“No matter how much experience you have, there’s always something new you can learn and room for improvement.” ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

 

“Change is the end result of all true learning.” ―Leo Buscaglia

Overview

Many marketers complain that they’re too busy to participant in learning workshops. This is a sign of an ignorant culture. Either we learn and progress or we slide into decay. The Lunch & Learns make it easy for all marketers to participate in learning new things, relearning and provoking new thinking. It allows for personnel and organization development in creating a performance-driven culture to make marketing matter more.

 

Programs

These are 90-minute programs (roughly 60-minutes of instruction and 30-minutes for Q&A), conducted at the client company’s facility. Some of the topics to choose from include the following:

  • Positioning and The Brand Idea – Most marketers and their organizations treat positioning as a subset of promotion and for the sole purpose of developing the Brand’s communications. But, positioning is the most important “P” in marketing. This puts positioning strategy development into perspective and encourages the development of Big Brand Ideas to differentiate versus competition and create brand loyalty.
  • Intro to the Essential Creative Brief and the Creative Brief ScoreCard – The goal would be to help everyone get on the same page as to what constitutes the “Essential” Creative Brief (i.e., components and meaning) and use the Creative Brief ScoreCard to assess each CB for technical competence.
  • How to Infer and Assess Competitive Advertising “Strategy” – We need to be aware of what our competitors are promising if we are to ensure meaningful differentiation. Unfortunately, there are not many brands participating in this practice. Part of the problem is marketers don’t know how to infer strategy from reviewing advertising communications. This would share with them how to infer and, in turn, assess the competitor’s strategy (i.e., target, communication behavior objective, benefit promise and reasons-to-believe).
  • How to Infer and Assess Competitive Advertising “Execution” – This is about determining if there is a campaign idea and assessing whether it is effective. Both this and the aforementioned modules could be directed at “any” not just “competitive advertising.” We might also conduct this with Merck (or for that matter any) advertising; however, participants might feel uncomfortable if we were to identify warts with their marketing communications.
  • Achieving Marketing Excellence – This term “excellence” gets bantered about by virtually all organizations. However, it tends to be nothing but a pipe dream. The focus is on competencies as opposed to results. This will identify results and the key activities that will get the organization and/or brand there (Positioning, Marketing- By-Objectives and Leadership Communications).
  • Marketing-By-Objectives – This is a big, big miss in most organizations. The communication objectives are not behavior objectives. We need to get marketers on the same page regarding what constitute “behavior” objectives but also how to create SMART communication behavior objectives. Without SMART behavior objectives, there is not accountability nor path to success.

 

Instructor

The Lunch & Learns will be conducted by Richard Czerniawski, a 45-year veteran of marketing who has held every marketing position, and been involved in every type of marketing situation, during his career.