8:00 a.m.
Registration & Continental Breakfast

8:30 a.m.

Chairperson's Welcome, Opening Remarks & Presentation:
Best Practices In Branding From A "Best Place To Work"

What's the formula for being a top-five "Best Place to Work" for four years running? Ask Genentech, the San Francisco Bay Area biotech that prides itself on helping save patient lives while providing its employees with some of the best internal programs and services out there.

Genentech has used internal branding within initiatives, programs and organizational functions. They have learned the secret to capturing the hearts and minds of employees with consistent communications and internal brand experiences.

• Create a range of internal brands that support your organization's mission while engaging your employees
• Facilitate a cross-functional team through the brand development process
• Align internal brands to the strategic goals of a company
• Manage, maintain and sustain a family of brands through a clear brand framework

Gordon Rudow, Co-Founder & CEO
BONFIRE COMMUNICATIONS

David Arrington, Associate Director, Corporate Relations
GENENTECH

9:30 a.m.

Speed Networking

Meet your colleagues in this fun and fast-paced forum! You'll have a chance to meet and greet your fellow attendees.

10:30 a.m.

Bringing The Brand To Life: How To Encourage Employees At All Levels To Deliver The Brand Promise

Mayo Clinic is the most powerful health care brand in the United States. Patients come to Mayo Clinic from great distances, across the country and around the world, for medical care each year.

Like many institutions, Mayo Clinic has a sophisticated brand management program. However, without question, the most important brand activities at Mayo are internal efforts. Mayo Clinic's brand is not built by brand managers, marketing professionals or advertising -- it's built by each interaction a Mayo staff member has with a patient, and the stories each patient tells about his or her experience at Mayo Clinic.

In this session, you'll learn how Mayo Clinic has developed a corporate culture that encourages its employees at all levels to deliver the brand promise. And, you'll learn about specific internal branding strategies, ranging from storytelling to new employee orientation to organizational celebrations.

Amy Davis, Chair, Mayo Clinic Brand Management Team
MAYO CLINIC

11:20 a.m.

How The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company Built An Employment Brand Campaign For Their Already Well-Established Brand

Why is the Ritz-Carlton brand so often held up as the "gold standard" for customer service? How do they successfully engage their employees to deliver their brand promise?

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company is one of the most well-known global brands, known around the world for exceptional service and exceptional employees -- our ladies and gentlemen. For years, this has translated to a strong employer brand where Ritz-Carlton employees not only understand the company and its customer, but also have a keen appreciation of what it means, as well as their role in delivering on that promise, translating into an incomparable employer brand.

• Successfully build on already-strong employee values
• Partner with an external advertising agency
• Understand historical and current internal and external candidate perception (including those who were offered positions and didn't take them)
• Learn and leverage drivers of what you have to offer
• Successfully communicate and launch a brand campaign

Susan D. Strayer, SPHR, Corporate Director, Talent Management
THE RITZ-CARLTON HOTEL COMPANY, L.L.C.

Join a group of your communication and marketing colleagues for lunch with an informal discussion facilitated by one of our expert speakers. Take this opportunity to join others in a small, interactive group setting to network and brainstorm solutions to your most pressing internal branding concerns.

1:40 p.m.

How To Align And Brand The Culture Of A Non-Profit, Decentralized And Unionized Healthcare Company To Support Organizational Goals

Every company is unique, but some companies are more unique than others. Kaiser Permanente is one of those rare companies for which most text books don't have case studies. Founded in 1948, Kaiser Permanente was the country's first health management organization focusing on prepayment, prevention and an integrated approach to healthcare. Now, Kaiser Permanente is a $35 billion non-profit healthcare company that delivers healthcare to its 8 million members on a consensus basis with its 15,000 doctors that comprise The Permanente Medical Group and its 125,000 employees that belong to 32 various unions.

Trying to brand and align employee culture at Kaiser Permanente, or any company like it, requires a tailored, integrated and comprehensive, top-down/bottom-up decentralized strategy that is rooted in a brand positioning customers and employees truly believe in and the company can actually deliver on. Given the operational size and complexity of Kaiser Permanente, a decentralized strategy was essential to align their culture. To that end, the company took a rather unconventional and risky approach by first launching their award winning "Thrive" advertising campaign in the marketplace as way to galvanize and align the internal organization around the brand. As a result, policies, training, tools and incentives are now being deployed throughout the organization to empower employees to build the brand every day on the job. Furthermore, management's expectations of employees in terms of living the brand and delivering branded customer service are being specified in new union contracts and linking pay to performance.

