Brad is the president and founder of BrandForward, Inc. Brad brings an unequalled level of expertise in branding to his clients, leading them in the collaborative discovery process that results in strong brands. Brad gained his experience as director of brand management and marketing for Hallmark Cards, Inc. and as vice president of marketing for Element K, a leading e-learning company.
During his tenure as Hallmark's chief brand advocate, Hallmark rose to 4th in the EquiTrend national quality brand ranking and received the Brand Management of the Year award. At Element K (now SkillSoft), he moved the brand from relative obscurity in a highly fragmented market to one of the top 10 e-learning brands in the world in less than two years.
Brad's clients range from Fortune 100 and start-up companies to not-for-profit organizations and municipalities. He has helped position Bangkok, Thailand as a global fashion capital and downtown Tampa as an up-and-coming place to live in southwest Florida.
Recognized as one of the world's foremost experts on brand management and marketing, Brad is a much sought after speaker and writer. A keynote speaker at several major conferences a year, he writes extensively for the business press and academic journals and is regularly quoted in trade publications. He has been interviewed by CNN, Entrepreneur, Fox News, HLN, Investor's Business Daily, National Public Radio and The Bloomberg Money Show.
He has been a guest lecturer at many universities including Connecticut, Harvard, Kansas, Northwestern, Rochester, Stanford, Vanderbilt, RPI, RIT and University of Missouri at Kansas City. In addition, he has conducted brand management and marketing workshops throughout the world, from Accra, Barcelona, Basel, Brussels, Milan, Moscow, San Juan, Toronto and Vienna to Almaty, Bangkok, Bogotá, Dubai, Kiev, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Vancouver and Zurich.
Brad has been the American Management Association's featured speaker on measuring corporate brand value. He was a member of The Conference Board's working group on Managing the Corporate Brand and APQC's Brand Building & Communication Benchmarking Study sponsor group. He chaired the IIR Brand Masters conference and the IQPC conference on Internal Brand Building. He is a founding member of the World Class Branding Association. He is a facilitator of Unilever's North American brand management and marketing planning.
He has authored two books on brand management: The Brand Management Checklist and Brand Aid, which are available throughout the world and have been translated into several languages. His books are used by several universities to teach brand management.
Brad authors BrandingStrategySource.com, named one of the top 100 branding blogs in 2016 by feedspot, and coauthors BrandingStrategyInsider.com, the #2 branding blog with more than 39,000 subscribers.
He has assisted numerous advertising/marketing agencies develop, sell and deliver brand management capabilities.
In 2008 and 2009, Invesp named Brad one of the Top 100 Marketers in the US.
Brad has a BS degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Brad was a member of the Advertising Council of Rochester's board of directors and won their Lantern Award. Brad serves on the marketing committees of several non-profit organizations including the George Eastman Museum and the Rochester Area Community Foundation. He is the past president of the Writers & Books and Harvard Business School Club of Rochester boards.
