Dr. Darren Coleman

From Expense to Asset: Reframing Brand Investment for Senior Executives

Keynote context

Getting senior executives, especially the c-suite, to believe in the commercial value of brands is a frequent barrier to brand investment. But with careful thought, persistence and self-belief this issue can be addressed. This keynote will show you how.

Keynote Experience

Dr. Coleman’s keynote has been designed to help your audience:

• Rethink how they approach selling the commercial value of brand to senior executives at their organisation.
• Know how they should position brand as an investment not an expense, so it aligns with senior executives’ priorities.
• Learn from best practice guidelines and case studies so they can enable their teams to convey the commercial value of brand more effectively.
• Acquire actionable insights, tools and templates that help them become a more convincing commercial brand marketer.

Keynote Content

Dr. Coleman’s keynote will be structured in three segments:

1. Understanding senior executives’ mindset: The first segment of the keynote will outline why many senior executives struggle to believe in the commercial value of brand. Doing this will help your audience empathise with the executives they want to influence.
2. Seeing brand as an investment not expense. In the second segment of the keynote, Dr. Coleman will outline how you can move senior executives’ minds so they understand and advocate brand as an investment which drives commercial growth. This will help your audience understand how they can encourage senior executives to invest in brand.
3. Getting senior executives to buy into brand: Best practice case studies. The final segment of the keynote will share case studies of how brand marketers have successfully moved sceptical executives minds so they see brand as an investment asset not an expense.

Is your audience ready to convince senior executives to invest in brand?

How to Retain Brand Relevance Through Brand Experiences

Keynote context

Retaining brand relevance is a constant challenge for even the most experienced marketing executives. This keynote has been designed to help your audience solve this problem by learning how to retain brand relevance through brand experiences.

Keynote Experience

Dr. Coleman’s keynotes will help your audience:

• Know how to think about retaining relevance through brand experiences.
• Appreciate how they should structure and scale their approach to building brand experiences.
• Have best practice lists and guidelines they can reference to manage their teams better.
• Know where to access practical management tools that will enable them to build brand experiences that help their brands retain relevance.

Keynote Content

Dr. Coleman’s keynote will be structured in three segments:

1. What do you need to move beyond customer experiences? The first segment will enable your audience appreciate why organisations that embrace a brand experience – and a not customer experience – mindset win in today’s markets.
2. Why build brand experiences? This segment of the keynote shares the rationale for building brand experiences. This will help your audience genuinely believe in the value of brand experiences when they build their brand experiences business case.
3. How to build brand experiences? The final segment of the keynote introduces the Brand Experience Blueprint – which lies at the heart of Dr. Coleman’s book, Building Brand Experience Design: A Practical Guide to Retaining Brand Relevance. Understanding the Brand Experience Blueprint will help your audience think about how to build brand experiences in a structured and scalable way. Best practice case studies will be used to demonstrate how the Brand Experience Blueprint can be used in practice.

Are you ready to retain brand relevance through brand experiences?

Delivering Brand-Driven Growth in Turbulent Times

Keynote context

We live in turbulent times which make it daunting and difficult for marketing executives to deliver the growth the c-suite demands. This keynote will help your audience address this issue. It has been designed to constructively challenge the audience, so they reframe and rethink their approach to growth by using their brand as a platform to growth.

Keynote Experience

Dr. Coleman’s keynotes will help your audience:

• Know how to think about driving growth through brands at their organisation.
• Learn how they should organise their approach to delivering brand-driven growth.
• Refer to robust guidelines so they can empower their teams to get brand-driven growth right.
• Know how to apply practical tools and templates at their organisation so they think about brand-driven growth in the context of their job.

Keynote Content

Dr. Coleman’s keynote will be structured in three segments:

1. What is the rationale for brand-driven growth? The first keynote segment will outline why the world’s most powerful and valuable brands focus their investment efforts on intangible assets like brands. This will enable your audience to appreciate the limitations of price and funcational product-driven strategies vs. using brand as a platform for growth.
2. How can you structure your approach to delivering brand-driven growth? The second segment of the keynote introduces the Brand-Driven Growth Blueprint – a practical management tool Dr. Coleman has used extensively with clients around the globe. Doing this will help your audience start, structure and scale their approach to brand-driven growth.
3. How can you use the Brand-Driven Growth Blueprint? The final segment of the keynote demonstrates how your audience can apply the Brand-Driven Growth Blueprint with a worked example. This gives your audience actionable insights they can apply immediately at their organisation.

Are you ready to drive growth through brands?

Specialist keynotes

Context

Clients and / or event planners can request specific and specialist keynotes. This ensures case studies and the language used make important points in the way the client would like. Requests for specific, specialist keynotes tend to come from in-house clients, but previous requests have also come from event planners organising public events for specific industries such as pharmaceuticals, financial services or fast moving consumer goods.

Examples of specific and specialist keynotes

Competing through brand experiences: Three steps for success
Demystifies the brand experience building process so attendees can start to build brand experiences for themselves.

Building your employer brand: Becoming an employer of choice
Challenges to audience to rethink their approach to employer brand building so they can win the battle to attract and retain the best talent.

Building a winning services brand: Consistency is the key
Provides actionable advice that will help service brand marketers deliver a consistent brand experience at scale.

Building a B2B service brand: Winning through emotionally charged brand experiences
Demonstrates why B2B services brands that compete through emotion and experiences are leaving their competitors behind. (NB can be B2B and / or B2B services brands)

Creating an employee advantage: Aligning employee and brand experience
Constructively challenges the audience to rethink how human resources and brand can align their activities so an employee advantage underpins their competitive advantage.

