Jim Stengel
"Jim Stengel was absolutely fantastic and really captured the attention and in some cases, the emotions of our audience. He did a fantastic job of really understanding our theme and molding his comments to be in harmony with those of our CEO that morning. His presentation style and engagement were absolutely fantastic and exactly what we expect from a high profile keynote. Jim was also very approachable with our employees and appeared to really enjoy himself during the day he spent with us." Food
Known as the innovative marketing genius who reinvigorated consumer giant Procter & Gamble, Jim Stengel is one of the preeminent champions of ideals-driven business.
“A brand ideal,” explains Stengel, “is not social responsibility or altruism, but a program for profit and growth based on improving people’s lives.”
Dynamic and perceptive, Stengel honed his inventive techniques through 25 years at P&G, where he worked his way up from brand assistant to Global Marketing Officer. Universally respected as one of the world’s most innovative companies, P&G’s core businesses were stagnating at the time of Stengel’s C-Suite arrival.
“To hit these big targets, we needed an even bigger goal: identifying and activating a distinctive ideal,” says Stengel. “Improving people’s lives would be the explicit goal of every business in the P&G portfolio. We could then establish each business’s true reason for being as the basis for new growth, and we could link them all into a strong foundation for P&G’s recovery.”
The company’s quick and decisive turnaround was engineered with the help of Stengel, who oversaw an $8 billion marketing budget and more than 7,000 employees. With an open mind and willingness to try something different, he transformed P&G’s marketing culture and firmly established it as one of the world’s most admired brand-building companies.
After seven years on the Executive team, Stengel left P&G to start his own eponymous consultancy and think tank – the Jim Stengel Group – to pursue his passion for helping businesses grow by focusing on human values.
There’s a common thread to some of the world’s truly significant brand transformations, finds Stengel. They are all born from authentically activating the brand’s higher purpose.
Working with an array of companies, from Fortune 50’s to start-ups, Stengel has learned that all struggle with sustaining growth, differentiation in the marketplace, and employee engagement. His group’s proprietary “Purpose Path to Growth” approach addresses these challenges head on – helping leadership teams galvanize their organizations to move toward significant, lasting change.
Outside of his consulting work, the bustling business sage takes time to teach his marketing methods as an adjunct professor at Kellogg School of Management and previously as an adjunct professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Stengel also runs dual week-long academies at the influential Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, the annual global benchmark for effective marketing communications, bringing together the creative communications industry every year. As part of his focus to give back, Stengel aims to inspire younger people who will be the next generation of professionals in the field of business.
Currently, Stengel is embarking on the research and writing for his third book about the interconnectivity of our current world. His first tome, Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies, is based on a 10-year study demonstrating the direct correlation between brand purpose and financial performance. His second book, Unleashing the Innovators: How Mature Companies Find New Life with Startups, serves as a playbook for big companies to change their culture to drive innovation and growth.
Highly acclaimed, Stengel has been honored numerous times by prominent industry publications Ad Age and Brandweek. His leadership was recognized when P&G was honored as “Advertiser of the Year” at the 2008 Cannes Lions Festival. He was named to the first-ever Fortune Executive Dream Team in 2011. And, in 2017, he was inducted into The American Marketing Association Marketing Hall of Fame.
Equally comfortable talking about both the passion and emotion of value-laden marketing, as well as big data and research analytics, Stengel unleashes his persuasive playbook for embracing and activating new ideas and ways of working.
An avid practitioner of transcendental meditation, Stengel undergirds his explosive energy with a grounding sense of calm. The Financial Times says, “he sometimes sounds more like a Peace Corps volunteer than a corporate executive.”
With enthusiasm, a bold vision, and entrepreneurial imagination, Stengel inspires brands and organizations to get in touch with who they are – and who they must become – in order to effectively compete in a new generation.
