MARTIN LINDSTROM

One of the world’s top speakers on Business transformation and Branding, #20 in Thinkers50



Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, the world’s leading brand & culture transformation group, operating across five continents – and more than 30 countries. 
TIME Magazine has named Lindstrom one of the “World's 100 Most Influential People”. And for three years running, Thinkers50, the world’s premier ranking of business icons, has selected Lindstrom to be among the world’s top 50 business thinkers. Lindstrom is a high profile speaker and author to 8 New York Times Best-Selling books, translated into 60 languages. The Wall-Street Journal acclaimed his book Brand Sense as “one of the five best marketing books ever published”, Small Data “revolutionary” and TIME wrote this about Buyology: “a breakthrough in branding”.

  • Innovation

  • Business Transformation

  • Branding

  • Strategy

  • Consumer trends

  • Social Media

Lindstrom’s speeches are more shows than lectures, packed with visuals, sounds and amazing videos. Lindstrom appears in the audience as well as on stage, making his style highly engaged, fun, and truly interactive.

Awarded by Fast Company as one of the world’s top speakers on Business transformation and Branding – Martin Lindstrom’s keynotes are in a league on their own. Through provok-ing – yet practical while highly entertaining, packed with cases, captivating videos, sounds and to -the – points visuals. Below is a selection of Lindstrom’s most sought-after speeches.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM 17 SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS TRANSFORMATIONS (AND 3 COMPLETE FAILURES)

MISTAKE #1: To transform a business takes years. FALSE. It can be and should be done within months.

MISTAKE #2: It’s all about giving the employees a mandate . FALSE. Employees will never accept it – better would be to change their KPIs.

MISTAKE #3: Transformation succeeds from a top-down approach. FALSE. Success comes from a bottom-up approach. l speech…

Over 60 packed minutes, Martin Lindstrom takes a deep dive into what it truly takes to transform an organization. He should know, with a track record of 17 global transforma-tions including Lowes Foods, Burger King, Maersk, Swiss International Air Lines – and 13 other commodity conglomerates.

“Most of my insights originate with the customer – as do most of my mistakes”. Lindstrom shares generously his accumulated wisdom and knowledge in his trademark lighthearted yet engaging way, rich with anecdotal first-hand experience. You’ll learn what works, what doesn’t and what is just plain stupid (yet in the heat of the moment looked like a stroke of genius).

Join Lindstrom on a spectacular ride across multiple industries, from transportation, CPG, hotels, retail and banking, to IT and Consumer Goods. Get privileged access to the “real world” ABC’s on how to transform commodity players, organizations and businesses with such impact that tripling the revenue, NPS and EPS – in less than a year – is often the end result.

YOU WILL LEARN:

  • Why most MBA text books are often misguiding when transformation is on the agenda – and what a true (and much more dynamic) alternative looks like.
  • How to reinfuse hope into an organization which began decades ago to lose its nerve, nimbleness and entrepreneurial spirit.
  • How to ensure that great concept thinking and big ideas don’t drown in politics, bu-reaucracy, compliance – and a lot of talk but no action.
  • How to balance the short term (going from red to black) and the long term (the big idea – versus a compromise of a compromise) without losing the board’s, senior management and investors’ interest.

HOW TO KEEP A COMPANY IN START-UP MODE…

The way we conduct business has changed. Profound statement, right? But think about it. Years ago, we bought in to this concept-thing called “brands.” It let us co- own a sticky, lovey connection with our customers. Then, we invested in state-of-the-art tech systems designed to automate daily drudgery and untangle complexities…so our people could spend their time really using their brains. This we called efficiency. Then, we instituted a proliferation of KPIs to quantify absolutely everything we do. It was all supposed to work smoothly, efficiently, and profitably.

Somewhere on the journey, though, we wandered off the path.

Brands got locked into departments. Systems started dictating how we spend our time and energy. Swamped with the minutiae of maintaining the system, our people became ever more challenged to use what little additional time we could spare them to “innovate” across a variety of ever-hot topics. All the time conflicting KPIs duke it out across departments, undermining – and destabilizing – cross-departmental problem solving.

