The Boston Consulting Group's Antonella Mei-Pochtler, a senior consultant with a focus on branding, media and consumer goods, says there are nearly limitless possibilities for a brand if you invest in building it the right way. "Most people see branding as a way to communicate with consumers, but it can be so much more if you get the management of the brand right," Mei-Pochtler says. "Brand should be deeply linked into strategy, and a brand is most effective when it's making a company's strategy more visible and relevant to customers."
Today, Mei-Pochtler spends a lot of time giving similar advice to C-level executives at companies in the luxury goods, retail, automotive and media industries. One of the biggest challenges clients are dealing with these days, she says, is how a brand strategy fits into the new media world, one in which consumers actively engage with companies and their products. "It is such a dramatic switch; it's a tsunami compared to what it was ten years ago because of the Internet and the social aspects of Web. 2.0," she says. "It requires much more complex management to create impactful brands. My main work right now is around making sure the billions of dollars of investments companies put against the creation and the management of brands is being used in the most meaningful and most impactful ways."
Born and raised in Rome, Mei-Pochtler attended the German School and studied economics and business administration at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. Mei-Pochtler holds numerous leadership roles within BCG, including being a member of the executive committee, the European management team, and the global marketing committee. For more than a decade, she has organized the Brand Club, the top branding and media-focused conference for CEOs in Germany. Members include Mercedes, Porsche, Procter & Gamble and Adidas. She also co-founded business@school, an initiative to build entrepreneurial and business skills in students throughout Europe and Singapore. In addition, she is co-creator of the Europe 500—Entrepreneurs for Growth, the European association of fast-growing companies. For the past five years, she's written a column in Austria's leading newspaper, and a selection of those columns on strategy and leadership were turned into a book called Acupuncture for Management, which was released in 2006.
Her efforts have led to BCG becoming the top-consulting brand in German-speaking Europe in terms of clients and potential recruits. "The most important brand I work on is BCG itself," she says. "I've been experimenting with more community-oriented marketing approaches, first in the German-speaking countries and more recently at the European level. I've really been focused on growing the BCG brand in German-speaking Europe. It's important for a consulting firm to walk the walk."
And her recruiting efforts are also paying off. It's been nearly 10 years since she launched business@school, and some of those students
are beginning to show up at BCG. "I want to make BCG into the most relevant and attractive recruiting brand in the marketplace," Mei-Pochtler says. "Recruiting success is at the core of our overall success. As a consulting firm, we're only as good as our people."
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