Pre-Conference Workshops

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS -- OPENING NIGHT EVENT

7:00am - 6:00pm

Conference Registration

8:30am - Noon

Design Green: Greener Products, Better Business
Jacquelyn Ottman, President, J.Ottman Consulting

Looking for a new spark for innovation or competitive advantage? Want to learn what the cutting edge knows about how to leverage eco-design to maximize business benefits and profit? Attend this highly interactive half,day workshop and take away five critical strategies for designing products that address consumer needs with minimal impact at every stage of their life cycle. Learn how to measure your success with such tools as life cycle assessment. Created especially for Sustainable Brands ˜07, this pre-conference workshop will showcase some of the most successful eco-innovative brands on the market today. Join hundreds of others who have benefited from Design:Green workshops, created under an Innovation Grant from U.S. EPA and endorsed by the Industrial Designers Society of America.


1:30pm - 5:00pm

Your Sustainable Brand Story: A Strategic Storytelling Workshop
Pam Van Orden, President, Enlightened Brand

This hands-on workshop will take participants through a series of interactive exercises aimed at helping them tell their sustainable brand story. We will explore the following storytelling considerations:

  • Knowing what customers value. How sustainability factors into a purchase decision.
  • The sustainable customer journey: from consideration to purchase and beyond.
  • Your sustainability message and the role it plays in your overall brand story.
  • Sustainable tribes and where they gather. Meeting customers where they already are.
  • Sustainability trends. Preparing for the next wave.

 

Leading Organizational Change for Sustainable Brands
Seetha Coleman-Kammula and Brian Coleman, Simply Sustain

Even those companies most committed to developing sustainable brands will run into significant organizational barriers when attempting to translate good intentions into good deeds. A recent survey by McKinsey and Co showed that while 75% of CEOs said that a corporate stand on sustainability should be fully integrated into strategy and operations, only 50% think their company actually does so.

In this workshop, participants will be introduced to tools and frameworks for helping ensure the successful implementation of sustainable brand initiatives. By the end of the workshop, participants will:

  • Understand how a decision to green your brand impacts other parts of your organizational system, e.g. strategy, products and services, people and the way they interact, structure and business processes, metrics and rewards and culture etc. and bring some congruence.
  • Be able to gauge employee readiness, trust and belief in the changes needed and get them engaged.
  • Identify forces for and against change and build a timeline for creating momentum.
  • Map individuals inside your company on their power vs. stance towards change and develop a plan to enlist them in the change initiative.
  • Understand your own personal power to create change.
  • Identify effective project team compositions.
  • Identify ways the project team can help or hinder progress.
  • Identify some of the ways the reward and recognition systems (HR) within own company can be changed to support the sustainability initiative.

5:45pm - 9:30pm

¢ Forever New Orleans!


Be involved in an immersive opening night event being designed to connect the experience of rebuilding and re-branding New Orleans (or NOLA as they call it down south!) with the increasing focus on innovation for sustainability in business