Erich Joachimsthaler is the Founder and CEO of Vivaldi.

During the last sixteen years, Erich has consulted world leading companies to build strong brands, to find innovation and new growth opportunities and realizing them in today’s digital age.

Special areas of emphasis include: leveraging new growth and marketing strategies in the context of industries that under deep disruption and transformation due to rapidly changing customer expectations.

Time permitting, Erich also serves as a Visiting Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at IESE since 1995, which he first joined full-time in 1989 after completing his Post-Doctoral Fellowship work at Harvard Business School.

IESE is ranked globally one of the top ten MBA programs, and the World’s No. 1 executive program by The Financial Times in 2015 and 2016.

Prior to his work at Vivaldi, Erich has held academic faculty positions at the University of Southern California, Instituto Estudios Superiores de la Empresa (IESE) in Barcelona, Spain, and The Darden School, University of Virginia.

He has guest lectured at a number of business schools: University of Munich, University of Cologne, Harvard Business School, Dartmouth, INSEAD, Yale, Columbia University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, IMD, London Business School, University of Toronto, Duke University, Stockholm University and Helsinki Institute of Technology.

In his career, Erich has published over 100 articles in highly respected academic journals and best-selling and award-winning books.

Together with David A. Aaker, he wrote some of the most seminal and best-selling articles on brand strategy and brand architecture in the Harvard Business Review and the California Management Review.

His book Brand Leadership, co-authored with David A. Aaker was first published by The Free Press in January 2000 and republished in 2009 by Pocket Books London.

It described the new leadership paradigm of building strong brands and has been translated into 14 languages.

His book on innovation and growth strategies from a consumer-centric perspective, entitled: Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute Your Company’s Next Growth Strategy, was published by the Harvard Business School Press has been also translated into 10 languages and has won the AMA-Berry 2008 Best Marketing Book of the Year award.

Erich is an internationally recognized authority on the impact of technology on strategy, and the digitalization of industries and categories, and the role of innovation and branding, and is being quoted regularly in the USA Today, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, Advertising Age, Absatzwirtschaft, Brandweek, Bloomberg Business Week, Marketing Week, Fast Company, US News & World Report, Forbes, a host of trade publications and extensively in European and Latin American media. He has been featured at Bloomberg Business TV, CNBC PowerLunch, CNBC Europe and Forbes TV.com. He is also a regular speaker at industry conferences and company meetings in both Europe and the U.S.

Erich holds degrees in economics, statistics and business administration from both German and U.S. universities, having received a Master of Science degree in quantitative methods and marketing and a Ph.D. in Business Administration with an emphasis in statistics and consumer behavior from the University of Kansas.

He joined Harvard Business School as a Post-doctoral Fellowship.

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