Marketing Fundamentals

Innovation: Myths and Mythstakes

Dave Siegel, LaunchForce

Undoubtedly, one of the most often cited needs and/or objectives in today’s business world is to: “Innovate!” In fact, a simple Google alert search on the topic of “innovation” will generally reveal dozens of new articles every day. The demand for change and the speed of change in today’s world is unprecedented. Consumers and customers are embracing change and adapting to new product offerings and services earlier and faster than ever. As a result, we now have a business environment in which the need for companies to innovate is constant. If you don’t respond, your competitor will!

The big dilemma? Companies that don’t innovate….die. BUT most innovations fail! This presentation by the author of the soon to be published Innovation—Myths and Mythstakes (Paramount), will discuss how, if done properly, innovation can be done with a far greater success rate. It will explore and uncover some of the myths about innovation that have lead to unnecessary mistakes, and easily avoided failures. It will present new ways in which to acquire valuable insights into your customers, ways in which to create ideas, and methods for pre-testing. This discussion promises to be valuable to any businessperson, whether he/she is from a Consumer Goods Company, Business to Business, Service or Institution.

 

 

Social Media Marketing

How to Incorporate Social Media into Your Marketing Mix

Panel including:

Josh Dahmes, Risdall Search Marketing

Mike Rynchek, Spyder Trap

Brian Brown, ideapark

Paul Isakson, space150

Jennifer Kemp, Kemp & Co

Beth Fischer, TCI Group

 

What is social media and how do you use it to build your brand? This panel of social media experts will help define what social media is, provide insight into the right way to interact with your customers and give us some helpful hints on how to start using it. They will also talk about understanding the investment required to make social media marketing successful.

 

 

Targeted Marketing

Personas

Gina Giovannelli, Miles Interactive

Giovannelli will share with you first-hand experience in leveraging personas and other helpful tools to build world class websites that truly meet the needs of your target market. 

 

 

Eco-Conscious Marketing

What is Green Marketing?

Steve Valigosky, TNS

TNS talked with over 13,000 consumers in 17 countries to find out how concerned people are about the environment and how their concerns translate into behavior. Did you know that 53% of US consumers will consider paying more for eco-friendly products but only 26% admit to actively seeking those products when shopping? The TNS Green Life Study categorizes respondents into eight distinct consumer segments to provide you with a better understanding of their “green” attitudes and behaviors and through purchase preferences.

Find out how “green” can impact and improve your business.

 

 

Technology Tools

Message Received: Obama as King of Social Media

David Krejci, Weber Shandwick

David will discuss Barack Obama's use of technology in his campaign for the presidency, including his mastery of social networking, mobile communications and more.

 

 

 

 

Marketing Fundamentals

The Value of Values: Creating Competitive Advantage for Your Company and Your Career

Durwin Long, University of St. Thomas

In an era when products, services, and marketing campaigns can become commoditized seemingly overnight, values-driven marketing may be the best way to create sustainable competitive advantage for your brand.  Indeed, growing evidence suggests that customers are increasingly interested in doing business with companies and brands whose values they share.

 

Equally important, finding the right alignment between customers, companies, and your personal values can be the key, not just to marketing success, but to your own leadership acumen and career satisfaction.

 

 

Social Media Marketing

This Ain't No Picnic: The ROI and ROP of Social Media

Adam Metz, Metzmash.com

 

Leading lifestyle brand strategist Adam Metz explains how to measure return-on-investment and return-on-participation of branded social web strategies and implementations. Metz will outline the differences between web analytics and social web analytics and show you how to sell these programs to your CFO and CIO.

 

 

Targeted Marketing

The Importance of Being On-Emotion

Dan Hill, Sensory Logic, Inc.

As scientific studies have proven, people are primarily emotional decision makers who absorb sensory stimuli quickly and intuitively. Making the emotional connections that drive marketing decisions requires a profound, strategic understanding of both the core motivations and the emotions implicit in every buying decision. Dan Hill provides a tremendous opportunity for marketers to ensure that they are not only on-message, but, more importantly, on-emotion. Dan’s insights are drawn from a decade of observing what does and does not work with consumers, based on utilizing the emotionally-oriented facial coding research tool made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, Blink. Dan is uniquely qualified to help companies make their marketing dollars work harder and smarter for them.

 

 

Eco-Conscious Marketing

The Right Marketing Strategy - Creating an Environmental Footprint for Tomorrow

dik Bolger, Bolger Vision Beyond Print

Eco-friendly practices are no longer the exception-they have crossed over from a luxury item to an essential component of business strategy decisions. Nearly every large company today is taking a hard look at its products, processes and operations through the lens of environmental impacts. As a leader in the greening of the printing industry, dik will tell you how to market environmentally sound practices in your own company or companies you market, find where the green savings grow and turn to ROI, and how to communicate commitments to the environment. Learn how to avoid the “greenwashing” effect in marketing and bridge the sustainability side with marketing.

