Keynote: Three Strategic Steps You Can Take Today to Drive Organic Growth Tomorrow

The field of marketing is a late bloomer when it comes to conforming to the analytic, fact-based approach to decision-making that is THE standard practice in virtually every other critical strategic business function. The excuses that worked even just a few years ago — we don't really know which group of customers has the highest profit potential, our customers won't tell us what will motivate them to buy, and there's no way to measure marketing ROI, we just have to guess, and on and on — just don't fly with CEOs and CFOs anymore. The reality is the effectiveness of marketing is disappointing and getting worse. Marketers are under increasing pressure to drive instead of drag organic growth.

According to Kevin Clancy, much of the reason for poor performance is an over reliance on seat-of-the-pants approaches and unscientific tools to make critical marketing decisions. High performance marketing programs, however, are not the result of instinct, anecdotes, and personal opinions; they come from the careful measurement and analysis of unimpeachable data to select the most profitable and compelling strategic components (i.e., targeting, positioning, product/service configuration, ROI measurement, etc.). Kevin will describe three best practices for developing financially-optimal marketing strategies — illustrating each with real-world examples and case studies drawn from his new book, Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head: How Disciplined, Fact-Based Marketing Can Drive Extraordinary Growth and Profits — that will dramatically improve marketing performance.

About the Speaker

Kevin J. Clancy, Ph.D., is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Copernicus Marketing Consulting, a marketing firm committed to transforming the way companies think about and practice marketing. Prior to Copernicus, Clancy founded and served as Chairman of Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Earlier in his career, he was Vice President for Research Services at BBDO Worldwide, and held faculty appointments in Sociology and Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University's School of Management. Clancy received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Sociology and Economics from the City University of New York and his Ph.D. in Research Methods and Statistics from New York University. Clancy has published numerous articles on advertising, marketing, and social science research, has consulted for three decades with major corporations around the world, including American Express, AT&T, and McDonald's and has co-authored seven books, including two business best-sellers.

Your Gut is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head : How Disciplined, Fact-Based Marketing Can Drive Extraordinary Growth & Profits By Kevin Clancy Wiley 2007 Buy at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

Market New Products Successfully: Using Simulated Test Market Technology By Kevin Clancy Lexington Books 2005 Buy at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

Counterintuitive Marketing: Achieve Great Results Using Uncommon Sense By Kevin Clancy The Free Press 2000 Buy at Amazon or Barnes & Noble

Other books by Kevin Clancy at Amazon.