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2004 BRANDWORKS UNIVERSITY SPEAKERS: (click each name to view a summary of the remarks or scroll down) THE GENESIS OF CREATING ENDURING, PROFITABLE BRANDS ›› Marsha Lindsay, President and CEO of Lindsay, Stone & Briggs WHAT THE ROAD TO REDEMPTION LOOKS LIKE ›› Michael Raynor, a director in the thought leadership arm of Deloitte and coauthor of The Innovator’s Solution THE NEW TESTAMENT ON BEST PRACTICES IN NPD ›› Robert Cooper, President of the Product Development Institute, Professor of Marketing at McMaster University, distinguished research fellow at Penn State, and a fellow of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Brad Goldense, Founder and President of Goldense Group, Inc. John F. Sherry, Jr., Anthropologist and Professor of Marketing in the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University HOW TO RESURRECT AN EXISTING BRAND WITH NEW PRODUCTS ›› John Blasberg, Vice President of Bain & Company THE LAUNCH PARABLE OF DEFYING THE TRADITIONAL RULES ›› Kerri Martin, Guardian of Brand Soul for MINI USA “maddog” Hall, Executive Director of Linux International Melissa Johnson, Marketing Public Relations Manager for Procter & Gamble’s North America Home Care brands THE YIN AND YANG OF CONSUMER AND BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS LAUNCHES ›› Amy Kelm, Senior Director of Worldwide Brand and Communications for Hewlett-Packard WITH WHOM MIGHT YOU EVANGELIZE? ›› Michael Tindal, Senior Director of SAS Institute, Inc. HOW TO PREACH SO THAT THE TRADE AND CUSTOMER WILL FOLLOW ›› John Philip Jones, Professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University Michael Polk, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Chief Operations Officer, Unilever Bestfoods Ram Charan, consultant and author of the business best-sellers Every Business Is a Growth Business and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. Charan is ranked among the “best executive educators” by Business Week, GE, Wharton and Northwestern University. THE GENESIS OF CREATING ENDURING, PROFITABLE BRANDS Marsha Lindsay, president and CEO of Lindsay, Stone & Briggs, is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Brand Management, London, has taught the MBA-level course on strategic brand management at the University of Wisconsin business school, and is a past member of the executive committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies Marsha Lindsay offered these top 10 insights for profitable growth:
‹‹ back to the list of speakers WHAT THE ROAD TO REDEMPTION LOOKS LIKE Michael Raynor, a director in the thought leadership arm of Deloitte and coauthor of The Innovator’s Solution Michael Raynor told Brandworks University that innovations that change the competitive battlefield often take share from markets that have been abandoned by market leaders as undesirable or undoable. If you are a market leader, he cautioned, watch out for challengers who compete by serving market segments you consider unprofitable, or by offering less capable (and less expensive) versions of your products. The disrupters and contrarians may not look like a threat today, but once they learn the business, they will disrupt your profitable business segments just as Wal-Mart destroyed the Sears empire, by nibbling away from below. No one can ignore line extensions and sustaining innovations, but they are just “me too.” Look for products, services or business models that serve customers the current incumbents don’t want or can’t profitably serve. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers THE NEW TESTAMENT ON BEST PRACTICES IN NPD Robert Cooper, creator of the Stage-Gate™ product development process, the president of the Product Development Institute, a professor of marketing at McMaster University, a distinguished research fellow at Penn State, a fellow of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) and the author of six books on product development, including Portfolio Management for New Products and Winning at New Products: Accelerating the Process from Idea to Launch Commitment to new products separates the winners and losers in the product-development world, according to Robert Cooper. Cooper revealed the findings of a recent “best practices” study, by the Product Development Institute and the American Productivity and Quality Center, of nearly 2,000 product launches at more than 500 firms.
