CHICAGO — M2W, the 6th Annual Marketing to Women Conference, presented its "You Take the Cake" award to Garry Rosenfeldt, Midas International’s director of marketing research. The award is annually presented to the speaker rated highest by M2W’s audience of senior brand market executives.

Rosenfeldt won for his case study "From Hostile to Loyal: Midas International’s Customer Experience Transformation," presented at this year’s M2W held April 21-22 in Chicago’s Cultural Center.
 
"In addition to Rosenfeldt, M2W featured 40 other speakers," according to Nan McCann, M2W producer. "The conference is designed to help brands improve their sales and marketing to women. Garry’s study showed how marketing research at Midas led the way to a corporate-wide policy shift toward designing, implementing and sustaining a superior customer experience that not only addressed the needs of the woman consumer, but lifted the entire brand along the way.
 
"The only thing more difficult than building a new brand is changing an existing one," McCann added. "This is especially true for companies that operate in a category where the perception among women can range from skeptical to downright hostile. Garry showed how to do it in a session that covered every aspect of marketing from research right on through to customer interaction at the retail level.”
 
In addition to the stars onstage, M2W’s audience was filled with brand teams and marketing executives from companies and brands as diverse as GM, J & J, Brown-Forman, Kraft, MasterCard, GlaxoSmithKline, Reebok, SCA Tissue, ESPN, Genworth Financial and Burton Snowboards.

"Smart brands attend M2W," McCann added, "because they know that women control or influence 85 percent of consumer purchasing in almost every single product category — from autos to electronics to pharmaceuticals to video games and everything in between."