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What are the different approaches for activating a global brand for local impact? In this challenging presentation, Jim Stengel will share proven global approaches to activation. Using actual brand examples, Stengel will present framework tools to help accelerate local application, recognize challenges and barriers, and implement success measures. Participants will be able to take away applied learnings that they can start acting on immediately.
A master communicator who is in the business of helping companies tell their stories, Jim Stengel knows how to cultivate a purposeful conversation. He can question, tease out, cajole, and elicit bold truths – just as he helps leaders and organizations define their purpose.
Stengel also recognizes the value of airing and trying to resolve diverging viewpoints. He uses his charm, humor, and spontaneity to disarm difficult conversations and produce thoughtful dialogue.
The traditional mission and vision is a formula for mediocrity, says Jim Stengel. To hit big targets a bigger goal is needed. Businesses instead, he believes, need to identify and activate a distinctive ideal and build company culture around its purpose.
Through his efforts at Procter & Gamble, where he helped transform the culture to a consumer-centric model, Stengel helped pioneer a new ideals-driven framework that helps businesses identify their purpose and use it to make a difference in the lives of the people they serve.
“Opening up an organization to activating on purpose moves the needle like nothing else,” Stengel explains.
In this story-rich session, Stengel takes the audience through anecdotes from his book, Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies.
Based on a unique ten-year study involving 50,000 brands, “Grow” shows how the world’s 50 best businesses have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions and values.
Passionate and powerful, Stengel offers insight and guidance on how businesses and organizations can lead with purpose and inspire it in others.
How and why are digital startups toppling legacy companies? Jim Stengel believes it’s because big companies lose their original excitement, purpose, and drive over the years.
“These big companies become more concerned about how to maintain market share or survive in their space than about how to transform the world,” he says. “In a word, they go from bold to old.”
“They also focus on selling and telling instead of servicing and delighting,” adds Stengel.
In this inspiring talk, Stengel draws from the lessons outlined in his second book, Unleashing the Innovators: How Mature Companies Find New Life with Startups. The marketing guru describes it as a playbook for big companies who are trying to change their culture.
The book was born of an ingenious experiment in 2008 when Stengel was still serving as the Global Marketing officer at consumer giant Procter & Gamble. Stengel swapped staff with Google for a month to see if they could “rekindle the fire of nimbleness at P&G while coaching Googlers on P&G’s processes.”
With audiences, Stengel explores how legacy companies can tap into their passionate and committed workforce. After all, he says, “no one cares more about your company than the people who work there.”
He also guides leaders through a self-assessment of their level of personal courage – and points out what to work on to become a more effective, courageous leader.
In 2008, shortly after helping Procter & Gamble capture its first-ever Advertiser of the Year Award at Cannes Lions, Jim Stengel shocked the marketing world by leaving his lucrative and prestigious role as Global Marketing Officer – to start his own company.
He went from overseeing an $8 billion marketing budget and managing 7,000 employees, to self-funding a staff of 12.
Stengel felt he achieved everything he set out to do at P&G, and knew it was time to embark on another adventure. With two goals in mind – to lift and elevate marketing to be a more world-improving force and to give back in areas where he had passion and something to give – he started over from scratch.
Stengel shares his journey and what he’s learned about happiness, freedom, risk, love, grit, and resilience. In a very personal and poignant account, he takes audiences through his checklist for a happy life, and asks them to consider their own checklist.
“We should all plan, but be open to serendipity,” he counsels. “The worst mistake so many of us make is to stay in a plan when we are not following our intuition and our heart.”
How do you lead a business or brand today? You simply cannot be a master in everything, says Stengel.
The world is changing – and changing fast. Playbooks and plans are outdated before they are executed. Leaders are more insecure and self-conscious than ever.
Where do you start and what are the new principles? In this insightful talk, Stengel explores what it takes to adapt and lead to more effectively compete in a new generation – whether you’re seeking to embrace new technologies or bridge the generational gap with new employees.
With his signature approach that is both strategic and holistic, Stengel inspires audience with his mission to rethink business, leadership, branding, and life.
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