Kodak's Brand Transformation

Jeff Hayzlett, CMO for Eastman Kodak, reveals how Kodak is successfully transforming itself into an innovative leader in digital imaging.  He will share his perspectives on what it takes to succeed in the digital age, with a particular focus on how companies can utilize marketing to build closer relationships with customers, build their brand and create innovative products, and deliver tangible return from their marketing investment.

You can’t fix what you don’t understand:
A Practical Guide to Win/Loss Interviews

Improve sales, positioning, and boost your career.

Buyers (wins and losses) hold keys that can help you diagnose and improve many of the most vexing problems in your business. Yet 90% of your peers – and your competitors – ignore this powerful source of market information.

In this session I will present some practical tools that you can use as soon as you return to work. Attendees will determine the specific topics, but I will be ready to discuss practical topics such as:

•  Where to start? How to focus your analysis by picking a high-impact problem to solve. Bigger Deals? Discounting? Competitive Intelligence?
•  Who cares about Win Analysis?
•  What to do if you are not allowed to call accounts.
• How to get lost accounts on the phone.
• How to gain management support.
• Competitive Intelligence using lost deals

Bring your questions!

The Art and Science of Positioning - Positioning is the perceptual space where your product or service fits into the marketplace and can put you first in the minds of potential customers.  Re-positioning is trying to move to a different space in consumers’ minds, so you have the difficult task of shifting current consumer opinions.  In this interactive workshop we’ll examine each of the 3 elements of effective positioning, learn how to generate them, and practice how to write effective positioning concepts.

Interactive Workshop

Capturing the Customer's Voice to Drive Product Innovation - We are all asked to come up with more innovative ideas for our products.  Unfortunately, it doesn't come naturally to all of us.  One of the ways we can learn more about incorporating unique market and customer insights into our products is to learn from  other companies and how they achieve higher levels of success with their products.  This is an interactive discussion, not a straight presentation, so you will have a chance to work with other people, participate in vigorous discussions, and even have some fun! 

Lessons Learned in Developing Commercial Value Up Front - Everyone has had at least one experience in their career where you just move ahead with a new product idea and ignore some of the basic steps along the way.  Next thing you know your about to commercialize a new product that had substantial investments made by your company and you realize the payback just isn’t going to be there. This roundtable discussion will help participants understand the importance of developing commercial value upfront for a new product concept by sharing the experiences of the group. 

Some of the questions that will be discussed during the session include: 

• How do I establish commercial value for a new product concept?
• How important is an ROI analysis and when should it be use in the commercialization process?
• When is the best time to kill a project and how do I communicate it?

Defining the Fuzzy Front End of New Product Development  - All new products have to start somewhere.  Usually it starts with an idea that forms into a concept and hopefully evolves into a commercially available product.  Early on in the process it is critical to frame out what this product will be.  It is this “Fuzzy Front End” that can be very challenging to define.  The scope of this presentation will focus on how to define product requirements upfront in the new product development process to ensure commercial success. 

Questions the presentation will address:

• How soon should I start defining the product requirements?
• What tools can be used to understand the unmet needs of the customer?
• How to convert the unmet needs into specifications?
• What’s the best way to deal with product trade offs?

Customer Immersion 

1. Making new connections with your customers and users
2. Visiting your customers
3. Capturing and documenting the observations
4. Interview questions
5. How to focus and understand what customer will pay for
6. Capture the different types of Needs, e.g. qualifier, activity, context, common
7. Prioritize the findings
8. Reporting your experience back at HQ

How Many People Think They own the Product?  Product Managers think about and spend a lot of time interfacing with Development.  With many companies moving key functions overseas, the supply chain interface is getting a lot of attention and Product Managers are spending more and more time here.  Is this happening in your company?  How do you manage that interface and what opportunities and challenges does this present? 

How to Create & Use Video on the Internet to Grow Your Business
Get 1st page ranking with video, use video in your email marketing campaigns, & more...  (plus where to get Free software for video production & SEO)

Joseph V. Marigliano

A preview article on the topic:

http://www.sixsigmaiq.com/article.cfm?externalID=947

Do social software tools provide some promise to streamline Product Design, Development and Deployment operations of an organization?  Product development does not end with the first customer shipment. In many complex products (especially technology and s/w oriented) , the need for development teams to be connected to the field and to the customer is imperative. The prioritization of product features must be in sync with the business development activities. With rapid globalization and M&A activity, product design teams are now spread across the world.

With customers across the world and company verticals (sales, marketing, applications engineering and R&D) spread across multiple geographies, co-ordinating and working on a product or project can be quite complex. This session is intended to discuss the various difficulties faced by such organizations and how best could existing or new tools/software tackle these issues.

How to build your personal "product manager" brand?

We as product managers are well trained in listening to the needs of the market, building the right products, helping marketing position the product in the marketplace, pricing products and the list can go  on and on. 

But how much time do you spend managing the best product you have - "YOU".

Do you know:

1. "Your" unique competencies?
2. "Your" positioning to your buyers - "future employers"?
3. How to build "your" personal brand?
4. How to make yourself "findable" on the internet? 

