Sergio Zyman

Sergio Zyman Speaker Biography

World-Renowned Marketing and Leadership Expert, Best-Selling Author and Former Chief Marketing Officer for Coca-Cola

Sergio Zyman is probably the most prominent and charismatic strategist in contemporary marketing. He is the former Chief Marketing Officer of The Coca-Cola Company.

Former Chief Marketing Officer for Coca-Cola

Sergio Zyman is the Chairman and founder of Zyman Group and the former Chief Marketing Officer of The Coca-Cola Company. Over the course of 30 years of hands-on marketing experience, Zyman has conceived a revolutionary set of principles that are proven to translate marketing strategies into positive business results. He rejects the old rules of the industry that conceptualized marketing as an art form with vague commercials and awareness messages. Instead, Zyman passionately advocates a vision of scientific, process-based marketing as the driver of sales and profits and the centerpiece of business. The only definition of marketing success he upholds is “selling more stuff to more people more often for more money more efficiently.”

Marketing Speaker

From major food and beverage companies to industrial manufacturers to popular retailers to global telecommunications powers, a diverse group of clients has sought out and received Sergio Zyman’s marketing expertise. As the driving force behind Zyman Group, he is able to reach even more diverse businesses in need of marketing guidance. Zyman Group has helped businesses ranging from the largest of the Global 1000 to high-tech growth companies improve their marketing results by providing the guidance they need to move their marketing efforts from hoping to planning, from art to science, from guessing to knowing, and from random success to planned success.

Accolades

Sergio Zyman’s unparalleled marketing career also includes tenures with Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble. He is best known for his bold actions as the outspoken CMO of Coca-Cola, where he re-conceptualized the company’s marketing strategy and boosted worldwide annual sales volume from nine to 15 billion cases – the most explosive growth period in the company’s history. This success led TIME magazine to name him one of the three key pitchmen of the 20th century.

Books

Sergio Zyman is considered one of the most globally savvy leaders in business, and he wrote the book on visionary marketing. His passion and knowledge have been transformed into texts that constitute the core curriculum of results-driven marketing with his best selling book, The End Of Marketing, his second book, Building Brandwidth and latest book Renovate Before You Innovate.

Publications

A highly experienced marketing professional and an extremely charismatic communicator, Sergio Zyman’s acute insights have been featured in every major business publication, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Fortune. He holds an Executive MBA from Harvard University and has attended graduate schools in London, Paris and Jerusalem.

Sergio Zyman Speaking Topics

Accelerate Profitable Growth By Renovating Before You Innovate

Many companies rely too heavily on innovation to solve their problems. When a brand gets old or tired, the impulse is to scrap it and start over with something fresh. But more often than not, innovation simply doesn’t work. Sergio knows this firsthand – he was the chief marketing officer at The Coca-Cola Company during the disastrous launch of New Coke. So what’s the alternative? Sergio preaches the power of renovation - recapturing the essence of your existing brands, products, and core competencies and doing more of the things that made you great in the first place. Too many managers are so obsessed with innovation that they launch products that no one will buy. Premoistened toilet paper or smokeless cigarettes, anyone? Sergio delivers the solutions managers need to revitalize their strategies to improve growth, and he challenges conventional business wisdom to help companies make smarter, profitable decisions.

Embrace the New Future of Marketing to Drive Increased Profits

Marketing is serious business. It’s about increasing sales and profits, through rigorous deployment of strategies to grow your business. So it’s time to replace the “art” of marketing (you know – using instinct and gut feel to communicate to your customers) with a scientific, data-based approach to driving sales. Sergio will help audiences understand how, by transforming marketing efforts from the product of guesswork to outcome of a disciplined process, their businesses can “sell more stuff, to more people, more often, for more money, more efficiently.” Sergio offers his unique observations about who gets it, who doesn’t and what it all means for your business.

Sell More By Understanding Your Customers’ Consumers

Learn how to increase your value proposition to your customers by helping them sell more product to their customers. Sergio shows how an understanding of what your customers and the end users need and how to position your product to specifically meet both of these needs. By understanding this, you will differentiate yourself from other suppliers therefore becoming the preferred supplier (and maybe charge that elusive price premium). Everyone wins when you demonstrate to your customer how to use your product to sell more to their end customer.

Why Marketers Need to Be More Like Politicians

What do candidates and brands have in common? What can a brand strategy mimic from a campaign strategy? What can marketing learn from a campaign that has an expiration date? Businesses keep reminding themselves: “It’s all about the customer” but politics never needs the reminder: “It’s all about the voter”. Sergio will show audiences differences and similarities between marketing a brand and marketing a candidate, but most importantly he will lay out the principles and guidelines to successfully apply the political model to your brand to create breakthrough strategies.

A Down Economy: The Lazy Marketers Lame Excuse

Customer confidence is in the tank; cost cutting is in vogue; geo-political uncertainties remain; non-traditional competitors are proliferating; unemployment is rising; housing and personal wealth are at generational lows; greater than $100 a barrel oil is here to stay….it’s no wonder consumers “are on the sidelines.” Are consumers really on the sidelines or do they just need better reasons to buy you? Sergio will detail how economic times like these are golden opportunities for strategic marketers. He will outline proven models/approaches that require marketers to change their mindset from “inside out” (selling what you make) to “outside in” (make what you can sell); from aspirational goal-setting to aspirational planning; from capturing share to capturing potential; from being positioned by others to controlling the dialogue. And why it’s the restless and discontent that are the first to benefit.

Private Equity: It’s Not About “Managing the Business”

Changes in external factors are driving new challenges for the private equity industry, forcing it to move beyond transactional thinking and embrace transformational and value-creating investment opportunities. With deal flow on the decline and liquidity/credit challenges, there is a need to evolve the approach. Quite simply, PE firms must go beyond managing the business (operations, supply chain, efficiency) to running (driving acceptability, affordability and availability) and growing the business (creating demand and new sources of growth). Sergio will help audiences understand how, by focusing on the consumer and not only the financials, with transformational vs. transactional growth, PEs can improve the profitability of the portfolio of companies.