Scott Deming

Why organisations work with Scott Deming

• He ran the agency before he ran the keynote. Deming built Ryan Communications to 70 staff and around USD 30m in revenue, serving clients including Benjamin Moore and The Scotts Company, so his views on brand and customer experience come from operating accountability rather than observation.
• His thesis in The Brand Who Cried Wolf (Wiley, 2007) is unusually concrete for the category: brand is the cumulative outcome of every customer interaction, and most brands fail because they over-promise in marketing and under-deliver in operations.
• Powered by Purpose gives leadership teams a working language for connecting individual values to customer-facing behaviour, which is where most culture programmes break down.
• Client list spans regulated and operationally complex environments: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Delta Airlines, PwC, U.S. Treasury, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe. Useful when buyers want a speaker who has worked inside their kind of complexity, not adjacent to it.
• He writes regularly for Entrepreneur on customer experience, leadership and innovation, which keeps the material in active circulation rather than locked to a single book cycle.

Biography highlights

• Author, The Brand Who Cried Wolf: Deliver on Your Company’s Promise and Create Customers for Life (John Wiley & Sons, 2007).
• Author, Powered by Purpose: Identify Your Values, Discover Your Purpose, and Build Success for Life!
• Founder of Deming Advertising in 1986, later Ryan Communications Inc.; grew the agency to 70 employees and approximately USD 30m in annual revenue before exit in 2003.
• Regular contributor to Entrepreneur on customer experience, brand, leadership and innovation.
• Keynote and training work for AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Delta Airlines, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. Treasury, Hershey Foods, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe, 3M, Chipotle and Frito-Lay, among others.
• Founder and former board member, Service Nation / Service Roundtable.

Biography

Brand promises are written in marketing and broken in operations. The book that captures this most directly is The Brand Who Cried Wolf, published by John Wiley & Sons in 2007. Its argument is that customer loyalty is built or destroyed in the routine interactions that no advertising campaign can paper over.

That argument has a particular weight because the author spent seventeen years running the kind of agency that produces those campaigns. Scott Deming founded Deming Advertising in 1986 and rebuilt it as Ryan Communications Inc., growing the agency to around 70 staff and USD 30m in revenue before exiting in 2003. Clients included Benjamin Moore and The Scotts Company. The view of brand as an operating outcome, not a creative output, was formed inside that business.

His second book, Powered by Purpose, extends the thesis inward. Customer experience is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of whether individual employees understand their own values and how those values show up in the work. The book is the basis for his leadership keynote, which leaders use as the language for connecting purpose to customer-facing behaviour.

The platform work spans large, operationally complex organisations: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, General Motors, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Delta Airlines, PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. Treasury, McDonald’s of Eastern Europe and others. He writes regularly for Entrepreneur on customer experience, brand, leadership and innovation, and he was a founding board member of Service Nation / Service Roundtable, the network for service-business owners in the trades.

Key speaking topics

• Customer experience and brand loyalty
• Brand strategy and brand promise
• Purpose-driven leadership and culture
• Employee engagement and customer-facing behaviour
• Sales and customer service performance
• Innovation in customer-led organisations

Ideal for

• CMOs, CXOs and brand leaders looking to close the gap between marketing promise and customer reality.
• CEOs and operating leaders accountable for culture as a commercial lever, not an HR slogan.
• Heads of customer service, sales and retail operations in regulated or franchised environments.
• Franchise networks, dealer groups and service-business associations where the brand is delivered by independently operated front lines.

Audience outcomes

• A clearer test for whether your brand promise survives contact with your actual customer journey.
• A working model for connecting employee purpose and values to customer-facing decisions.
• Practical changes to customer service routines, from frontline scripts to escalation policy, that compound into loyalty.
• Confidence that culture work has a measurable commercial return, not just a wellbeing one.
• A shared internal language for talking about brand as an operational discipline rather than a creative one.