Information Use and Media Behavior in the Channel
Summit Kick-Off
October 4. 3:00 p.m. –3:30 p.m.
Alex Nordlinger, VP Channel Strategy • CMP

CMP Technology’s Channel Group recently completed a landmark information and media usage study among solution providers to gauge how and why they gather information, and which media platforms they use for different information needs. In this session, Alex Nordlinger, CMP’s VP of channel strategy, will present how the lessons learned from this study can educate technology manufacturers to best reach solution providers with the right message. Armed with this vital knowledge, technology manufacturers can better craft their marketing plans and messages so that they reach solution providers with increased effectiveness.

Gaining Channel Mind Share to Improve Market Share
October 4. 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Panel 1 - B2C
Kurt Higgins , President • ChannelForce
Dave Couture, Principle • Deloitte Consulting LLP
Bob Thacker, SVP Marketing • OfficeMax
October 4. 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Panel 2 - B2B
Shinya Akamine, President and CEO • BlueRoads
Adriano Gonzalez, VP of Strategy and Programming • BPM Forum
Carolyn Layne, VP of Marketing • Comergent
Eli Singer, CEO • WebCollage

Channels are critical and pivotal to powering customer engagement, closure and satisfaction. Unfortunately, strategic marketers are frequently out of sync with the channel and fail to design campaigns and market positioning strategies that embrace, excite and enable this critical partner constituency. Key channel segments, like distributors, retailers, VARs, integrators and solution providers, are often overlooked and under-valued as a source of knowledge and insight into customer needs, requirements and opportunities. Understanding how to better optimize, individualize and strategize with channel partners can be a key competitive advantage. Growing deeper, more synergistic relationships reduces potential channel conflict issues and furthers more effective and efficient marketing spend. It also ensures more consistent messaging and brings real-time transactional intelligence and market trend data to the mapping, modeling and segmentation process. How should marketers engage with channel to get better mind share and market share? Participate in an open forum with top executives prior to this year's official CMO Summit event.

The Power of Engagement
Theme Introduction
October 5. 8:20 a.m. - 8:50 a.m.
Christine Heckart, GM of Marketing • MicrosoftTV
Martyn Enterington, VP of Marketing • Textronix

Three members of the CMO Council Advisory Board, led by Martyn Etherington, VP of Worldwide Field Marketing at Tektronix, will provide an introductory perspective on the Power of Customer Engagement. Etherington will be joined by Peter Krainik, CMO of QD Technology, and Christine Heckart, General Manager of Microsoft TV, will present forceful views why marketers must make customer-centricity their number one priority, or continue to lack respect and relevance in the executive suite. “ Much has been written and discussed regarding marketing’s position within organizations. Why is it that our peers spend such a large percentage of their time justifying their position and their budgets? Experience and studies show us that in order for the marketing function and our peers to be successful there is a ‘Need for Greater Marketing Relevance’ if marketing is to become an important and respected part of an organization,” notes Etherington. This year, a milestone CMO Council study, Select & Connect: Strategies for Targeted Acquisition & Retention, reveals that marketers are not in significant contact with customers; customer advisory boards and links with online communities are rare; there is no consistent monitoring of churn and retention; and they place a heavy reliance on sales to drive customer conversations. Many organizations and marketers appear to have lost sight of the late Peter Drucker's simple definition of the purpose of business is to "Create and Keep Customers". Etherington and his colleagues will set the stage for this year’s CMO Summit by providing peer views and observations on the state of customer-centricity in today’s marketing organizations.

Corporate Transition-Brand Transformation
Effective Strategies for Retaining & Gaining Customers During Business Realignment
Keynote Presentation
October 5. 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Deepak Advani, Senior Vice President & CMO • Lenovo Group Ltd.

Acquisitions, divestitures and buy-outs are a common occurrence in the ever-evolving tech sector. Typically, these business events put strain on marketing organizations to orchestrate communications, manage messaging and reassure key stakeholders, most importantly, customers and the channel. Among the most visible and sensitive global tech deals – attracting extensive media attention and intense government scrutiny -- was the purchase of IBM’s personal computer division by China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. Now the third largest personal computer manufacturer in the world, Lenovo has revenues of $13 billion and more than 19,000 employees worldwide. Based in Purchase, New York, Lenovo paid $1.25 billion for IBM’s PC business and the use of certain brand assets (like ThinkPad) for a period of five years.

