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Denise Lee Yohn

Brand-Building Expert | Author of What Great Brands Do

Now more than ever, business leaders are looking for fresh ideas, new understanding, and actionable insights to jumpstart their business. Denise Lee Yohn inspires, informs, and instructs them with a completely different way of thinking about their business. Blending a fresh perspective, twenty-five years of experience working with world-class brands including Sony and Frito-Lay, and a talent for inspiring audiences, Yohn is a leading authority on building and positioning exceptional brands.

Yohn initially cultivated her brand-building approaches through several high-level positions in advertising and client-side marketing. She served as lead strategist at advertising agencies for Burger King and Land Rover and as the marketing leader and analyst for Jack in the Box restaurants and Spiegel catalogs. Yohn went on to head Sony Electronic Inc.’s first ever brand office, where she was the vice president/general manager of brand and strategy and garnered major corporate awards. Consulting clients have included Target, Oakley, Dunkin’ Donuts, and other leading companies.

An influential speaker and writer, Yohn enjoys challenging audiences and readers to think differently about brand-building. She is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes, and often writes for Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Knowledge@Wharton, Seeking Alpha, QSR Magazine, among others. Yohn is also called on by media outlets such as CNBC, FOX Business TV, The Walls Street Journal, and NPR, when they want an expert point-of-view on hot business issues.

Yohn is the bestselling author of three books: What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest; Extraordinary Experiences: What Great Retail and Restaurant Brands Do (e-book); and her latest, FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies.

Yohn teaches and inspires her audiences with provocative insights, powerful case studies, and practical tools and approaches to implement right away. She has addressed business leaders around the world at corporate events such as Facebook, NFL, and Lexus, and conferences including International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), The Art of Marketing, and Sustainable Brands.

Ready & Resilient: Leading Through Challenge and Change

Continuous disruption, increased competition, a pending recession…the challenges you face are greater today than ever before and more change is on the horizon. Is your organization prepared to perform under pressure? Denise Lee Yohn shows you how to ensure it is.

Drawing upon her work with business leaders through three recessions and against fierce competition in fast-paced industries such as retail and digital technology, Denise has cracked the code on organizational readiness and resilience. She shares an informative and practical guide to future-proofing your business with a strong brand and vital culture.

Learn how to not just survive, but thrive in turbulent times.

Brand Leadership: How to Build a Rock Star Brand

You know how great brands dominate their fields.  You experience it every time you pay a premium for a certain type of jeans, or see a line of people camping out to catch the newest smart phone release.  Denise shows you how to achieve rock star brand status.  Drawing from case studies, analyses, and interviews with brand leaders from the world’s leading brands, she shows you what great brands do and how to achieve the kind of brand leadership that everyone — from customers to employees to investors — wants a piece of.

The Fusion Formula: Brand + Culture = Results

Forget everything you think you know about workplace culture!  You don’t need perks and parties.  You need engaged employees who produce the right results and help you build a great brand.  Denise shows you how to infuse your culture with your core brand values and align your people with your unique brand identity, so you produce a healthy organization and a valuable brand.  Based on her new book, FUSION, Denise shares the secrets behind the world’s greatest organizations and lays out the leadership playbook for achieving the brand-culture fusion you need to power your performance and future-proof your business.

Ignite Experience: Fuse Customer Experience and Employee Experience to Drive Your Growth

Customer experience is the new competitive battlefield where customer loyalty is won or lost.  And among employees, the war for talent is intensifying.  How do you win on both fronts?  Denise shows you how to align and integrate your employee and customer experiences—and unleash their combined power to fuel your growth.  Learn how to design and deliver employee experiences that fully engage your people and translate into customer experience excellence.  Denise lays out the complete game plan you need to win the hearts and minds of customers and employees.

Extraordinary Experiences: How to Win Customers' Hearts and Dollars

How do some companies break through the clutter; compete with bigger, better-resourced competitors; and manage to grow and thrive when so many others fail?  They earn customer love and loyalty through extraordinary experiences.  Denise gives you the complete blueprint for creatively designing and consistently delivering customer experiences that win over customers for life.  Learn how to get the edge that everyone else wants and excel at customer experience.

What Great Salespeople Do

If you’re worried about how the role of sales and selling is changing, you need to know what the best salespeople do to succeed in this new business environment.   Denise shows you that great salespeople do what great brands do.  She explains how to innovate — not imitate, how to create extraordinary experiences that embody your brand, and how to cultivate strong, emotional connections with customers.   You’ll be inspired to engage with clients in new ways that cut out competitors and create long-term business success. Learn why and how the most effective salespeople operate as brand evangelists — and how you can too to win the new sales game.

Build a Breakthrough Brand with a Clear Competitive Positioning

A clear, definitive competitive brand positioning is essential to brand building.  It defines who you are selling to, what your business scope is, and what you do to create value for your customers.  It provides strategic guidance on product development, pricing, messaging, and more. In this hands-on workshop, Denise shows you how to craft a competitive brand positioning, including:

  • The most effective way to identify and define your target segment(s)
  • How to determine an appropriate competitive frame of reference
  • Three strategies to establish meaningful and lasting differentiation
  • The sources that achieve brand credibility among today’s savvy customers

Scale-Up Your Brand

Are you looking to grow significantly, expand your scope, or hit a new milestone? You need a solid strategic brand platform…and Denise will show you how to develop one.  In this one-day, hands-on, fast-paced workshop, you will learn all the tools you need to develop a strong, valuable, sustainable brand strategy that will ignite your growth and help you scale.  Set the foundation for your brand to inspire true customer loyalty, improve your profit margin, and increase the longevity of your business.

Leading Through Challenge and Change

COVID-19 is the newest, but not the only challenge you have faced, and more change is on the horizon with economic recessions, continued disruption, and increased competition.

Drawing upon her work with business leaders through three recessions and against fierce competition in fast-paced industries such as retail and digital technology, Denise Lee Yohn shows audiences how to lead organizations so that they can thrive in uncertainty and perform under pressure.

Audiences will learn:

  • The roadmap for engaging, aligning, and motivating your workforce.
  • How to cultivate an innovative culture that produces more with less.
  • How to inspire confidence and instill clarity so employees are productive now and prepared for what’s next.

This virtual presentation is highly interactive and can be customized for your specific industry and context.

Cultivating Culture and Building Brands in Crisis

Now more than ever, you need a vital organizational culture and a valuable brand so you can retain employees and customers. Denise Lee Yohn, author of Fusion: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies, shows how to infuse work culture with core brand values and align people through a unique brand identity to produce a healthy organization and a powerful brand, so that they can thrive in uncertainty and perform under pressure.

Audiences will learn:

  • Why brand and culture alignment is critical to business performance, especially during crises.
  • How to produce workforce alignment, competitive advantage, and valuable relationships with customers and employees.
  • How to transform your leadership and avoid common culture- and brand-building mistakes.

This virtual presentation is highly interactive and can be customized for your specific industry and context.

Employee Experience Disrupted

Employee experience has been disrupted and a new work reality is emerging. We must rethink our approach to organizational culture and employee engagement now that employees work from home. They are often stressed and distracted, and demand authentic diversity and inclusion. Denise Lee Yohn, author of FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies, shows how to ensure your workforce is engaged and productive today and ready for tomorrow.

Audiences will learn:

  • How to design employee experiences that address today’s challenges and anticipate the future of work.
  • The tools to engage employees with empathy and motivate them with meaning.
  • How to transform your leadership and avoid common culture-building mistakes.

This virtual presentation is highly interactive and can be customized for your specific industry and context.