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Eric Arnson, Managing Partner
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Eric has a long history as both a line marketer, with full profit and loss responsibility, and a growth strategist, held accountable for taking the strategic recommendations into specific execution. This think and roll up your sleeves combination was pioneered at the firm he founded - ENVISION. They developed a 'Brand Development System' that typically stretched across a multi-year period. This ensured that strategies were effective and truly created incremental growth.
ENVISION was only 1 of 2 companies ever acquired by McKinsey & Company. At McKinsey, Eric was a senior partner, serving as a leader in the North American Branding Practice. His responsibilities included introduction of the ENVISION intellectual capital globally. The ENVISION approach and methods were the basis for Power Brands, written by McKinsey Director Hajo Riesenbeck and Jesko Perrey. Eric led numerous Brand engagements, focused on integrating ENVISION’s innovative growth strategies and insightful quantitative methods with McKinsey’s traditional supply side strengths. Clients included John Deere, Wrigley, Midas, Visa, The Weather Channel, and Allstate.
In addition, Eric assisted David Thomson, a McKinsey alumni, in an exhaustive examination of high growth companies. The intent was to understand why certain companies had sustained, rapid growth. As a result of David's exploration, Eric became a significant contributor for the compelling book, ‘Blueprint to a Billion - 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth.’ His perspective centers around creating powerful value propositions and defining the tangible and intangible benefits your brand should strive to own. Blueprint was the #4 best selling CEO book in 2007.
Eric began his professional career at Procter & Gamble, where he held a variety of Brand, Sales and Product Development positions on brands including Duncan Hines, Pringles Cisco and Jif. He later joined Beecham Cosmetics as Director of Marketing, responsible for Vitabath, Vita Europa, Yardley of London and new product launches like the fragrance Aspen. Prior to McKinsey’s acquisition of ENVISION, Eric spent most of the 90’s consulting in consumer categories. He was one of the original partners at The Cambridge Group and in 1994 left to found ENVISION.
Eric holds a liberal arts degree from The University of Michigan, where he was also the President of the Michigan Student Assembly (MSA), the all campus student government. He resides in the Chicago area, is married with 3 children, and is an entrepreneur at heart.
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