Founded in 1996, Will Power Integrated Marketing was founded by 25-year beauty industry and Salon owner Wil Shelton. Will Power Integrated Marketing is a full- service experimental, event activation agency specializing in the beauty/barber industry.
 

Wil’s vision for Wil Power Integrated Marketing was born of hard-won experience. He knew a different kind of agency was needed-a firm that takes a holistic and integrated approach towards promoting salons, stylists and barbers, while consistently over-delivering on value and responsiveness.
 

Shelton feels that it's important for brands to have multicultural divisions or arms because most brands are setting up multicultural departments.
 

Wil Power Integrated Marketing is positioned in more than 40 urban markets nationwide (with well-established business relationships with over 100,000 African American salons and barbershop nationwide and the ability to reach over 100 million consumers annually.
 

The agency provides a means to maximize a brand's overall marketing through timely, strategic product placement and with lucrative sales results that follow. This network allows for a brand message to be displayed in store where these shops are excellent venues to distribute coupons, customized product placement, product sampling, window posters and merchandising opportunities as well as advertising optimization, social media outreach, target marketing research, in-venue merchandising and more.
 

Wil Power Integrated marketing creates events that help global brands to help position brands into the consumers’ minds by attracting and emotionally engaging them in the salon or shop experience.

 

In an August 2021 article in Popsugar magazine Natasha Marsh writes "Shelton believes the Black salon can empower and reconnect women with who they want to be at the end of the day. It's high time for movie studios to recognize the power that African Americans have on culture. After all, Black women's spending power continues to grow every year, we watch more movies than any other race, and we watch television 40 percent more than any other group.Black people have an outside influence on the culture and the ability to redefine cultural norms," said Shelton. "It's a culture within a culture. [Hairstylists] don't just shape hair; they shape the culture one style at a time, and for too long that's been a blind spot. I want big companies to understand that when you promote movies and other products through [hairstylists], you're not just promoting to the stylists that work there; you're promoting through them as they are the tastemakers."

 

The fact of the matter is, Black hair salon owners and stylists have large — sometimes millions — of followers on social media, and if brands and movie studios tapped in, the reach could be huge.

​

"There's been no better time in history for movie studios to utilize the Black beauty salon to promote their movies. And the success of this rollout is proof that the Black salons and barbershops are still the incubators of culture, of Black culture, and most importantly that the women who work and gather there are more than worthy of the respect of these entertainment marketers," Shelton said.