Ken Schmidt
Most companies still compete on what they sell. The pricing, the features, the specifications. That posture turns the product into a commodity and the customer into a transaction. The harder commercial problem is becoming a company people will go out of their way to choose, defend and talk about, and very few leadership teams know how to engineer that on purpose.
Ken Schmidt is the former Director of Communications at Harley-Davidson Motor Company who helps leadership teams rebuild reputation, customer loyalty and competitive differentiation around how people feel about a brand, not what it sells.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Ken Schmidt
- He sat inside the room when Harley-Davidson went from near-collapse to one of the most emotionally bonded brands in American business, and he can describe what changed in the company’s positioning rather than what got written about it afterwards.
- He frames customer loyalty as an operating decision, not a marketing output. His Noise Cubed Trilogy gives leadership teams a structured way to interrogate how they are heard, remembered and chosen.
- Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance (Simon and Schuster, 2018) gives leaders a written, reusable method for moving a company from product-first to people-first positioning.
- He works in the language operators use. Sales teams, dealer networks, franchisees and frontline staff respond to him because he treats reputation as something the whole organisation builds, not a head-office function.
- He is consistently booked for annual sales kickoffs, dealer conferences and leadership offsites where the brief is to change how a workforce thinks about its own market position, not to deliver a generic motivational talk.
Biography highlights
- Director of Corporate and Financial Communications at Harley-Davidson Motor Company, 1990 to 1997; joined the company in 1985.
- Primary spokesperson to media and financial communities during Harley-Davidson’s turnaround years.
- Author of Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance, Simon and Schuster, November 2018.
- Co-creator of 100 Years of Harley-Davidson, an official centenary motorsports title.
- Founder of Ken Schmidt Company (1999); co-founder of Torque Sessions Leadership Training.
- Host of the Tailgating with Geniuses business podcast; previously held an ownership stake in Chicago marketing firm VSA Partners.
Biography
Harley-Davidson was effectively a dying American manufacturer in the mid-1980s. The bikes had reputation problems, the financials were thin, and the brand was the punchline of its own segment. The work that pulled the company out was not a product fix. It was a deliberate reconstruction of how customers, dealers and the financial community thought and talked about the company, and Ken Schmidt was inside that work from 1985.
By 1990 he was Director of Corporate and Financial Communications, working directly with the CEO and CFO and serving as the primary voice to the media and investment community during the years sales and brand equity recovered. That seat gave him a particular vantage on how reputation actually gets engineered inside a company under pressure, and on how leadership decisions about positioning translate into customer behaviour on the ground.
After leaving Harley in 1997 he took an ownership position at Chicago marketing firm VSA Partners, then founded Ken Schmidt Company in 1999. Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance (Simon and Schuster, 2018) sets out his method for moving a company from product-first to people-first positioning; his Torque Sessions training format and Tailgating with Geniuses podcast extend the same operating logic.
The argument he brings to a leadership room is that competitive advantage built on product specifications is now mostly perishable, and the durable form of advantage is being chosen on purpose by customers who feel something specific about the company. That is a hard claim to make credibly. It is harder to make from the inside of a brand that did it.
Key speaking topics
- Customer loyalty and advocacy
- Brand positioning and reputation
- Competitive differentiation
- People-first organisational culture
- Storytelling and corporate voice
- Sales force and dealer-network alignment
Ideal for
- Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and customer-experience leadership teams.
- Sales leadership at companies running annual kickoffs, dealer conferences or franchise summits.
- CEO and executive teams in mature categories where product parity is eroding margins.
- Membership organisations, associations and trade bodies needing to reset how they are perceived.
Audience outcomes
- A sharper internal language for what their company is actually known for, versus what it claims to be known for.
- Schmidt’s three-question Noise Cubed framework, useable as a working tool on positioning decisions.
- A concrete view of how the Harley-Davidson turnaround changed customer behaviour, with the operator-side mechanics named.
- A reframing of customer loyalty as something every part of the business builds, not a marketing or CX function output.
Talks
A keynote on moving an organisation from product-first to people-first positioning, using the Harley-Davidson turnaround as the worked example.
Key takeaways:
- Why product-led competition is now structurally weak in most mature categories
- The behavioural drivers that move customers from buyer to advocate
- How the Noise Cubed three-question framework gets applied inside a leadership team
A session on building a distinctive corporate voice and being chosen on purpose rather than by default.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between being known and being preferred
- How story discipline travels through a sales force and a dealer network
- Practical tests for whether a company has a reputation it can defend
A leadership keynote on aligning the organisation around the human drivers of customer choice.
Key takeaways:
- Why emotional connection outperforms feature parity in mature markets
- Where customer loyalty is actually manufactured inside a business
- The leadership behaviours that protect or erode brand equity