branding – BaylorS3E

S3 Spotlight: Bill Glenn Explains–How to Expand your Skill Set to Advance Your Career

kirk_wakefield 2014, About S3, Sell, Sponsorships February 1, 2014November 1, 2018activation, branding, consultative selling, consumer, insights, marketing, research 0 Comment

by Justin Pipes – February 2014

Bill Glenn is President of The Breakout Group, a boutique consulting firm that creates sales and marketing strategies to challenge norms and produce breakout results for brands and sports/entertainment organizations. His thinking is built on a foundation of deep sales and marketing expertise and both an agency and client-side perspective as it relates to integrated marketing programs in sports and entertainment, including big data and program analytics. Glenn has a both a Bachelor’s in Journalism and MBA in Marketing from the University of Missouri.

Build a Skill Set Foundation: Start with Sales

Glenn’s career started as a Marketing Associate with GTE (now Verizon) where he had three, six-month assignments in direct marketing, product management and sales. Although he doubted sales would ever be something he enjoyed, the brief experience felt like such a great fit he remained in B2B “consultative” sales and sales management for the next ten years.

Over this time, Bill learned the critical importance of blending strong customer relationships with a keen understanding of the assets you’re selling:

Great relationships uncover business needs while asset knowledge delivers the best client solution.

Understanding this dynamic is the key to any successful business strategy. Through this experience, he was able to learn how sales and marketing are co-dependent functions in delivering client success. Additionally, Bill says, “Sales taught me the importance of having a broad knowledge base and understanding how all the parts of an organization work together to enable revenue.”

Build the Bridge: Understand How Sales and Marketing Work Together

After 10 years in sales, Glenn wanted to extend his skill set to brand marketing and marketing communications. He took over trade show marketing and strategy at GTE and was able to learn how messaging and technology at an event can deliver product value in a different context and what value this communication channel offers a field sales organization.

Bill quickly transitioned to leading GTE’s sports marketing and sponsorship group, where he leveraged his prior roles to understand how to leverage partnership assets in unique ways to produce value for both consumer and B2B target segments. His sales experience offered credibility and improved his productivity when interfacing with business and consumer-related field sales teams.

Balancing the objectives of multiple organizations in this sponsorship role yielded a solid understanding of the company’s overall brand strategy and also improved the effectiveness of sponsorship investment. With this knowledge he was able to determine the best values in a sponsorship package.

Focus on Results: Learn About (and Learn to Like) Data

Having a strong understanding of sales and brand marketing, Glenn decided to extend his skill set (adding research/analytics) and perspective (agency side) in joining The Marketing Arm where he launched the agency’s first Insights and Analytics practice. In this role, he learned how to leverage primary and secondary research and measure program performance using statistical models to help clients understand the impact of marketing strategy and programs. It was a tremendous experience in learning how to find meaningful data points to both support and direct marketing and sales strategy.

Build Value: An Extended Skill Set Yields New Perspectives and Experience

Today, Bill is putting all these skills to use in consulting with brands and sports/entertainment organizations in creating integrated programs and building sales and marketing strategies that make a difference.

Merrill Dubrow, President and CEO of M/A/R/C Research, says, “Bill has a very diverse background having been on both the client and agency side. Very few people have the ability to offer clients sales and marketing expertise, including analytics, as well as an agency/vendor perspective.” Dubrow went on to say, “When dealing with clients, having been one of them, he is able to quickly gather keen insights thanks to this varied experience and perspective.” Dubrow’s comments reinforce how well Glenn knows sales and marketing and how extending your skill set over a career can pay dividends both personally and professionally.

Have Desire: To Learn

As an Adjunct Professor of Marketing, Glenn mentors many students and young professionals. He says, “I just try to get students to think differently. The first 5-10 years of a career should be spent getting a broad base of perspectives and by extending your skill set through experience.”

Glenn says he hears many say they “want to work in sports” but that desire depends heavily on understanding sales and marketing. He continued, “It is much easier for me to teach someone the sports business than it is to teach marketing and sales skills. The latter, for the most part, is developed through experience.”

Glenn also coaches students to concentrate less on who they’re working for and more on the role their current job will play over the course of their career. In other words, what’s your dream and what perspectives and experience will enable you to reach that destination?

How’s your sense of sell? Defining your personal brand

kirk_wakefield 2013, Sell, Sponsorships, Tickets July 1, 2013November 2, 2018bow tie, brand awareness, brand identity, brand loyalty, branding, Houston Texans, New York Giants, personal brand, signature 0 Comment

by Brian George – July 2013

Much of your personal brand is on display via social media, as Ken Troupe shared with us in Establishing Your Personal Brand and What does your Twitter and LinkedIn say about your personal brand.

John Maguire

Within the context of premium and corporate sales, let’s explore more what it means to establish and grow your “Personal Brand.” A large portion of what I’ve learned and applied through the years came through a workshop facilitated by John Maguire, Sr. Vice President of Corporate Partnership with the New York Giants.

What Makes You Unique?

