Thirty Years of Strategic Innovation

For thirty years Kevin Clark as the founder of Content Evolution creates and manages assets that grow and protect IBM’s brand and the experience it delivers. He is Director emeritus Brand and Values Experience, IBM Corporate Headquarters. Kevin strategically orchestrates billions of dollars of intangible value for the company, valued at the time at $72 billion by Interbrand – IBM being the most valuable business-to-business (B2B) brand in the world by both Interbrand’s Best Global Brands and Millward Brown’s Brand Z indexes. His career arc is about solving some of IBM’s toughest challenges and capitalizing on its greatest opportunities by developing next generation experience and customer touchpoint strategies widely in use at IBM today.

Brand Stewardship

Kevin is the first brand steward for the innovative IBM ThinkPad line of notebook computers. He creates and leads the ThinkNext futurist initiative for human and technology trends to drive future offerings – and is the leader for the IBM PC Company Advisory Board and Advisory Council program with over 400 global members in 17 groups representing some of the most distinguished industry advisors, consultants, journal editors, and IBM enterprise customers from around the world. During this period Kevin was head of business strategy with responsibility for market research, customer satisfaction, brand strategy, web presence, and patent portfolio licensing and management. IBM PC Company was sold to Legend Computing of China for $1.7 billion, today Lenovo; the largest PC manufacturer in the world.

C A S E   S T U D Y

IBM Watson Research

“When we asked you to conduct “A practical work session to drive a game-changer for IBM Research” we were not asking for something simple. Our group of 25 researchers, some of whom worked for me and some of whom did not, was filled with strong and differing opinions; deep technical and emotional arguments, and monumental egos. Your highly participative approach led us through a very successful strategy, branding and values workshop that aired the opinions, heard the arguments, and soothed the egos.”

“The workshop did all we wanted and more. We ended up with an excellent understanding of the target clients and their attributes; the value proposition and required technology, and a universally accepted project code name. More importantly, we turned the group of 25 individuals into a committed team with a clear goal.”

– David L. Cohn, Director, Business Informatics, IBM Watson Research