Have you met the traveling gnome?

Yesterday I had a great experience thanks to my MBA program. I had the opportunity to go to Fuqua's Marketing Conference at Duke University. It was an all day conference with different sessions about marketing and I feel like the knowledge I gained was invaluable. First, Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke University spoke about marketing as the Faculty Keynote Speaker. I then went to Alain Groenendaal about Experimental Marketing in a Post Digital World where experimental marketing was defined as a planned event that leaves a brand impression on a target audience. This can be achieved by the following:

1. Educating/teaching new behaviors.
2. Bringing brand promise to life
3. Generating conversation
4. Making tangible the intangible
5. Expanding the brand's meaning.

Next Yaser Bishr talked about creating a "social footprint" and creating Evangelists in your consumers.

The next session was delivered by Kimberly Long, Brand Manager of Heinz Ketchup. who talked about Heinz change to reflect new campaign "Grown, not made." In this session, she talked about expandable consumption; how to use ketchup beyond burgers, hot dogs and fries, and how to use more in a serving, get customers to buy bigger bottles of ketchup, etc. She also talked about using the classic glass bottle in advertisements (just as Coke still uses the classic glass Coke bottle for advertisement) as well as the importance of equity tracking both before and after consumers saw the new campaign(s).

The next speaker was Brad Brinegar, CEO of the Durham marketing firm, McKinney, who is responsible for Travelocity's effective marketing campaign with the Traveling gnome. Brad spoke about Connection planning for complex segmentation- to consider who the right people to reach are and what conversations you want to have with these people. "Brands are the connection between someone and something. Transactional connections say 'I'm buying what you're selling' whereas personal connections say 'I'm buying from you'."

Clint McClain talked about building a brand portfolio, specifically regarding his position at Wal-Mart and the value of discovering the type of consumer that you plan to target in your marketing strategy.

Overall, I was quite impressed with the knowledge I gained at this conference. These are just some of the valuable things I learned yesterday.