Paul Wiefels Speaker Biography
Corporate, Business, and Market Development Strategist
Paul Wiefels is a managing director and one of the founding partners of The Chasm Group LLC. He provides counsel to companies and organizations — from start-ups to the Fortune 500 — in the areas of corporate, business, and market development strategy and specializes in product marketing and positioning strategy. He is the author of The Chasm Companion: Implementing Effective Marketing Strategies for High Technology Companies, published in North America in 2002 by HarperCollins; and published internationally in 2003 and 2005 by John Wiley & Sons.
Clients
Many of Mr. Wiefels’ global clients are recognized leaders in their fields including Accuray, Adobe, Agilent, Brocade Communications, Citrix, H-P, Intel, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Symantec, and VeriSign. He has worked with clients in virtually every sector of technology including information technology, consumer technology, biotechnology, medical instrumentation, and "green" technologies providing both counsel as well as capacity via a "hands on" orientation to senior management teams in North America, Europe and Asia.
Experience
Mr. Wiefels’ unique career background began in the consumer marketing sector where he served as an advertising agency account director working in the packaged goods and financial services sector. He transferred this experience to the technology sector where he has worked during the past 25 years.
Prior to joining Chasm Group, he served as director of consulting for Landor Associates, the world’s largest branding consultancy. Prior to Landor, he was worldwide director of product marketing for Ingres Corporation. Mr. Wiefels began his high tech career with Apple serving in marketing management positions with Apple’s U.S. and International operations.
Education
Mr. Wiefels earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Southern California and an MBA from USC’s Marshall School of Business. He has served as a faculty lecturer in the California State University system, and currently lectures at Pepperdine University and Stanford’s Graduate School of Engineering. He has also served on the boards of directors for both public and private companies. In frequent demand as a keynote speaker to technology organizations, he is also a regular contributor to a variety of industry publications in the U.S. and Europe.
Paul Wiefels Speaking Topics
Achieving Escape Velocity
Great companies can get stuck. Technology and globalization keep changing the game. New growth opportunities arise, yet there is massive internal resistance to reallocating resources to seize the day. As a result, companies end up with the same fundamental portfolio while nothing new reaches materiality. How can we free ourselves from the pull of the past? How can organizations achieve “escape velocity?” Paul Wiefels offers a new framework to address the most critical challenge enterprises and organizations face in the 21st century economy, where technological disruption is more rule than exception: How to set strategy and drive execution without being trapped by past success.
The Future of Information Technology: From Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement
The crippling economic recession suffered by most if not all information technology vendors, enterprise information technology has, for the moment, consolidated around a handful of large and powerful vendors—all looking to increase their hold over their customers and the IT ecosystems they both serve and leverage. But, during the same time, a new IT paradigm is emerging called systems of engagement. Increasingly, this will be where the action is in IT development and deployment through the balance of this decade—all of it driven by the “consumerization” of IT. Wiefels explores how we believe it will play out – and why the dominant vendors of the day may find themselves marginalized in this new game.
Marketing High Technology in the 21st Century: A Land of Chasms, Bowling Alley, Tornadoes and Main Street
Drawing on his book, The Chasm Companion, (and those of colleague, Geoffrey Moore), Wiefels traces the pathways markets take as they develop according to the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, and explains what organizations must do to succeed at each stage.
The Five Stages of Marketing Maturity: Identifying Your Organization
Based on over 25 years of marketing experience in technology and consumer products, Wiefels traces a marketing maturity model that starts with “what’s marketing? – to the ultimate end game: defining the very rules of competition by which the market will then operate. Audiences will rapidly identify how their own organizations’ stack up through a set of diagnostics along with a set of imperatives to focus on at the next stage.
Selling the Story: Getting Beyond One-Size-Fits-All Marketing Messages and Brands
Successful companies with successful brands know that there is much more to the marketing mix than product, price, place and promotion. In a world that is fraught with conflict, economic uncertainty and self-doubt, marketers must as never before, connect with their audience. Beyond Page 2 advertising, branding, public relations, web presence and other conventional methods of creating demand, Wiefels explains why the power of story and storytelling is reemerging as the most meaningful way to connect or reconnect with customers—and keep that connection sustainable.
Paul Wiefels Books
