she ended up in Providence House.”
It’s providence in a lot of ways. Oguche, who spent her teen years in Cincinnati, never thought she would be in public relations. She was born in Nigeria to Aaron Isa Baba, a chemist, and Pauline Ann Baba, a computer scientist. The family immigrated to the United States so her father could get a doctorate in chemistry. The Babas lived in Louisiana, New Jersey, and Alabama as Aaron followed his dream. When her father became a chemistry professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Oguche attended Reading Junior Senior High School in Reading, Ohio and graduated from Ohio State University with a BS in marketing.
She loved to write. She was an avid participant in the Power of the Pen writing contest and the editor of the Devil’s Advocate student newspaper at Reading High. In college, she took business and professional writing classes and considered becoming a journalist.
Yet it wasn’t until her last year as a summer intern at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati that she discovered her true love – public relations. “I was like, ‘What is this magical place?’ It was what I had always been looking for. It was marketing in that you’re promoting a product or a good or a service, and I also got to write and work with journalists. I got to tell the story of the brand.”
The Hard Works Pays Off
Proctor & Gamble hired her after college. She worked on a number of different accounts in Ohio and Boston including Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, which, she points out with a laugh, is “literally a block of melamine foam. How do you romance a product like that? How do you tell a story around that? So it was fun. It was challenging.”
Her hard work at the company did not go unnoticed. She won numerous public relations awards during her 11 years there. Phillip Sontag, who has held senior positions at some of the world’s best known PR firms, and who knew Oguche at P&G during her early career days, says he is not surprised by her success. First of all, P&G is a great training ground for young people in the communications field and secondly, he knew that Oguche would just soak it up.
“She always came across as very poised, very bright,” says Sontag. “I always thought to myself that this is a young woman who will go far in her career.”
After Procter & Gamble, Oguche worked in public affairs for Abbott handling communications for the health tech giant’s infant formula division, and later at a startup in Chicago where she built a communications team. When the startup was sold, she moved to Sleep Number, the “smart” mattress company in Minneapolis.
In January, 2020, she accepted a job at Nike, Inc. in Portland, Oregon because she wanted to work at a global retail company. It was a huge challenge because the store had 45,000 retail employees in dozens of countries, but she says, “I’m always trying to find that balance of where I can learn a new skill, a new industry, and where I can be useful.”
The COVID-19 pandemic hit just three months later. Nike closed stores as employees became sick and it had to operate under different, often confusing masking and quarantine regulations. This made communicating the rules to employees a challenge. Still, the company managed to open one of its flagship stores in Paris, the Nike House of Innovation, during the pandemic. While she handled the communications for the new store, she didn’t get a chance to see it until this summer when her family went to France on vacation.
“It was a horrible time for the world,” she says about the pandemic. “It’s crazy to think that that was just a few years ago, but in terms of being able to flex different muscles and understand the business of communication in a different way, it was really a meaningful learning experience.”
By the time Oguche landed at Rock Entertainment, she had a lengthy resume – and experience in the world of basketball. The self-declared nerd knew all about the game, thanks to her husband’s nonprofit, Crown Elite Sports, which helps develop the next generation of basketball players in Nigeria. Her husband, Hanson Oguche, used to play for the Nigerian national basketball team. His nonprofit holds tournaments in Nigeria in an effort to popularize the game.
Oguche started out as just the “press release writer” for her husband’s project but “I developed my own passion for basketball. So when this opportunity at Rock Entertainment came it felt like a natural next step.
Because It’s Beautiful
Falling in love with the tree-lined streets of Shaker Heights after living in leafy green Portland was another natural step, says Oguche, who is the mother of two daughters, Abigail, 7, and Grace, 2. “It’s so beautiful here and the old homes have such beautiful architecture.” Inventory was tight in Shaker, but she was able to find a house thanks to real estate agent Kim Price, a long-time Cincinnati friend who insisted Shaker was the perfect city for Oguche. And it has been perfect, says Oguche. “I feel blessed that we get to be here. We didn’t sacrifice the things that are important to us like diversity and being able to have neighbors that invite us over for dinner and ring the doorbell and ask if the girls can come over and play.“ Her goal is to get her mother and little brother, who will graduate from high school soon in Portland, to move to Shaker. Her father died recently. “We want to make sure that he’s able to finish strong without too much transition,” Oguche says about her
brother. “But I’m like, as soon as he’s done, you got to come on over here because it’s beautiful.”
