ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard K. Rodgers
President
The Kelley Rodgers Group
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
PT Associate Professor
College of Architecture
Georgia Institute of Technology
Dick Rodgers has developed rich insight into strategic and tactical marketing during his exposure to U.S. and global business, which includes more than 40 years of consulting assignments across The Coca-Cola Company and its worldwide business system of Independent Bottlers and Retailer Customers in all trade channels.
Asked to stay on campus after graduation (B.S. in Advertising, 1952) to become a very junior assistant to the President of The University of Illinois (Urbana), Dick worked in Alumni Relations, Student Relations, Development, Legislative Relations and Recruiting. Joining Pan American WorldAirways in 1955 as a Sales Management Trainee, he worked in New York City , Frankfurt , London , Helsinki , Stockholm and Chicago , where he was recruited by a small Chicago ad agency as account executive, copy writer and sales trainer. "A small ad agency is a great place to learn something about everything!" he says.
Allstate Insurance Companies’ home office personnel remembered him as "their Pan Am rep," and recruited him as Selling Skills Program Developer, where he worked with Allstate's 4,000 agents in selling Auto and helping introduce new Life, Small Business and Hospital & Medical insurance products.
Kielty, Dechert & Hampe, a pioneer U.S. sales training consulting firm, recruited him next to develop a major customer relations training program for American Airlines: Guest of Honor Service. This program was so effective that within six months Dr. Pierre Martineau, the Chicago Tribune's Director of Marketing Research, noted American's move to leadership over rivals United, TWA and Northwest in his monthly passenger attitude surveys on the New York-Chicago route.
At KDH, Dick began working with an array of blue-chip clients and brands, including American, Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, Armour, Swift, General Foods (now Kraft), and major trade associations. It was through the National Restaurant Association in 1962 that Dick introduced the first formal marketing education program in the Restaurant Industry. As part of this initiative, he brought the NRA and The Coca-Cola Company together in a first-ever strategic alliance to co-sponsor a foodservice/restaurateur educational program: a 3-hour workshop on "How to Build a Quality Image."
His dynamic and still active relationship with The Coca-Cola Company began in 1960, and has included assignments for Coca-Cola USA, Coca-Cola Foods, Coca-Cola International, The Wine Spectrum, and now, for Coca-Cola Enterprises, the giant 40%-owned Anchor Bottler for the USA, Canada, England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg.
An important part of this work has been his original research and development programming for Coca-Cola's then new move to a Customer Relationship Management Strategy beginning in 1978 and continuing to date. Dick also provided major development assistance in creating Coca-Cola USA 's Fountain and Bottler National Sales programs, and, 1978-1988, the parent company’s International Accounts program.
Part of the CCUSA CRM work was research and development of a series of channel marketing guides for the Company's major trade channels: Supermarkets, C Stores, Fast Food, Petroleum, Chain Drug, Hotels/Motels/Resorts, Mass Merchandisers, and the U.S. DOD Military Resale retail commands: AAFES, NAVRESSO and DECA.
The productive and expanding relationship with Georgia Tech began in the mid-1980s when Coca-Cola's Vice President for Marketing Research asked him to be Guest Speaker for a Tech Consumer Behavior class for a case study about Food Ecology program at Michigan State University for which he had been consultant-developer. Student response was so favorable that repeat requests followed, culminating in a request from his young Instructor: "Please develop and teach the marketing course you wish you had had in college but didn't take!"
The result was Strategic Retail Marketing, which several years later caused his Dean (Management) to host a luncheon to say: "Your course is the best new marketing elective in my 18 years here. We have a student course evaluation system here, and when they choose to offer comments, you don't want your Grandmother to read them. Yours are so different and positive that I look forward to them each time. Thank you!"
Encouraged and mentored by his original "young Instructor" (now Regents Professor and author of the foremost text on Marketing Research, Prof. Naresh K. Malhotra), and by Dean Robert G. Hawkins, Dick's other new Tech courses include Social & Cause Marketing, and Sports Sponsorship in Corporate Marketing Strategy, and in 1998, Marketing Architecture & Engineering Services.
For Dean Hawkins and the Ivan Allen College Center for Sports Business, Dick conducted an original strategic study for TEXACO/StarEnterprise on "How to Use Sports More Effectively to Build Brand Image, Sales, Share & Long-term Profits." This study led to a consulting relationship with both TEXACO, INC., and Star/Enterprise, their U.S. retailing organization at that time.
In 1992, Dick was urged to develop a new strategic marketing text/workbook for the legal services sector by a young attorney-publisher whom he had mentored when she joined an ad agency serving Coca-Cola. MARKETING LEGAL SERVICES proved a hit with senior law firm managements, and was discovered by Dean Thomas D. Galloway and Prof. John Kelly in Georgia Tech's College of Architecture. The result was a request to introduce a new COA course: AEC Marketing & Business Development (1998) and another new course in 2006, Leading the AEC Firm -- focusing on management functions, issues and activities with which an AEC CEO should be cognizant.
The latter course is being sponsored by Niles Bolton, AIA, and Niles Bolton Associates, an Atlanta-based leading global architecture, planning and interiors design firm.
Information and insight gained since 1998 also has enabled Dick to develop a new text/workbook/marketing guide -- "DIRECTIONS -- Strategic Marketing For AEC Business Development" which is the core text for both courses.
CROSS-SECTION OF PAST CLIENTS |
||
|---|---|---|
|
... and more |
|
| PRO BONO CLIENTS | ||
|
||