Marketing Intelligence by Iain Johnston

As well as being a world famous product designer, and on the BBC again this week, Dick Powell also organised our latest Loewy Masterclass, this time the theme was Pitching.

Neil Christie of wieden & kennedy whose presentation was extremely well received, has beaten me to it and already summed up proceedings well here, and Wadds from Speed has already posted his take on the event.

In answer to the comment on Neil’s blog, this was a closed event, the second such event Dick has organised for us, and a raging success so far, based on:

1. the audience feedback forms (too many positives to ALL have been bribed).

2. the improvements in our win rate since the previous masterclass in June

My only concern about the whole thing was that I failed to apply the lessons of the previous and this masterclass to my own presentation. We tell our people not to pitch for a project that we haven’t got the time or bandwidth to do justice to. No excuses, I clearly knew in advance I was going to struggle to prepare properly for the event, and two weeks earlier had suggested Dick cut me down to just 15 minutes. As it turned out, I didn’t make enough time, and had to opt out at the first coffee break to get back to the joys of conference calls at the office. So I missed some of the star turns which followed.

Ok so the conference call went really well (about much more at a later date), but better to do one thing brilliantly than two things just about OK.

Still, over 100 people in the audience did get huge value from the whole thing, and they’re already asking Dick about the next one.

Huge thanks to Neil, Roger, Tim, Richard, Phil and Al for their excellent presentations, and of course Dick, Lucy and Hayley for organising the whole thing - superb.