At any given time in a market there are perhaps as many as 1,000 professionals selling marketing and/or advertising to your competition.

What are you doing differently than your competition to make “You” stick out from the competition?

My “personal brand” started innocently enough at a store with my wife four years ago. I happened to pick up a bow tie and asked her opinion. Her disapproving look was enough motivation for me to purchase said bow tie and wear it the next day to work. I happened to have a meeting with one of the most notorious “bully clients” in the city of Houston. When I walked in, he said, “I like the bow tie, it makes you different.”

From that moment forward the bow tie was a signature of my “personal brand.” So I ask you:

What is your signature?
When people mention your name in conversation what association is made?
When you walk into a meeting, what is your go-to opening that breaks down the wall of conversation?

Whatever you choose to be the signature of your “personal brand,” ensure that your promise, pricing and results are in line. It does you no good to have a signature only to have someone think of it in a negative light. Just like you protect the intellectual property of the company you work for, you need to have a constant understanding of how the actions you take with everyone around you affect your signature; that is, what you leave with them.

3 Brand Relationships

There are three types of brand relationships:

Brand Awareness: I know you exist.
Brand Identity: I know who you are.
Brand Loyalty: I like who you are.

One of the key takeaways of the workshop was: “Industry leaders make the effort to convert brand awareness and identity relationships into brand loyal ones by offering new and improved features of their brands.”

Assuming you want to be the best at what you do: Take a look at individuals who are probably loyal to another personal brand or know who you are–but aren’t buying. Come up with a tangible action plan to convert them to be brand loyal to your brand.

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Your personal brand

The question is, “Who’s buying?” [/dropshadowbox]

Understanding that the world of selling premium products and sponsorships has evolved so much in the past decade, relationships are still the most important part of what we do.

My relationship with others is based upon their personal brand perceptions. The question is, “Who’s buying?” For personal and professional reasons, I need to be conscious at all times to represent my own personal brand as best as possible.

Under Armour – The Underdog Story of Sports Merchandise

kirk_wakefield 2013, Lead, Learn, Research, Sell June 1, 2013November 2, 2018Adidas, athletics, brand management, branding, equipment, gear, merchandise, Nike, perception, Reebok, Under Armour 0 Comment

by Anne Rivers – June 2013

How to break into a mature market

The giants of athletic gear (Nike, Adidas and Reebok) traditionally dominated the sports merchandising brand space through partnerships with sports franchises and collegiate athletics. In mature, lucrative industries like this, the question for others is always the same: How do you break into a market that already has strong leaders?

In the brandscape of athletic apparel, Under Armour is considered one of the newest contenders. Kevin Plank, a former University of Maryland football player, founded the company in 1996 on the grounds of wanting to create a t-shirt that provided compression and kept perspiration off rather than absorb it. This highly differentiated product helped set Under Armour apart from its competitors, but was unable to break out of its relatively new and niche space in their desired market for several years.

Being Different

In the BAV, UnderAmour, along with 3,500 other brands are surveyed by over 17,000 respondents on 71 metrics including 48 emotional attributes in the U.S. every quarter. Through the data, we spot key trends to help the brand grow into and/or maintain their leadership position.

Energized differentiation (ED) is a key indicator of future brand performance and a driving force for the value of sports brands. In 2007, Under Armour performed well as a differentiated brand with high esteem (E), but lacked in relevance (R) and knowledge (K). Their products set them apart from other sports merchandise giants of the United States, but needed more consumers to relate to and know about the brand and what it stood for.

Grassroots Marketing

How did they start to capitalize on their high differentiation from the other brands? Under Armour desperately needed to increase the relevance and knowledge of their brand among the general population. Grassroots efforts to gradually grow Under Armour through influencers provided the brand with authentic, passionate advocates who generated enthusiasm for the brand.

Evolving strategy

The brand had to first appeal to smaller segments of the overall desired target audience. For example, Under Armour sponsored a few professional athletes like Ray Lewis, Tom Brady and Miles Austin, as well as college teams from Northwestern, South Florida, Texas Tech, and Boston College. By learning how to appeal to smaller segments of athletes, Under Armour gathered enough momentum to appeal to the mass market.

Understanding brand essence

Under Armour benefited from its dedicated approach to consistent, true-to-self branding efforts, becoming a leadership brand in the midst of a recession and continuing to catch up to the category leader. Today, Under Armour outperforms Nike on these key attributes of their brand essence that drive consumer choice:

unique
simple
innovative
independent

Continuing to exhibit values that resonate with Americans’ emotional needs since the recession help Under Armour maintain its leadership identity today.

Sports franchises

Using the BAV’s assessment of consumers’ perceptions of brands we can predict stock values of publicly traded companies. Using the BAV’s scores of energized differentiation for pro franchises, we can predict Forbes’ annual valuation of franchises. Sports teams, and individual players for that matter, can diagnose what elements of their brands are contributing to success and which hold opportunity for improvement. Just like Under Armour, there’s no quick fix. But, with appropriate diagnostics and strategy, teams can gain ground on the leaders in their markets.