 

 

 

Technology Tools

Strategy Activation - Keeping Promises to the Marketplace

Scott Glatstein, Imperatives, LLC

Wouldn't it be great if each new strategy you created for your company actually worked in the real world and brought you the results you envisioned? Unfortunately, recent research shows that the odds are stacked against you. Ninety percent of all business strategies fail. Based on the ground-breaking book, Strategy Activation: How to Turn Your Vision into Marketplace Success, this session introduces the audience to a new holistic discipline for driving strategy into the marketplace. Strategy is a promise made to the marketplace. It signals intent and thus creates customer expectations. But success doesn't come from making promises; it comes from keeping promises ...consistently across each touchpoint such that customer expectations are continuously met or exceeded.

 

 

 

 

Marketing Fundamentals

Get Tuned In: Leadership Strategies for Winning in a Down Economy

Phil Myers, Pragmatic Marketing

Product and service sensations like the iPod, Starbucks and FedEx were all launched in challenging economic times. They didn’t rely on luck, superior funding or clever marketing campaigns to catch on. Yet, these hits all resonated because they came from organizations that built real and deep connections to what their buyer’s valued most. They ‘tuned in’. In this presentation, learn the six-step Tuned In system that winning organizations use to:

• Find unresolved problems in the market that create the breakthroughs no one thought possible.

• Create strategic positioning platforms that connect authentically with a full marketplace of buyers.

• Identify and communicate with distinct buyer personas in a language they understand.

• Quantify how big or little is the market opportunity of a particular product.

• Ignore the noise created by sales, big customers and innovators … and win in the process.

From real estate to religion, from technology start-ups to hotels, great examples exist of companies and individuals who have created unique “why didn’t I think of that” experiences for their customers by being tuned in. Told with many case studies and real-world examples, this practical discussion provides the key steps to transforming your everyday activities into those creating a culture that builds market leaders.

 

 

Social Media Marketing

An Organic Approach to Social Media

Adrian Ho, Zeus Jones

Rob White, Zeus Jones

In less than a year Nordstrom has incorporated a number of social media initiatives into its marketing including: blogging, Twittering, Facebook and MySpace applications, unique uses of RSS and web videos. Rather than emerging from a comprehensive plan, each initiative stemmed from meeting a specific business objective. Having established a presence, these different initiatives are now being knit together to amplify each other and serve a wide variety of different needs.

Using a bottom-up approach enabled Nordstrom to avoid the complexity that can paralyze companies from entering social media and minimize the upfront investment while creating flexible platforms that will evolve over time. This session will take you behind the scenes to show how planting small seeds in social media can pay large dividends over time.

 

 

Targeted Marketing:

Supersizing Your Brand with Public Relations: Inside the OfficeMax
Re-Branding Story

Heather Schwartz, Weber Shandwick Minneapolis

Paul Maccabee, Maccabee Group Public Relations

What can marketers learn from the creation of the World’s Largest Rubberband Ball, an insanely Dancing Elf and a Human Art Gallery hand-painted on the bare backs of 10 fashion models in front of Chicago’s Institute of Art?

 

Enjoy a peek behind one of America’s highest-profile re-branding campaigns, as you learn how OfficeMax combined guerilla/experiential promotions, event marketing, viral marketing strategies, media relations and advertising to make marketing history as they re-branded their 900 office supply retail stores. Using examples from OfficeMax’s “A Day Made Better” campaign (which surprised 1,000 teachers in 1,000 schools with $1.2 million worth of free school supplies, winning the Silver Halo Award for best Cause Marketing Campaign of the Year) to the chain’s pop culture smash ElfYourself (which generated 444 million page views and won Promo Interactive’s Viral Campaign of the Year), the architects of OfficeMax’s PR campaigns will reveal how you can:

• Utilize public relations strategies and tactics to engage key audiences in conversations about your brand.

• Integrate multiple agencies and a variety of marketing tools so they all focus like a laser on a single brand message.

• Design cause marketing campaigns that truly support your brand, rather than just make your CEO feel great.

 

 

Eco-Conscious Marketing

Turning Corporate Green into Actual Green

Shawn Spott, RBC Wealth Management

Corporations are looking for methods to make green strategies into tangible deliverables. Shawn will highlight how the enterprise green strategy at RBC has permeated the actions of the Wealth Management group and ultimately has changed some very basic practices. Using the 2008 firm survey project as a case study, Shawn will outline how Marketing Research turned a key firm survey into a green friendly format and experienced significant savings in the process.

 

 

Technology Tools

Welcome to the Social (Wish You Were Here!): Mapping Social Media Use Across Lifestage and Generation

Nancy Robinson, Iconoculture

Katie Anderson, Iconoculture

Social media are crossing the generational threshold.  Once the sole stomping grounds of web-savvy Millennials, the Internet is now a place to gather, exchange and engage for everyone from preschoolers to silver foxes. This cross-generational presentation will explore the changing landscapes of social media and mobile social networking, bringing the space to life with interactive demos and video interviews with bloggers, Twitter addicts, Flickr phenoms and more. To paraphrase Woody Allen: 90% of (social) life is just showing up. It’s the elusive other 10% that keeps them coming back.