The Lenovo story of cross-cultural integration success, category innovation, rebranding (previously known as Legend in its contract manufacturing days), and customer retention and growth is the subject of the CMO Summit’s opening keynote by Deepak Advani, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Lenovo. Previously, vice president of marketing with IBM’s Personal Computing Division, Advani has been leading Lenovo’s global branding and market development efforts since the deal closed in May, 2005.\

Hear more from Advani on how Lenovo orchestrated its global rebranding and cultural assimilation program, boosted relationships with channel partners and customers, as well as launched aggressive new product offerings and demand generation programs across multiple market sectors in the Americas, Europe and Asia. This is a unique and insightful keynote that will set the stage for the Power of Engagement Summit.

Building a Brand Franchise and Following
October 5. 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Moderator: Joe Gillespie, EVP, CNET Division • CNET Networks
Dean Harris , CMO • Kayak.com
Shawn Gold, SVP, Marketing & Content • MySpace.com
Page Murray, VP Marketing • Palm

Delivering a predictable, trademark consumer experience has enabled many power brands to endure and market innovators to gain traction and intrusion in crowded market sectors. Many companies have defined brand identities by introducing new models for meeting and addressing consumer needs or by continuously and diligently improving a hallmark service offering, stringently examining and refining every facet of the customer experience has become essential to optimizing performance and market relevance. Meeting demands for greater convenience, selection, value, and personalized attention are essential to building a brand franchise and following. Marketers that embrace customer lifecycle marketing strategies and continuously evolve and refine their product and service mix are the ones driving business value. Panelists in this interactive session will present valuable best practice thinking on ways to craft and implement effective customer engagement strategies that result in enduring, profitable relationships and recurring, sustained business. They will speak to the tools and techniques for profiling and understanding customers, utilizing transactional and trend data, and increasing brand attachment and affinity. In addition, panelists will speak to how they segment and target audiences with customized messages and special services to further their franchise and following.

Growing Customer Equity: Creating Converts and Champions
October 5. 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Moderator: John Ciacchella, Principal Tech., Media & Telcom. • Deloitte Consulting LLP
Alicia Dietsch, Vice President, Business Segment Marketing • AT&T
Jeff Hayzlett, CMO • Eastman Kodak
Chris Moloney, CMO • Scottrade, Inc.

In the business-to-business world, third party validation, referral and reference rules. Taking a customer through consideration, conversion and close is typically a complex and time-consuming process for BtoB marketers. The next challenge for the fully aligned sales and marketing organization is even more daunting as vendors seek to take customers from satisfied purchasing and procurement partners to becoming active and influential evangelists of their brand. Visible testimonials and active word-of-mouth comes from careful and considerate customer handling strategies and smart approaches to evidencing the upside of case studies to customer contacts and decision makers. Active relationship networks, affinity groups, customer councils and advisory boards have become channels and vehicles for peer-level interaction and exchange of vendor experiences. Growing these channels of insight, access and influence is often done in concert with strategic account management teams to further penetrate customer organizations, multiply contacts and relationships, as well as uncover and optimize business opportunities. Find out what it takes to build and leverage customer equity from some of the foremost BtoB brands. Learn the techniques for gaining customer confidence, trust, and willingness to assume powerful brand advocates roles from senior marketers in the professional service, banking, IT and digital imaging sectors. Rate your effectiveness and audit your competencies in this critical area of sales and marketing integration and business value building.

New Channels of Engagement: Growing the Fan Faithful
USA TODAY Luncheon Introduction
October 5. 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Karen Durkin, EVP, Communications and Brand Strategy • National Hockey League

After enduring a strike shortened season, and threats of never being able to recover is fan base, 2006 was on of the National Hockey League’s most successful seasons ever. 2006 saw the National Hockey League revenues soar, and its fan base grow, both in demographic as well as in numbers. How did the NHL stay engaged with its audience? What were the changes that will ensure the longevity and vitality of the league? When it comes to sponsorships, and corporate alliances, the league saw a few long-standing relationships give way to upstarts and yet the support of the fans did not waiver. Tapping into the psyche of the avid fan, while appealing to the indifference of the casual fan is an enigmatic challenge, yet, the 2006 NHL season did it. Changing rules, offering fans more control, options, and opportunities to watch increased the reach of the sport and expedited the recovery of the season.