1. How to best build one's "personal" brand or one's "NET" worth? (and I don't mean assets and liabilities)
2. Tips to "market" yourself mean in this day and age?
3. How to differentiate yourself from the crowd

Forecasting Competitor Responses to Your Next Product Launch - Hint:  They Aren't Going to do Nothing 

Your company is planning to introduce a new product in the next few months and there are considerable risks.  Your marketing department is working overtime to plan the launch at an upcoming trade show - product demonstrations, press releases, testimonials and endorsements from beta tests will be showcased.  Everything is in place to make the best impression with the media and your customers.

But have you forgotten a critical aspect of your product launch?  Have you considered how your competitors react?  Is there a way to predict their actions?  Can you anticipate their moves and "head them off at the pass?"

Turbocharging the Stage Gate Process with Market Intelligence 

This workshop will provide participants wtih proven, successful tools and techniques to incorporate competitive analysis into the product development process, including:

• Patent Analysis
• Comp etitor S.W.O.T. Analysis
• Benchmarking Tools
• Value Chain Analysis
• Competitor Response Model
• Blindspot Analysis 

Market simulation: getting a foothold into better decision making - a techniques forum for brand, product and product line optimization, pricing, and versioning. Market simulation provides businesses a low-cost, accurate method to evaluate and uncover the most profitable market strategies and tactics with respect to:

• messaging and advertising
  
• product
• price
• positioning

Here we demonstrate how simulation can be used as an integral part of your marketing decision making to achieve better market outcomes. We’ll discuss how market simulation has been applied in real-world cases, and situations where it should have been applied.

This presentation and discussion will be extremely valuable for product managers, marketers and others who are directly involved in making marketing decisions where so much is extremely uncertain, and often little is known other than basic management intuition. We’ll show you ways so you don’t have to simply rely on your “gut,” but rather have access to data driven decision making.

Primed: how our approach to innovation helps us see the world beyond the way we are - Cognitive bias informs so many of the choices made in the product development realm. From where and how we source input during ideation, to how we sort and organize our thinking, to where we choose to invest our time, energy and effort - each act is a reflection of who we are and not necessarily a response to the way the world is. Learn to recognize and understand how you are "primed" so you can make better choices about creating "what's next."

Agile vs. Traditional Development:  The Best of Both Worlds - There’s a misconception that organizations have to use either agile or traditional development. Learn how to benefit by using a hybrid model and get the best of both worlds.

Services as Products: Thoughts, Lessons, and Outtakes on the productization of labor-based services at a big-5 tech consultancy.  Points of consideration:  Why treat services like products, What services gain from productization, What services lose from productization, services sales vs product sales, what can and cannot be standardized, pricing services vs pricing products.

Benefiting from the Bleeding Edge: Leveraging Social Trends in Technology within your Product Suite

How firms across industries can benefit from socially hot trends like Facebook or Twitter and leverage even newer technologies without placing large bets on single products. A discussion of how to benefit from social media, microblogging and other socially trendy technologies.

The Front End Of Innovation: How To Succeed At The Tip Of The Product Spear!!

A recent article in Businessweek magazine touted the failure of innovation to deliver on its promise.  Innovation for its own sake has not provided durable competitive advantage.  It's not so much price as it is "value". Game changers have tremendous ROI. But especially in today's environment, cash flow is king, and credit is so tight that many good projects lay in waiting. Those flush with cash or credit and a penchant for pushing the envelope have tremendous opportunities today to ready their organizations for growth. Join in this insightful dialogue about building that game changing process to not only survive, but flourish in today's business environment

Startup Mistakes to Avoid

Statistics show that over 90% of new businesses fail.  In this session I will take a market-strategy view and share a set of common mistakes I've seen in working with venture-backed technology startups including: failure to determine a strategic vision, lousy or non-existent positioning, gobble-dee-gook marketing messages and chasing your market instead of leading it.  I'll give a very short (15 mins max) presentation with my examples to kick off a discussion.  Come prepared to share your startup war stories or pose your questions to the room.

Creating Messaging that Doesn't Suck

Does your website remind you of Paris Hilton - it's great to look at but nobody has a clue what it's talking about? This session will work through how to quickly and easily build a messaging framework that customers will not only understand but act on.  I'll give a short presentation (15 mins) on examples of companies I've worked with and my person set of best practices and then will throw it open to the floor to share your experiences, war stories, and messaging embarassments.

Why Twitter is Important for Product Managers/Marketers

Have you joined Twitter and are still wondering why anyone wants to know you had a ham sandwich for lunch?  Come to this session and find out Twitter can help you be a better product manager or marketer.  I will give a short presentation outlining how I've been using Twitter and will discuss what I think are some great ways for marketers and PM's to get value (beyond lunch-time entertainment) from Twitter.

How Green is My Brand?

Developing & Differentiating Your Brand Based on Green Characteristics

Environmental responsibility and sustainability are moving beyond the buzzword stage to growing significance as essential business practices. The challenges are for product developers to make products affordably greener, and for brand managers to authentically communicate greener characteristics. But how do you decide what the green features or characteristics need to be in order to win in the marketplace? This talk will take a practical look at both the product development and brand marketing issues surrounding green, including a review of a few case examples.