Senior Marketing Executive Case Study THE EXECUTIVE’S CHALLENGE: Ralph Klein grew up in the apparel business and never wrote a resume in his life. When he was terminated as a Senior Marketing Manager by a major firm, Ralph was in his 60’s and many of his closest colleagues had retired. Ralph was very concerned about how he would fare in a tightly consolidated industry now being run by much younger executives, many of whom were children when he was making brand marketing history updating the image of the Maidenform bra! Would he be perceived as a venerable “has-been” without the modern vision needed to compete in today’s apparel business? DAN COBEN’S RESUME STRATEGY: “I was tempted, and it would have been very easy, to position Ralph Klein as ‘The Hero of Maidenform’ because that was his professional identity, it was how his contemporaries knew him, and he felt his more recent accomplishments were tainted by his dismissal. But I knew from experience that this would have been comforting my client instead of creating a strategic resume to effectively position him in the marketplace. By reverse engineering Ralph Klein’s recent success pattern (sustaining a top-ranked company’s competitive market position by turning around its underperforming brands) and featuring it as the central theme of his resume, his professional identity was transformed into that of a uniquely effective brand turnaround manager with recent proof of concept.” THE RESULTS: Ralph Klein was hired as a Division President by a much larger apparel company that needed his brand turnaround expertise and gave him significantly greater responsibility and compensation. |
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