‹‹ back to the list of speakers HOW GOOD IS GOOD ENOUGH? Brad Goldense, founder and president of Goldense Group, Inc. How fast you bring a new product to market often determines whether it will be profitable or not, according to Brad Goldense. A McKinsey & Company study found that companies that overrun their development schedule by only nine percent lose 22 percent of their profit potential. “By the time it becomes profitable, it’s an old project.” To maximize payback, companies should strive to minimize time to profit from the inception of a product development cycle. Most companies only measure the time it takes for a product to launch. Goldense said companies should:
‹‹ back to the list of speakers THE PATH TO ENLIGHTENMENT John F. Sherry, Jr., an anthropologist and professor of marketing in the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University Want to know what consumers really think about your product? You’ll find the best clues by “deep hanging out.” That is John Sherry’s term for the process ethnographers call contextual inquiry. Consumers actively hide their thoughts and motivations from researchers, Sherry explained. If you want to find out how people really live, “you have to stay out (on location) until they regard you as part of the furniture.” Contextual inquiry helps identify unarticulated wants and needs. “A banana is hardly ever only a banana. You have to look for the meaning.” Advertising and other communications are no longer a one-way process from the advertiser to the consumer. Concepts about brands are co-produced by marketers and consumers. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers HOW TO RESURRECT AN EXISTING BRAND WITH NEW PRODUCTS John Blasberg, vice president of Bain & Company and the head of Bain’s North American Consumer Products practice There are no tired brands, only tired brand managers, says John Blasberg. “Profitable growth is hard. If you believe you are in a slow growth category you will be.” Blasberg told Brandworks University participants that any brand can grow if management focuses on two key strategies: advertising and innovation. Focus on ads, not trade promotion. Contrary to popular belief, trade spending was not a factor in the success of 524 brands across 100 categories examined in a rigorous study by Bain. Blasberg said understanding the consumer is key to innovation. Don’t just look at your best customers, he suggested. Also understand normal, light and non-users. You don’t need to discover the trend; you just need to leverage it. “The future is here today, it’s just not widely distributed.” ‹‹ back to the list of speakers THE LAUNCH PARABLE OF DEFYING THE TRADITIONAL RULES Kerri Martin, Guardian of Brand Soul (a.k.a. marketing communications manager) for Mini USA, was selected by Advertising Age as a woman to watch in 2004. Kerri Martin didn’t set out to launch a car; she set out to launch an icon. “There was no way to do traditional demographic segmentation,” Martin told her Brandworks University audience. “We had to market to the mindset.” With no money for a traditional advertising launch, Martin’s team devised tactics for each audience:
“We always had a fear of being a fad,” Martin confessed. “We didn’t want to be a fad; we wanted to be an icon. Icons don’t have life cycles.” ‹‹ back to the list of speakers DAVID VERSUS GOLIATH “maddog” Hall, executive director of Linux International How far does your creative thinking stretch? Could you figure out a way to make money by giving away your product? Linux does. The trick, explained “maddog” Hall, is to think of your channel first. Unlike traditional products, Linux is at heart really a big idea. The Linux operating system is free. Anyone can use it. Anyone can modify it. Partners can change the logo. The programmers work for free. But because Linux has found a way to let others leverage them, they have grown remarkably against Microsoft. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers PUBLIC RELATIONS PROVERBS Melissa Johnson, marketing public relations manager for Procter & Gamble’s North America Home Care brands Procter & Gamble’s Swiffer brand has successfully launched a new platform based on the “fun” of cleaning with Swiffer by leveraging publicity, according to Melissa Johnson. P&G’s public relations strategy is credited with changing the public perception of cleaning from “drab” to “fab.” When P&G introduced Swiffer in 1999, there was no precedent for a “fun” cleaning product. But in the past five years Swiffer has created a new $800 million sub-category – quick clean products – and now holds 67 percent of that category. One dramatic measure of success is that traffic quadrupled in the traditionally sleepy mop-and-broom aisle after the launch of Swiffer. In 2003, the brand received more than 250 million impressions in unexpected places such as the cover of Rolling Stone with Jessica Simpson, In Style magazine, The Today Show, Dr. Phil, Frasier and more! By leveraging strategic publicity to capture the current culture, Swiffer broke the traditional communication barriers of the cleaning category and became a cultural icon on its own. Swiffer’s success story is grounded in deep consumer insight: People were looking for a new and better way to clean that simplified the process without compromising the result. