I am thrilled to be at SAS’ flagship annual thought leadership event, the 2011 Premier Business Leadership Series. The theme is “Innovate, Optimize, Transform” and we have world leaders, best-selling authors and thought-provoking professors with great wisdom to share in one exciting event. It’s truly inspiring.  Yet as compelling as all those speakers are, one look at the agenda tells me that the spotlight is really on the customer at this event.  Let me explain.

The main stage on day one includes a CMO panel moderated by Professor Tom Davenport, and includes SAS CMO Jim Davis and his peers, Paula Puleo at Michaels Stores and Scott Hudgins from The Walt Disney Company.

Twelve of the nineteen interactive breakout sessions on the first day address innovations
and best practices in the many ways to evolve customer relationships, including:

1. A retail industry panel on Innovating to Improve the Customer Experience with Catalina Marketing, Winn-Dixie and Willard Bishop.
2. Driving the Total Customer Experience with Data, with digital information powerhouse EMC Corporation.
3. Sears Holding Corp. presenting Transformational Leadership that Drives Customer Engagement.
4. Bank of America discussing The Shift to Customer-Centric Marketing.
5. Bell Canada talking about how they use customer data to manage collections in a session titled, Matching for Money!
6. Using Data and The Customer to Help Guide Marketing Mix Evolution presented by Michaels Stores.
7. An insurance-focused panel discussion with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, State Farm Insurance, AXA Equitable and Strategy Meets Action titled, Connecting the Dots with Customer Analytics.
8. Northeast Utilities exploring how to improve credit and collection treatments with rate-payer data in Capturing the Rewards of Predictive Analytics and Behavioral Credit Scoring.
9. T-Mobile USA will present Customer Link Analytics to Improve Marketing, during which they’ll explain how communication patterns among subscribers reveal valuable data.
10. Win With Customer Loyalty will feature gaming leader Pinnacle Entertainment detailing how they are innovating loyalty marketing with their patrons' data.
11. Macys.com will present Marketing Analytics for Retail: Insights Behind Big Data.
12. Trusted Continuous Relationships, will be presented by The Walt Disney Company.

The customer spotlight continues on the second day with half of the roundtable topics addressing customer analytics themes, including:

• The 3 Be’s of Marketing: Be Relevant, Be Social, Be Real-Time with John Bastone exploring marketing in today’s digital, interconnected, social-savvy world.
• Colleen Cruz exploring How to Boost Effectiveness with Marketing Operations Management.
• A discussion of Better Pricing Decisions with Social Media Analytics, led by Kelly McGuire.
• Amartya Bhattacharjy focusing on marketing optimization in Merging Art & Science in Marketing.

Finally, solution demos at any given time will always highlight one of the customer intelligence
solutions, including:

• Online and Real-Time Marketing, presented by Luke VantLand.
• Marketing Campaign Optimization, by Amartya Bhattacharjy.
• Social Media Analytics, by Christina Engelhardt.

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