BrandPalace

Keep learning ...

Interesting and thought provoking article in Adweek.

Bottomline :

"We all have to keep learning more about the customer, both the consumer of media and the customer at retail."

What do yoù think ?

Spotlight on a Speaker : Pascal Mignolet

Pascal Mignolet holds a master degree in Sociology and Mass Communication from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and a degree in Marketing&Advertising from the Solvay Business School, Brussels.
He started his career as research executive at a Belgian market research agency (today part of Ipsos group) and left the company ten years later (1999) as Client Services Director, to become Research Manager at Mobistar. Three years later he became European Market Research Director of the Orange Group, responsible for all  European market research outside France and UK.

In 2006 Pascal joined the Sara Lee Coffee & Tea division (Douwe Egberts, Senseo, Pickwick,...)  as International Marketing Intelligence Director. His responsibilities include the management of both the local and central Market Research programs, as well as the Business & Competitive Intelligence group. He leads a remote team of 14 market researchers spread across Europe, South America and Asia.
                          
Pascal has a special professional interest in and experience within the areas of  Customer Satisfaction,  Brand Equity & Advertising and  Innovation Research.
His personal interests include reading (history), gardening & everything Italian. 

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Pascal will be teaching on "Marketing Information", on April 28th

Spotlight on a Speaker : Françoise Burlet

Françoise Burlet studied Business Management at the UCL (IAG Louvain-La-Neuve) University. In 1988 she joined Unilever as a marketer. During her 18 years stay at the company, she evolved from Brand Manager to Business Unit Manager.

When Unilever sold the Iglo business to Permira (Private Equity company) in 2006, she became General Manager of Iglo Belgium, France and Netherlands.
During her 20 years of experience, she took care of the following brands: Ola, Magnum, Carte D’Or, Cornetto, Iglo, Captain Iglo, Becel, Bertolli, Effi, Planta, Solo, Boursin, Lipton, Zwan, Bi-fi.

Françoise is passionate about Brands and about Business.
She is married to Erik and has two daughters aged 17 and 15. Her evening and week-end activities are shared between family, friends, University associations, theatre, fitness and books.

Françoise's session is about 'Brand Stewardship'. She will cover the roles and responsibilities of marketing & management officers within a company, best practices in how agencies and advertisers can work together and will discuss the new issues on brand ownership (advertiser ? agency ? consumer ?). Her presentation is scheduled on May 12th.

Unveiled : Special Guest Speaker Tom (Studio 100) Grymonprez

You surely are aware that BrandPalace will be featuring some Special  (or “Mystery”) Guests. They will join us as an extra at the end of each session, in a relaxed and informal setting. They will share with us their own personal story about their passion for brands.
We are proud to announce that Tom Grymonprez, Commercial Director at Studio 100 Benelux, will be speaking to us as a Special Guest.

Studio 100 is without any doubt one of Belgium’s most important brand powerhouses. With household names such as Samson & Gert, Kabouter Plop, Big & Betsy, Piet Piraat, Bumba, Het Huis Anubis, Spring, K3, Mega Mindy, Pipi Long Stockings, Lassie and Black Beauty, the company is a real house-of-brands.
And yet, Studio 100 is a fairly recent story : established in 1996, it quickly became one of Europe’s largest producers of family entertainment. The group’s portfolio includes film, television, DVD, publishing, amusement parks (Plopsaland, Plopsa Coo and Plopsa Indoor Hasselt), theatrical productions, internet radio, digital TV, websites, licencing and merchandising.
As a Belgian company, Studio 100 is rapidly becoming an international player. Bumba is aired in more than 30 countries worldwide, such as India, Israel, Canada, Singapore and Spain. Last year they acquired the German company EM.Entertainment, with their popular characters Maja the Bee, Wicky the Viking and Pipi Long Stockings.
In 2008 Studio 100 booked a turnover of €100 million - 40 percent of which comes from abroad, mainly Germany and the Netherlands.
In January this year, Gert Verhulst and Hans Bourlon, the business managers of Studio 100, have been chosen 'Managers of the Year'.