• Identifying and overcoming the challenges of aligning a highly unionized, decentralized company
• Establishing traction with union employees through key strategies and tactics
• Creating a clearly defined, evidence-based brand position
• Leveraging the power of an ownable and relevant advertising message to align employees around the brand
• Using policies, tools, training and incentives to align employees with the brand
• Being prescriptive in terms of brand expectations

Scott Power, Brand Planner, Internal Brand Planning, Program Offices
KAISER PERMANENTE

2:30 p.m.

How To Engage Employees & Develop Talent During Times Of Change

During extended periods of change, retaining and developing talent becomes an urgent priority. The talent development experience becomes deeply personal as colleagues and managers create a new future for the business. Making the right tools and processes easily accessible, while critical, simply isn’t enough. Pfizer’s Worldwide Technology organization implemented a colleague engagement and development program and related Pfizer’s brand using the People Capability Maturity Model (PCMM) as its foundation, and then created a personalized website and marketing program to redefine its commitment to growing its people.

• Challenge leadership to take a risk in developing a new brand and related experience for colleagues and managers
• Bridge the gap between brand, design, and technology
• Define a unique voice and tone for a branding program that pushes boundaries while still remaining culturally appropriate
• Create a flexible marketing program that puts managers and leaders in the driver’s seat in delivering the message
• Develop a program website as an extension of the brand, designed around a user’s work life and calendar-driven needs

Christopher Thornton, Senior Manager, Worldwide Technology Communications
PFIZER INC.

3:35 p.m.

How To Align Your Internal And External Brand Strategies To Ensure A United And Consistent Employee And Client Experience

Aon is the product of more than 420 acquisitions around the world. The company's growth through acquisition strategy was wildly successful in building the industry's best talent base and capabilities platform in less than 20 years. However, the strategy also produced a decentralized organization that operated individually in a number of arenas, including branding.

In 2005, Aon hired its first chief marketing officer and began its journey to build a brand that would represent the attributes and behaviors its people and clients had associated with it since the early 1980s. A critical first step was to define the internal Aon brand that would unite all 43,000 colleagues worldwide around a common set of behaviors that would define the Aon experience for clients as well as colleagues.

Global research of clients, colleagues and other stakeholders formed the basis for the development of the Aon brand and the Aon brand behaviors. As a result, a global employee engagement program was developed to communicate the brand to all colleagues. This included on-going initiatives like Aon's Community Day (Aon20), aligning the brand with Aon's Leadership Model and the use of local brand ambassadors to support the brand rollout and ensure that colleagues live the brand and clients receive value from their interactions with Aon.

The next step focused on activating the Aon brand externally with clients and other stakeholders. This ongoing step includes the development of value propositions by service line, aligning Aon's client facing materials with the Aon brand, and measuring client satisfaction (NPS).

• Determining the brand role of the employee in a professional services organization
• Ensuring brand activation through close alignment with the company's competency model
• Supporting local brand jazz in a global organization
• Putting the client first both internally and externally

Hans van Heukelum, Vice President, Global Marketing,
Corporate Marketing & Communications
AON CORPORATION

4:25 p.m.

Blowing Up The Traditional Communication Model:
Delivering The Brand Promise By Improving Performance And Generating Measurable Results

Legendary UCLA Basketball Coach John Wooden said, "Never mistake activity for achievement." Yet that's what communicators often do. Whether it's the newest technology or a trusted communication channel, it's easy to get lost in output instead of focusing on outcomes. But as communication professionals, you have the ability to deliver on what really matters – helping your company get better, measurable results so the brand promise to customers is realized.

In this session, you will hear how ConAgra Foods' Corporate Communication department transformed itself – shifting from the churn of traditional output to helping leaders attack communication and other leadership - - and people-related breakdowns – to ultimately influence what people do to improve business performance. This approach helped one of the company’s largest warehouses reduce product damage by 65% and inventory loss by 63%, and improve productivity by 16%. A large manufacturing facility reduced injuries by 35% and turnover by 27%. These are results that impact the brand, customer satisfaction and the bottom line.

• Examples from ConAgra Foods case studies to show how you, too, can help managers become better leaders and enable employees to be catalysts for improving performance to build the brand
• An approach to help you change the traditional communication mindset to one focused on delivering measurable business results
• How to find a place for existing communication tools in the overall mix of solutions and use them surgically to improve outcomes

Bob Kula, Senior Director, Corporate Communication
CONAGRA FOODS

5:15 p.m.
End Of Day One

Let's meet and have a drink as you relax with your peers. ALL conference attendees and speakers are welcome to join us for this special opportunity to meet new colleagues. Don't miss this chance to benchmark ideas over complimentary drinks!

Sign up during the day for dinner with a group. Take advantage of Washington, DC's fine dining while you continue to network with your colleagues.