Keynote approach

• Darren’s keynotes provide your audience with:
• New ways of thinking and perspectives that constructively challenge conventional wisdom and stimulate a mind shift.
• New ideas, approaches, contextual models, frameworks and industry-specific case studies that connect the dots between issues.
• Case studies, best practices, lists and guidelines that will help your audience understand and manage their teams.
• Actionable advice and insights: Tips, tools and templates that help your audience act and enhance day to day activities.

Building a B2B service brand: Winning through emotionally-charged brand experiences

Demonstrates why B2B services brands that compete through emotion and experiences are leaving their competitors behind.

Creating your employee advantage: Aligning employee experience with your employer brand

Outlines how to craft an employee experience that contributes to their employer brand and so helps them win the war for talent.

Building a values-led organization: The importance of data and employee engagement

Demonstrates why building a values-led organization makes good business sense and how attendees can go about doing it.

Brand and service design: A marriage made in heaven?

Shows how attendees can weave brand into the fabric of service design so they can deliver more scalable and consistent customer-centric brand experiences.

Getting your COVID-19 recovery right: Leveraging brand-driven growth

Outlines how attendees can drive organizational growth through brands during the turbulent times COVID-19 presents.

Competing through brand experiences: Three steps for success during times of COVID-19

Demystifies the brand experience building process so attendees can start to build brand experiences that will engage customers in spite of the challenges COVID-19 presents.

Building a winning services brand during turbulent times: Consistency is the key

Provides actionable advice that will help service brand marketers overcome the specific challenges they encounter as a result of COVID-19.

Retaining relevance through brand experiences. How to do it in three simple steps

How will this talk help attendees? C-suite executives and, in particular CMOs, know brand experiences provide a route to retaining relevance. But many struggle to structure then lead BX building initiatives with confidence and conviction.

This talk solves that problem by sharing a simple yet intuitive three step brand experience building blueprint which is based on my recently published book, Building Brand Experiences: Practical Guide to Retaining Brand Relevance (Kogan Page).

What will attendees be able to do differently after this talk? Attendees of this keynote will know how to use a simple three step Brand Experience Blueprint that will help them build brand experiences for themselves. Attendees will be directed to a URL where they can download the Blueprint and its associated Toolkit for free.

The Toolkit comprises a suite of tools / templates that will help keynote attendees put the ideas introduced into action.

Why emotion wins when building B2B service brand experiences

How will this talk help attendees? Senior executives who work in corporate finance, professional services, consulting etc., tend to overlook the importance of emotion when building brand experiences.

Price, capability, reputation and track record of delivery are seen as key drivers of client choice. True, these are important but this talk will help attendees understand why emotion is the trump card when it comes to building experiences at B2B services brands.

More importantly, attendees will learn how they can go about building brand experiences that resonate emotionally with clients and drive brand performance.

What will attendees be able to do differently after this talk? Attendees of this keynote will obtain a deep and scientific understanding of why emotion drives choice and know how to use this knowledge to their advantage when building brand experiences at B2B services brands.

Addressing the challenges of building a services brand

How will this talk help attendees? Services predominate in developed markets, frequently accounting for over 80% of GDP. But the characteristics of a services brand present executives with unique challenges.

For instance, services are intangible, never owned by the person who uses them and tend to be delivered by people – who can have good and bad days. A paradox also plagues a services brand. Senior executives have a large say in how things are done but play a small part in actual delivery. For instance, it’s the receptionist at a hotel and not the CEO that determines how you felt about your check in experience.

Knowing how to address these and other specific service brand issues are critical executive-level skills this keynote will address. What will attendees be able to do differently after this talk? Attendees of this keynote will know how to overcome the unique challenges a services brand presents.

This entails dovetailing strategic thinking and operational processes whilst being mindful of the unique challenges a services brand presents. Attendees’ will also acquire actionable insights that will enable them to deliver more consistent brand experiences through employee behaviour – the perennial challenge most, if not all, services brands face.

Hang on! Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. How to align your people, brand and digital transformation

How will this talk help attendees? A lot of CMOs dive head first into building brand experiences with a focus being on digital. Engaging then involving their employees with the brand experience building process is often overlooked.

Informed CMO’s develop close working relationships with their HR counterparts to align strategic thinking and operational processes to ensure people, brand and technology are aligned.

This talk will show attendees how to do this. What will attendees be able to do differently after this talk? Use a take away tool that will help attenees align brand and human resources when building experiences that have a digital focus. This will help them to deliver more consistent digital brand experiences.

Delivering brand experiences in a post-digital world

How will this talk help attendees? World-class brands have already moved beyond digital marketing. They are marketing in a digital world where data, connected devices and people combine to facilitate delivery of personalised brand experiences.

Understanding how to deliver brand experiences in a post-digital world is a challenge some brands are starting to embrace. To succeed, focus, clarity and consistency are required across the entire brand experience. This scale of this challenge is amplified by consumer demands for increased transparency driven by diminishing trust.

This talk will provide attendees ’ with practical tools and insights that help them not just to survive but thrive in the post-digital world. What will attendees be able to do differently after this talk? Attendees will understand what they need to do to keep their brand relevant and drive brand performance in a post-digital world.

This entails embracing a mindset that focuses on the end, not just the means, when building brand experiences. The importance of humans’ core need for connection will also be embedded in attendees’ minds as an important, indeed integral part of their post digital brand experience building efforts.

Command more respect in the boardroom by measuring brand experiences scientifically

How will this talk help attendees? Demonstrating how brand experiences drive financial performance is a challenge even the most seasoned executives face. This keynote outlines how senior marketing executives can command more respect in the boardroom by measuring brand experiences in a more rigorous, rounded and scientifically robust way.

What will attendees be able to do differently after this talk? Understand the importance of obtaining employee, brand and financial measures over sustained periods. Members of the audience will also receive practical measurement advice so they will leave the keynote with actionable insights they can start working on straight away.