Chris Brogan
Digital channels keep multiplying. Customer attention keeps shrinking. Marketing budgets rise while response rates fall, and pushing harder now produces more noise without more trust. The commercial question has shifted from how to reach more people to how to keep the ones who already know you.
Chris Brogan helps organisations convert digital audiences into durable customer relationships, building on the trust-agent framework he co-authored in the New York Times bestseller Trust Agents.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Chris Brogan
- A defined framework for online influence, not just opinions about it. Trust Agents named what separates real customer traction from noise, and the CREATE equation in The Impact Equation turned the same idea into a model a marketing team can actually apply to a campaign.
- Three decades of working through every online wave in real time. He was blogging before the term existed, co-founded the PodCamp unconference series in 2006, and signed up as the 10,212th user on Twitter. His read on what AI will do to marketing is calibrated by having been early on the last four platform shifts.
- Credibility with the brands others want to sell into. Disney, Google, General Motors, Microsoft, Coke, PepsiCo, Cisco, Humana, and Sony USA have all retained him as a consultant or keynote speaker. He has sat inside the marketing functions of the companies most audiences are trying to reach.
- A thousand keynotes’ worth of calibration. Audiences have ranged from the Coldwell Banker GenBLUE conference to the royalty of the United Arab Emirates. Forbes named him one of its Must Follow Marketing Minds; Success magazine commissioned him to interview Richard Branson for its cover story.
Biography highlights
- New York Times bestselling co-author of Trust Agents with Julien Smith (John Wiley & Sons, 2009; 10th Anniversary Edition 2019), also a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
- Author or co-author of nine business books, including The Impact Equation (Portfolio, 2012) and The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth (Wiley, 2014).
- Named by Forbes as one of its Must Follow Marketing Minds of 2014; chrisbrogan.com listed by Forbes among the 100 best websites for entrepreneurs.
- Co-founder of the PodCamp new-media unconference series (launched 2006 with Christopher S. Penn).
- Former monthly columnist at Entrepreneur magazine; featured in The Boston Globe, Forbes, Success, and USA Today; appeared on the Dr. Phil Show.
- Over a thousand keynote speeches delivered to clients including Disney, Google, General Motors, Microsoft, Coke, PepsiCo, Cisco, Humana, and Sony USA.
Biography
The cost of reaching customers online has fallen dramatically. The cost of earning their belief has climbed. Trust Agents, the 2009 New York Times bestseller Chris Brogan co-authored with Julien Smith, was among the first mainstream business books to name this problem. Its argument was that influence online accrues the way reputation does anywhere else, through consistent and useful contact with a defined community. The book’s “trust agent” framework set a vocabulary for a commercial category. With AI now flooding every inbox and feed with plausible noise, the framework has aged unusually well.
The follow-up, The Impact Equation, made the same argument operational. Impact equals Contrast multiplied by the sum of Reach, Exposure, Articulation, Trust, and Echo. The formula tells a marketing team which of five dials to turn when campaigns underperform. Brogan’s work has been tested inside some of the companies with the most to lose on this question: Disney, Google, Microsoft, General Motors, Coke, Cisco, Humana, Sony USA.
His authority on this stretches back further than most in the category. He was blogging before the term existed, co-founded the PodCamp unconference series in 2006 with Christopher S. Penn, and was signed up as the 10,212th user of Twitter. Forbes has listed him among its Must Follow Marketing Minds and named chrisbrogan.com one of the 100 best websites for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur magazine ran his monthly column for years; Success commissioned him to interview Richard Branson for its cover.
The point Brogan keeps returning to in keynotes and advisory work is commercial. Every competitor runs broadly the same automation stack and the same CRM vendors. The organisations that win real customer loyalty are the ones willing to do slower, more specific work for a defined audience. A thousand keynotes across audiences from the Coldwell Banker GenBLUE conference to the royalty of the United Arab Emirates is the track record that stands behind the argument.
Key speaking topics
- Trust and influence in digital markets
- Customer relationships in the age of AI marketing
- Content strategy and online community building
- The CREATE framework for campaign impact
- Human-centred approaches to digital transformation
- Executive leadership in a distracted marketplace
Ideal for
- CMOs and marketing leaders rebuilding channel strategy as paid reach plateaus and AI transforms audience behaviour
- Sales and customer experience leaders responsible for converting digital attention into durable revenue
- Communications and corporate affairs teams rethinking how their organisation earns trust at scale
- Founders and senior operators in content-heavy businesses where audience, community, and media are the core assets
Audience outcomes
- A usable way of diagnosing where marketing effort is being wasted, drawn from the CREATE equation
- A sharper read on where AI and automation extend customer relationships and where they erode them
- Shared vocabulary for internal debates about attention, trust, and audience value
- Specific examples from Fortune 500 marketing functions that clarify what “doing business the human way” looks like in practice
Talks
A session drawing on his New York Times bestselling book with Julien Smith, walking marketing and communications teams through the CREATE framework for campaign impact.
Key takeaways:
- How to audit a content or campaign strategy using the six-part CREATE model
- Why contrast acts as the multiplier in the equation, and what that means for messaging
- Where most marketing teams concentrate effort in the wrong variable
A talk on business storytelling as a strategic capability, grounded in two decades of advising corporate communications and marketing teams on how narrative shapes commercial outcomes.
Key takeaways:
- Why most internal and external business storytelling defaults to safe, low-impact framing
- How to identify the specific story that moves a defined audience to act
- The difference between storytelling that entertains and storytelling that converts
A session for customer experience, sales, and account leadership on how relationship depth compounds into measurable commercial value in crowded markets.
Key takeaways:
- Why customer retention is a more reliable lever for growth than customer acquisition in saturated markets
- Practical methods for building the kind of trust customers will choose over a cheaper alternative
- How to make relationship value legible in a business’s reporting and incentives