Embracing Partners & Customers in Co-Innovation
October 5. 2:00 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.
Moderator: Diane Hessan, President & CEO • Communispace
Nam Vo, VP Marketing - Health Systems • Cardinal Health
Nancy Bhagat, VP of Marketing • Intel
Philip Juliano, VP Global Brand Management & Corporate • Novell

“Co-innovation refers to extending the scale and scope of external partnerships and alliances to access and exploit new technologies, knowledge and markets.”
- Henley Management College, England
The need for co-innovation is legend in the technology sector where platforms, architectures, standards, protocols, and categories are contingent on driving partner, developer, or channel alignments and support. Bringing customers, industry ecosystems and even competitors into the process of building products faster, better and more efficiently has never been the forte of technology companies. According to the CMO Council, tighter budgets and escalating R&D costs are encouraging many marketers to use the Internet to form Virtual Customer Environments (VCEs) to drive “Product Ingenuity from Closer Community™.” A good example is SAP, which recently launched an “Enterprise Services Community” with 60 charter customers and partners and a promise to create the first cross-industry community to define enterprise services. It expects the ESC will directly impact the business requirements and architecture of the SAP platform by fostering business-focused feedback from community members. With 32,000 customers in more than 120 countries there is an awful lot of customer insight to be tapped. With new product failures rates now as high as 80 percent (reports New Product News), there is a need to get things right from the start with more meaningful, accurate, timely and relevant input into design, engineering and product development. Embracing customers and other key constituencies into the process of concepting and refining product features, functions and values reduces the risk of market rejection, hastens adoption rates, and improves customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. Brand leaders in customer co-innovation will lead this discussion drawing on real-world examples of where and how communities are changing the way companies research, identify and modify their product ideas and innovations.

The 3Rs of Customer Return: Retention, Renewal & Reactivation
October 5. 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Moderator: Rebecca Lieb, Editor • ClickZ
Ann Marie Miller, SVP, Corporate Sales • CMP
Alan Scott, CMO • Factiva
Peter Karpas, SVP, CMO and Product Management Officer • Intuit
Liz Smith, SVP, VP Marketing & Communications • Visa

The Internet today makes it quicker to shop but easier to hop whenever the best deals or offers come up or “pop-up” during surf or search sessions. Holding on to the customers you have has become more essential than ever as new account acquisition costs and churn rates take a bigger bite out of marketing budgets. Competition for customers has never been greater as smarter, more intrusive and creative online marketing programs reach and access an estimated 40 million broadband-connected households in America. With digital channels, marketers can quickly, efficiently and effectively modify, adjust and fine tune campaigns in real-time, optimizing spend and increasing accountability and yield. Concurrently, intelligent segmenting, targeting, profiling and personalization of sophisticated offline direct marketing campaigns is improving response rates and pipeline opportunities. With billions spent on acquiring, why are companies not doing more to assure deeper intimacy, attention, as well as proper care, handling and up-selling of valued accounts? Studies have shown that customer longevity is directly linked to business profitability, but many marketers do little to understand when, where, why and how customers depart, disconnect or defect. Gathering better customer intelligence and having real-time visibility into touch points, interactions and experiences are essential to retaining, renewing or reactivating accounts. Category leaders in financial services, online travel, retailing, communications and media will provide insightful and provocative perspectives on how to improve the 3Rs of Customer Return.

Producing Predictable Customer Experiences: Generations of Entertainment Excellence
Concluding Keynote Address
October 5. 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Julie Robertson, SVP, Marketing • Feld Entertainment, Inc.: Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, Disney On Ice and Disney Live

For nearly 40 years, Feld Entertainment has provided families with live action entertainment. Over the span of that time, Feld Entertainment has grown its properties from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, known as “The Greatest Show on Earth” to include Ice Follies and Holliday on Ice, which ultimately became Disney On Ice. Appealing to families in 47 different countries, and appearing on six different continents, Feld Entertainment has managed to provide a consistent customer experience, despite cultural differences, language barriers, and technology’s impact on family entertainment options. How does Feld Entertainment measure and track its effectiveness? How do they segment their customer base? What is the secret to creating generational brand awareness and loyalty? Julie Robertson will share with us the value of a consistent reliance on legacy principles for effective customer engagement. Through this session we will learn the value of continuing to employ marketing basics, and strategically implementing new ideas, without compromising the integrity of your product offering.