Jim Stengel, 2017 American Marketing Association Hall of Fame inductee and former Global Marketing Officer (GMO) at P&G sat down with The Conference Board’s own JP Kuehlwein to discuss how to translate purpose into powerful brands and profits, partner with startups, and remain helpful during the COVID-19 crisis.

Michael Sussman, Ph.D. and CEO of the BAV Group and Sandrine Martin, Analytical Brand Strategist of the BAV Group joined JP Kuehlwein of The Conference Board to discuss how one can assess the “strength of a brand’s equity across time, categories, geographies, social media, and in people’s minds.”

How does an active wear brand become an activist icon? Deliberately or despite itself? Can product, purpose, profit, and politics mesh—or do they risk unraveling? And what’s the story behind the unconventional Patagonia beer? These questions and more will be answered in The Conference Board Marketing and Communications Center's April Monthly Chat.

Developing compelling strategic communications is essential to successfully creating and implementing strategy across the enterprise—but it also touches the preparation of annual leadership team and shareholder meetings, large M&A deals, investor roadshows, divestitures, reorganizations, and a host of other high value, high stakes strategic events. It is present at every moment when you need to move an organization forward.

Over the past three years, a rapidly increasing percentage of Fortune 500 companies have begun using Instagram to reach a younger audience adept at visual storytelling. Although LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter dominate in terms of active accounts among the Fortune 500, Instagram and fellow visual platform YouTube have moved quickly to occupy the rest of the top five. Companies need to be active on a range of social media technologies that includes visual platforms.

How should companies prepare themselves to take a position on social issues? It comes down to four Ps: Purpose, Plan, Process, and Product. The important thing is to be strategic and to approach taking a public stand in the same way that a company would approach any other business decision.

The cyber risk landscape is quickly evolving, but organizations are slow to catch up with the new threat landscape. Organizations are still organized to focus primarily on more traditional cyber risk management, are not updating their processes and policies or investing in tools and technologies to comprehensively address the latest and fastest-growing threats coming from digital and social media. Senior leadership and boards need to better understand the evolving cyber risk landscape.

As the U.S. women’s national soccer team celebrated their second straight victory in the World Cup, chants demanding “equal pay” erupted from both players and fans. This isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that gender discrimination and inequity will be in the media spotlight.

Is improving leadership even on the radar screen in the public relations profession? The short answer appears to be no, according to the results of the Plank Center’s Leadership Report Card 2019. Though numerous blogs, articles and research studies in our field recognize the importance of improving leadership to help the profession achieve positive outcomes, the industry struggles to make it happen.

It is no longer enough to be an expert in communications to succeed as a communications professional. A recent research brief titled The Case for Business Acumen published by IC Kollectif spotlights key findings from primary and secondary research on the importance of business acumen for internal and external communications professionals.