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers THE YIN AND YANG OF CONSUMER AND BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS LAUNCHES Amy Kelm, senior director of worldwide brand and communications for Hewlett-Packard, responsible for managing and developing the overall consumer brand and communications strategy, worldwide creative development and the implementation of all advertising, packaging and sponsorships “You can’t separate out the brand and the business strategy,” Amy Kelm told Brandworks University. With more than one billion customers in more than 160 countries, one product does not fit all. “But one brand does. Our promise is about taking technology and applying it in a way that makes a difference,” Kelm said. “HP has an optimistic view of technology; it’s not overwhelming; it’s to be celebrated and empowering.” HP manages to be both global and local by creating a system of immutable and adaptable characteristics. Immutable characteristics go to the heart of the HP brand. Adaptable characteristics allow specific product features and communications to adapt to different customers, countries and cultures. That allows the HP voice and brand promise to stay the same worldwide, even while products are developed to serve specific niches. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers WITH WHOM MIGHT YOU EVANGELIZE? Michael Tindal, a senior director of SAS Institute, Inc., one of the market leaders in analytical customer relationship management (CRM) Michael Tindal believes the challenge for marketers is “how do we make marketing more relevant?” The challenge is how to use predictive modeling to identify customers who are likely to be receptive to your marketing message and the media where they are most likely to see and accept the message. Current, backward-looking CRM systems can’t always do that, Tindal said. The next leap for CRM is to go beyond tracking existing customers, to predicting new markets and trends. The solution will be an integrated data system that eliminates silos of information and allows marketers to use analytics to make marketing relevant to each consumer. ‹‹ back to the list of speakers HOW TO PREACH SO THAT THE TRADE AND CUSTOMER WILL FOLLOW John Philip Jones, professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and the author or editor of numerous books, including How Advertising Works, How to Use Advertising to Build Strong Brands, and The Ultimate Secrets of Advertising Cutting advertising in favor of promotion is the road to failure, says John Philip Jones. Currently, most companies spend about one third of the total marketing budget on building the brand and two thirds on short-term price promotion, which he termed “paying for disloyalty.” His analysis demonstrated that such discounting leads directly to lower profits, but advertising investment does not. He offered several rules for success based on many years of analysis:
‹‹ back to the list of speakers THE WAY OF THE PLATFORM Michael Polk, senior vice president of marketing and chief operations officer, Unilever Bestfoods Michael Polk used Brandworks University as a forum to challenge the consumer packaged-goods industry to fix the “pathetically low success rate” of new product launches. “As an industry, we need to deal with this issue or we will cede brand development to the retailer. We will not cost-reduce our way to success. It’s grow or die.” To develop and launch Unilever’s Carb Options line in an incredible 12 weeks from concept, Polk’s team rewrote the launch process. Many packaging, advertising and other critical issues were resolved in all-day, all-players meetings instead of through the usual process. Data was incomplete or absent. Mistakes were corrected after launch rather than through time-consuming testing. In other words, Unilever had to invent a new process and have the courage to go with gut instinct. “We had to move quickly without all the answers you might want to be comfortable. It was about an innovative, compressed approach to cycle time. The lasting value was a different organizational mindset. We loved the experience of getting this thing done.” ‹‹ back to the list of speakers THE BOOK OF REVELATION Ram Charan, consultant and author of the business best-sellers Every Business Is a Growth Business and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. Ranked among the “best executive educators” by Business Week, GE, Wharton and Northwestern University, Charan was formerly on the faculty of Harvard’s Business School. If you don’t have a growth strategy and a process for innovation, you are set up to fail, says Ram Charan, author, educator and advisor to the legendary leaders of GE, P&G and others. Charan offered Brandworks University participants some tools for achieving top-line growth and successful product development and launch.
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