Scott Bedbury – Keynote Speaker

Scott Bedbury is recognized as one of the world’s top business minds for helping build some of the most respected brands today, including Nike, Starbucks and Airbnb. Since publishing A New Brand World in 2002, he has spoken on brand leadership in more than 30 countries on six continents, sharing experiences and best practices now applied in business schools and corporations alike.

Bedbury joined Nike in 1987 as Global Advertising Director to help re-position a struggling number three athletic brand for young male jocks to a more relevant and ageless inspiration to the rest of us. Armed with a tiny Portland advertising agency, Wieden and Kennedy, he drove the launch of the “Just Do It” campaign in 1988, bringing emotional firepower to three pedestrian words and forever changing how we think of the swoosh. The “Just Do It” campaign made the company a household word, won every conceivable advertising and marketing award in the U.S., Europe and Asia, and grew the company into a $5 billion corporation.

In 1995, Scott Bedbury joined Starbucks as Chief Marketing Officer to help CEO Howard Schultz take his regional American coffeehouse chain global, an endeavour that would transform one of the oldest commodities into a welcome “Third Place” between home and work for millions every day and establish the case study for experiential marketing. Bedbury helped redesign its stores, entered its products into dozens of new markets, developed Starbucks ice cream, bottled Frappuccino for the grocery channel, and established a global relationship with United Airlines. His brand development strategies took Starbucks from a few hundred stores to several thousand (currently 24,000+ globally), found new categories of customers, new ways to distribute product, and new products built on the basic coffee breakthrough.

In 1998, Bedbury left the corporate world to write and establish Brandstream, a brand strategy firm that has advised Airbnb, Apple, Facebook, Google, P&G, Coca-Cola, NASA, Samsung, Casper Sleep, Ferrero/Nutella, Microsoft, Starwood Hotels, Tellme Networks, the North Face, the US Navy, Corona and VWAG.

Scott Bedbury splits his time between Bainbridge Island, Washington and his offsite/seminar facility in Bend, Oregon.