ISBM Consortia attendees agree: the most important outcome is the friends they make at consortium meetings.

ISBM consortia build important networks of personal and professional relationships. Colleagues and friends to call when confronting a problem, before a key meeting, for additional insight, or actually bring into the planning process in their own firm.

How do you build your own network? Do you have the time? Know the places you can go to meet people who can be professional friends and colleagues focused on your practice area? ISBM Consortia enable participants to build strong relationships with people doing similar sorts of things, all in a business-to-business context.

ISBM consortia are small group (15-40) meetings of B-to-B professionals sharing the same practice, problems, and challenges. The tone is informal, and an emphasis is on networking, developing practical knowledge, cases, benchmarks, and examples. Meetings usually begin with an evening reception, and continue through the next full day.

Agendas include an open-ended round-table discussion, where each participant is asked to describe:

• Their firm and their practice
• What's going on, what's new, what's hot, what's working
• Key issues, problems, or obstacles they're facing
• Key opportunities they're seeing
• News and insights for the group
• Questions, straw polls

Every consortium agenda also features:

• "Deep dish" case histories from member firms: drilling into their practice, lessons learned, what's worked, what hasn't, etc.

• Presentations from world-leading thinkers, researchers, or analysts. Trends, new tools and techniques-research insights, studies underway, etc.
  
  

Environmental Sustainability

The ISBM initiated the newest meeting, the "Environmental Sustainability Consortium," based on member input from our July 2008 sustainability survey. The response was overwhelmingly in favor to add this to our list of consortia. These meetings will be a "community of learning and practice" for professionals charged with or connected directly to environmental sustainability responsibilities or marketing your company's environmental products, services, or image.

Speaker and topics from the inaugural meeting included:

• Linda Fisher, Chief Sustainability Officer, DuPont
  The Triple Bottom Line: Making the Business Case for Environmental Sustainability

• Ellen Lutz, President, Clean Markets
  Environmental Sustainability Best Practices

• Paul Polizzotto, CEO, EcoMedia
  Innovative Approaches to Green Marketing

• Bill Brady, Exelon Corp.
  2020: A Low Carbon Road Map

New Product Development

Triggered by a request from ISBM member Unisys, this consortium includes typically 15-20 new product development (NPD) process owners at the firm or large SBU level. Twice annually, practitioners share insights on NPD processes they have in place, where they're working, where they're not working, trouble spots, etc.

A recent focus of this consortium has been "portfolio management" for new products: tools and techniques for ensuring that the right mix of initiatives—with the right mix of risk and reward—is being managed in the NPD processes. The Consortium has heard from world-leading researchers as such as Dr. Robert Cooper of McMaster University, and Dr. Abbie Griffin of the University of Illinois, as well as case histories from 3M, Corning, and others.

Business Market Brand

Brands can be critically important in business markets, but are often poorly understood inside business-to-business marketing firms. The ISBM Business Market Brand Consortium focuses on management, valuation, and better understanding of the role of brands in business-to-business marketing. Participants include corporate brand and large product category brand managers from business-to-business firms. Discussions focus on the management of brands during times of merger and acquisition, brand valuation in business markets, ingredient branding, branding strategy through channels, etc.

Participants have heard from world research leaders such as Dr. Don Schultz of Northwestern University and Dr. Raj Srivastava of The University of Texas at Austin. Branding case histories have been heard from firms such as 3M, Snap-On Tools, DuPont and others.

Business Marketing Educators

Twice each year, in conjunction with ISBM member meetings, we convene a community of professionals responsible for business marketing education for their firms. We're working together with this team on the development of a skills inventory profile, tools for marketing skill assessment, tracking mechanisms, and techniques for measuring the return on investment for marketing education.

We have heard from leading educators at these consortia, including Dr. William Rothwell of Penn State. We have also reviewed marketing education case histories from firms such as Honeywell, PPG Industries, Agilent, and others.

Members Meetings

Every year, the ISBM Members Meeting brings you the top thought leaders, researchers, and thought leaders in business-to-business marketing. Each meeting highlights relevant, real-time topics and solutions that you can take back to the office and implement immediately.

• The ISBM Annual Meeting, in State College, Pennsylvania on August 20-21, 2008 was titled: "25 years of Research, Practice, and Progress: The Most Important Lessons We've Learned. The Most Important Things We Must Forget."

• The ISBM Annual Meeting, in State College, Pennsylvania on August 22-23, 2007 was titled: "B-to-B Marketing: Organization, Process, Leadership--Keys to Profitable Growth in Business Markets."

• The 2007 Annual ISBM/CBIM Joint Members Conference in Tampa, Florida, on February 22-23, 2007 was titled: "B-to-B Marketing: Beyond Best Practice>>to Next Practice."

• The ISBM Annual Meeting, in State College, Pennsylvania on August 22-23, 2006 was titled: "Driving Profitable Growth: B-to-B."

• The Annual ISBM/CBIM Joint Members Conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia, on February 7-8, 2006 was on the topic of "Understanding Customer Needs and Managing the Customer Experience: End-to-End, B-to-B."

• Special Value: All of our meetings are "Key Point Summarized" on our Web site, so you can retrieve what you need, when you need it. View Members Meeting Summaries.