The Activation Imperative: How to Build Brands and Business by Inspiring Action

by William Rosen, Laurence Minsky

How can marketers navigate the growing array of marketing specialties, multiplying media options and data sources, and increasing content saturation to improve effectiveness and return on investment?

How can they provide consumers with seamless experiences of value across channels that overcome behavioral barriers and actually deliver results?

In The Activation Imperative, William Rosen and Laurence Minsky provide a straightforward guide for marketers to move beyond building brands to activating them—from simply projecting what a brand is to optimizing what it does—to move people closer to transaction.

Drawing on years of research and experience with the world’s most sophisticated brands, Rosen and Minsky share a unifying cross-discipline marketing approach designed to impact critical behaviors and more effectively drive business results. They reveal how today’s more personalized and trackable communications illuminate tremendous diversity in paths-to-purchase and explain how to leverage this data to develop more effective strategies and creative targeted to individual inflection points. With actionable advice and best-in-class examples, Rosen and Minsky offer marketers a road map to manage today’s increasingly fragmented marketing landscape to more effectively and efficiently build brands and business.

222 pages, Hardcover

Published November 29, 2016

About the author

William Rosen
Chief Executive Officer
VSA Partners

William Rosen is chief executive officer of VSA Partners, the design-driven branding, marketing and technology firm known for its leading-edge work on behalf of clients including AB InBev, Google, Nike, Kimberly-Clark, Beam Suntory, IBM and McDonald’s. William was previously partner and marketing practice lead at VSA, during which he drove significant growth and led the firm’s expansion into integrated marketing solutions and data science as a complement to its branding and design capabilities.

Prior to joining VSA, William was president and chief creative officer of North America for Arc Worldwide, the global marketing company and part of Leo Burnett Worldwide and the Publicis Groupe. There he led digital, CRM/direct, promotion and shopper/retail marketing for clients including McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nestlé Purina, Comcast, Walgreens, United Airlines, Whirlpool and MillerCoors.

Widely recognized as a leader in cross-channel marketing and branding, William has been honored more than 300 times with major creative awards and rankings around the world including “Best New Media,” “Best Multidiscipline Campaign,” several “Best in Show” awards, and three Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Since 2011, William’s work for MillerCoors, Procter & Gamble, Symantec, Walgreens, Kimberly-Clark and others has received 14 Effie Awards, the industry’s most prestigious prize for effectiveness. His work for Walgreens was honored with the MAA Worldwide Globes “Best of the Best in the World,” as well as the Oracle World Retail Award’s “Retail Advertising Campaign of the Year.”

William served as president of the jury at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, as well as the Spikes Asia Advertising Festival, and has served on juries for the Clio Awards, the Effie Awards, the London International Advertising Awards and numerous other leading industry award shows.

William has published extensively on branding, marketing, data science and technology in the Harvard Business Review, Wired and Advertising Age, and is co-author of the book, The Activation Imperative, which launched as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Business Marketing.