Along the way, we lost sight of plain common sense, lost the true purpose of the company, neglected our customers’ real needs, and forgot the actual reason our people come into work every day in the first place.

Is it any wonder we are now witness to plummeting customer satisfaction, employees suf-fering from perpetual change fatigue (and flagging morale), and formerly top-of-the-S&P companies simply vanishing into thin air? Sound vaguely familiar?

So…

Secure a sneak peak behind the scenes as Lindstrom and his team get to the truth behind why 95% of all company transformations fail – and what the 5% successes have in common.

You’ll join an in-depth expedition on how the turn-around happened with some of the who’s who of global business actually happened. Including how the Team helped to migrate businesses from a commodity play to a market leader position.

Secure your front row seat to witness exactly how Lindstrom and his team use well-honed skills and years of experience to transform and turn around companies one after another.

Packed with remarkable cases, anecdotes and powerful tools, you’ll learn:

  • How an outside-in, bottom up approach – if done right – can completely transform an organization that embraces entrepreneurial behavior
  • Why Key Performance Indicators (KPI)’s paralyze organizations – and what a much more robust alternative looks like
  • How to ensure your company will never (ever) again lose consumer focus
  • How to triple the speed of decision-making processes – in return for customer and employee satisfaction…and profitability

FORGET BIG DATA — SMALL DATA DEFINES THE FUTURE

LIKE IT OR NOT, businesses are slowly drifting away from the consumer. Only 1 in 3,000 executives have spent time in the homes of their consumers the last year. Instead of being in touch with the consumer, we’ve become reliant on BIG data — reports, databases, and statistics — in order to understand the emotions of our most important asset.

A cluster of technological forces has changed marketing and branding more in the last 5 years than it changed in the previous 50! Any tools we’ve previously used in order to un-derstand and communicate with consumers is now a relic of the past. But as we’ve come to rely on BIG data, a major vacuum has emerged, blinding businesses, but allowing the opportunity of Small Data to help those who seek it out.

Emerging in its place is a new approach: Small Data. Small Data is what Lindstrom defines as seemingly insignificant consumer observations which completely transform the way businesses are built and run. As he did in his New York Times best seller Buyology, Lindstrom lays out the science for his counterintuitive insights, offering vivid hands-on tools to make brands more effective.

YOU WILL LEARN:

  • Why Big Data no longer stands alone and how your organization should prepare for the next step in datarevolution
  • How to read and understand the consumer in a completely different and overlooked manner will lead to a complete turnaround of your company
  • How to balance Big and Small Data in the future, by adding a new dimension to the way you capture, mine, and assess your data
  • Which concrete steps your company should take in order to address this new data evolution`

A LOOK INTO THE FUTURE: THE DEATH OF OLD SCHOOL SOCIAL MEDIA

In a blink of an eye, new technologies come to the force and become the bright, shiny ob-ject of the moment. But how can you identify which to pay attention to, and which you can safely can ignore? If you knew everything about tomorrow, what would you do differently today? Few people are as well-equipped to answer this question as Martin Lindstrom.

Lindstrom — who predicted the arrival of Facebook two years ahead of time, described Google’s revenue model 2 years before the search engine revealed it, and pioneered the role of brands on the Internet months after the world wide web went live in 1994 — takes the audience through a fast-paced look into the future before pulling the hand brake and asking the toughest questions of them all.

What should your company do in order to create a future-proof brand and social strategy reflecting the fast-changing needs as generation Z and Y push social media to completely new boundaries?

This speech is designed to educate and prepare you for the necessary transformative ac-tion. Lindstrom explores underlying technologies that drive trends and create a solid framework arming your organization with a social roadmap for the future.

 

YOU WILL LEARN:

  • The five surprising steps brands needs to take in order to stay relevant as Old School Social Media transforms
  • Why an average teen takes 17 selfies of themselves every morning before they head to school and what this means for your brand
  • How social media has become the new bedroom wall and what it takes for your brand to secure a role on the new digital wall
  • Why the Screenagers have destroyed their bedroom desk and what this fundamen-tal lifestyle change means for every consumer business
  • Why a smart social media strategy is all about establishing transition points in con-sumer’s lives