Marketing Talks: Crisis and New Beginnings - What to Expect
Whether in business or in personal life, everyone faces crises. At the MK and Werbewoche marketing roundtable in late November, a former mega-CEO, an abuse awareness advocate, and a branding expert will discuss how they’ve handled challenging situations—and how to start over after hitting rock bottom.
Top-class guests in the Zurich cosmos: Thomas Middelhoff, P. Klaus Mertes SJ and Alexander Haldemann.
No one prepares you for the really big crises - people who get into them privately know this, as do brand managers whose companies are affected by negative developments. Once the initial shock has subsided, the question in both cases is usually: What next? The fourth marketing talk by MK and Advertising Week is dedicated to this very question and has invited top-class guests to Kosmos on Zurich's Europaallee.
MetaDesign CEO: How brands build and regain trust
The professional input is provided by the CEO of MetaDesign, Alexander Haldemann. The brand agency has been helping clients such as Apple, VW and Swiss Life to present themselves to the outside world since 1979. It's clear that this also includes dealing with crises: "Today, customers are no longer just recipients of brand messages, but also transmitters and multipliers - on all channels," says Haldemann.
Mature customers mean a lot of work for brands - because their feedback, expressed publicly, can cause a lot of damage. In his input presentation, Alexander Haldemann will outline how brands build trust, regain lost trust, what serves as an "anchor" and how they prevent crises from arising in the first place.
Mega-CEO and abuse educator: openness, humility and communication
The fireside chat will then bring together two men who themselves have had to live through the most serious crises in recent years: Former mega-CEO Thomas Middelhoff and Fr. Klaus Mertes SJ, the rector of the Jesuit College of St. Blasien and Germany's most prominent abuse investigator.
Thomas Middelhoff had a life most people only dream of: As CEO of Bertelsmann and KarstadtQuelle (later Arcandor), he earned millions, dined with heads of state and flew around the globe in a private jet. But then "Big T," as the media and colleagues called him, took a nosedive: Arcandor's bankruptcy was followed by court proceedings and finally a three-year prison sentence for embezzlement and tax evasion. Released from prison in 2017, he radically turned his life around. In his bestsellers "A115 - Der Sturz" and "Schuldig: Vom Scheitern und Wiederaufstehen," Middelhoff takes a hard look at himself and also blames his failure on the arrogance and greed that held him in check for many years.
P. Klaus Mertes SJ is the rector of the renowned Jesuit college and boarding school in St. Blasien in the Black Forest. But he gained notoriety for the post he held before: as rector of Canisius College in Berlin, where in 2010 he triggered the first major wave of revelations of sexual and physical abuse of young people at church (and later non-church) educational institutions in Germany. While civil society and German politics hold Mertes in the highest esteem, he is - even today, ten years later - discredited and shunned by conservative circles within the Catholic Church as a "fouler of the nest".
Together, Middelhoff and Mertes will discuss how they dealt with the personal and institutional crises, respectively, at the center of which they found themselves, through openness, humility, and a great deal of communicative work.
Live music and networking aperitif
As always, the Marketing Talks offer inspiring content as well as an attractive supporting program: live music provides an opportunity to pause between the stage presentations; the cozy networking aperitif ensures a comfortable and relaxed end to the event.
Registrations for the Marketing Talk on 26.11. are now possible via Xing.