Our Guest Speaker :

Tom Grymonprez holds a Master in Communication Sciences (UGent) and MBA’s Marketing ( Vlerick School) and Management (Vlekho).
Het started his career in 1998 as strategic planner at Quattro d’Arcy. After 3 years he moved to Accenture as a change management consultant.
Six years ago, Tom joined Studio100 where he had several commercial functions, before being promoted in 2008 as the Commercial Director Benelux, with responsibilities for all line extensions (Licensing, merchandising, publishing, multimedia…), for commercial product development, B2B partnerships, sponsoring and marketing.

Stay tuned for more news on our Special Guests. We have some great branding professionals coming your way !

How will agencies fare ?

Interesting stuff for people in the ad industry :

Reconsidering the Advertising Industry

View more presentations from Alain Thys. (tags: marketing agencies)

Wonder how advertisers react on this : do you share this presentations' analysis? And advertising professionals : agree, or not ? All reactions are more than welcome !

How to become a better partner for your client

In order to prepare the BrandPalace course, we conducted a series of expert interviews with some of Belgium’s most important advertisers. We wanted to know what these Marketing or Communications Managers saw as the biggest contribution a course could bring to a better collaboration between advertisers and their agencies.

These were the main recommendations :

1. It’s all about building value
-    Be a partner in building value – not only for the consumer, but also for the company (and it’s shareholders …) Brands are one of the company's main levers to build value.
-    Know the place of advertising in a broader business context.  Advertising can only be successful if it’s in sync with the whole business process.

2. Hard Facts
-    Be more open to the hard data that underlie a communications strategy
-    Better understand the facts and figures behind a briefing
-    Be more involved in defining the critical success factors of a campaign
-    Be more accountable.

3. Reality Check
-    Be sure to really know and understand the target audience,
-    Don’t get lost in your own small and privileged microcosm
-    Real interest for real people, the real world and real shopping behaviour
-    Pay more attention to the actual feasibility and the practical consequences of your proposals
-    Better understand the business processes within the clients’ organisation, such as logistics, production-, channel - and pipeline management.

4. Partnership
-    Be a partner in the briefing process : a brief takes a lot of hard work, to be done together by advertiser and agency.
-    Be a partner to all the stakeholders of your client’s organisation.
-    Be open to take your part of the brand-guardianship, by managing the knowledge acquired by each campaign.

With these recommendations in mind, we invited the speakers who can help us to become a better (sparring) partner in the branding and marketing processes.
But maybe, as a reader, you have additional recommendations or suggestions. Please feel free to post them !

Spotlight on a Speaker : Anne-Françoise Piette

Under the supervision of Anne-Françoise Piette, Sales & Marketing Director Eurostar Belgium since 2002, Eurostar has expanded enormously.
It was her merit that the line Brussels-London grew to be of the utmost importance to Eurostar. A commercial department that was set up in Brussels employed 15 people. The Belgian branch now participates in every strategic and commercial decision of the Eurostar Group, based in London, with French (SNCF), British (UK Rail) and Belgian (SNCB /NMBS) shareholding.
The results are impressive: a gain of more than 35 points of market share in 5 years’ time, business results have more than doubled in the same period and Eurostar’s name is now well established.
Eurostar has developed into one of the most striking brandnames in Belgium. Anne-Françoise Piette is awarded Marketeer of the year 2004, e-Marketeer 2007 and Media Advertiser 2007 and “Intrapreneur” Alichec Awards 2008.  Additionally she has won numerous marketing and communication awards for her Eurostar campaigns.

Anne Françoise Piette graduated in Financial & Economic Sciences (ICHEC – Brussels) with a special interest for marketing. She started her career in ’91 at Bongrain Belgilux. After that she worked as a marketing manager for Bacardi Martini and  a year later (’98) was hired to develop the marketing division for the mobile telephone department. In 2002 she was asked by Eurostar to set up the Belgian branch. She is now responsible for the overall commercial activities of Eurostar in Belgium.

In 2008 she was given an additional challenge: launch Eurostar activities in Holland. To be continued …

Anne-Françoise's session is about 'Touchpoints' and is scheduled May 5th at TBWA's offices.