An intense week of everything about brands
The AMI’s annual Marketing Week, to be held at the Holiday Inn Adelaide from 21-24 August, is perhaps the most intense week of marketing-related events held in the country each year.
From breakfast through to early evening, each day is packed with sessions that thoroughly canvass the week’s latest theme, this year’s being ‘Managing Brands: Art or Science?’
The program is designed so that you can choose to attend individual sessions, buy a multi-pack ticket for five sessions, or take out an event pass that allows attendance at every session. The event pass provides top value, because it can be transferred among staff.
One of the highlights of Marketing Week will be an address given direct via video link from Copenhagen, Denmark, by branding expert Jesper Kunde, of Kunde & Co (day 1, session 1G).
Kunde’s address, entitled ‘Unique NOW… or never’, will look at how a focus on branding can help a company get back to its core business and define its direction for the future. He will outline exactly what branding is, the importance of a unique value position, and how that interrelates with a company’s business concept and culture.
Kunde worked for Carlsberg and the electronics company LK before starting Kunde & Co in 1988. It has 85 clients, ranging from luxury brands, electronics and furniture, to public agencies, law firms, medico-pharmaceutical and heavy industry. It has offices in Switzerland, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Kunde has written two books about marketing and branding, Corporate Religion (1997) and Unique Now … or Never (2001). (See also 'Kunde carves place of brands in new age')
Branding and the youth market
Do you need to sharpen your understanding of how to market to the younger generations? Two sessions will focus on branding and the youth market (day 1, sessions 1B and 1C). In the first, ‘Brands in a Youth Culture Context’, Stephen Amiet (Motorola), Dion Appel (Lifelounge) and Damien Arthur (University of Adelaide) will investigate the relationship between brands and youth culture from a practitioner, agency and academic perspective.
In the second, ‘Branding According to Y’, Dr Rebecca Huntley from IPSOS Mackay will look at Gen Y attitudes to brands, shopping, celebrity endorsements, marketing tactics and consumerism in general.
The relevance of brands to small business
One of the Marketing Week organisers’ aims this year is to get more small business owners to attend. A short pre-conference workshop, ‘Branding for Small Business’, is a good place to start if you are a small business owner wondering if this branding and marketing stuff is really of any importance to you.
An Adelaide marketing consultant, Marc Makrid, and a relationship marketing specialist, Dr Carolin Plewa from the University of Adelaide, will discuss how small to medium enterprises will be able to make the most out of attending Marketing Week.
Makrid will, among other things, explain how lessons learned by large companies with international brands can be applied to benefit the smallest organisations. Dr Plewa will explore opportunities for the development of relationships through events like Marketing Week and success factors for building relationships into ongoing business opportunities.
Brands and branding are perhaps the core elements of successful marketing, and Marketing Week 2007 is the place to learn a huge amount about brands in a short time.
To find out more about the program and registration details, go to the Marketing Week site at www.marketingweek.com.au. Telephone inquiries can be directed to (08) 8235 2500 and email inquiries to sa@ami.org.au
Marketing Week’s committee chairman, Michael Neale, said that in planning the 2007 event the committee had wanted to develop a program that would benefit all businesses.
“A great deal of thought was put into approaching suitable speakers to ensure they would bring something to the table that would provide all attendees, whether they be a one-man-band or a manager of a multinational company, with something they could take away from the event and apply to their work,” he said.
Marketing Week is sponsored by the Australian Marketing Institute, The Advertiser, Australia Post, Clemenger BBDO Adelaide, and Graphic Print Group.
Kunde carves place of brands in new age
When people talk about religion, they often talk about a life-changing experience. It may sound corny, but when I read Jesper Kunde’s book Corporate Religion, it was a life-changing experience of sorts for me.
I had completed my business degree, majoring in marketing, in the mid 1980s and had gone straight into a consumer products company. I then moved into high technology marketing and was working in England at the height of the tech boom in the 1990s. Many aspects of my usual brand paradigm did not make sense anymore.
I found ‘religion’, Kunde’s Corporate Religion, on the then new Amazon UK web site.
Some of the most brilliant insights in life are, in retrospect, obvious. I started to read the book and immediately found one such insight. Kunde argued “… it is no longer products that compete, it is concepts”. At a time when the Internet was changing the world, this had instant relevance and currency for me. Kunde went on to argue that companies with strong brand personalities that both employees and customers can believe in are the companies that generally win.
Throughout the rest of the book, I came across insight after insight that came together to catapult my brand thinking into the 21st century.
That’s why I am pleased the Australian Marketing Institute has been successful in securing Jesper Kunde as a key speaker for Marketing Week 2007. I want to have my understanding of ‘brand’ further challenged so that managing brands into the future makes more sense to me.
— MICHAEL NEALE |
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