The Sweeney Agency

About Catherine Kaputa –Brand Strategist and Leadership Speaker:

Catherine Kaputa is a nationally recognized personal brand and marketing strategist, speaker, author and executive coach in personal branding and career success, leadership development and female leadership. She is known for her motivating and customized delivery so each audience can be inspired to achieve productive change and life-long learning.

From Madison Avenue to Wall Street to the halls of academia to founding a New York City-based brand strategy company, Catherine Kaputa’s experience has taught her how to brand products, services and herself.

Catherine shows others how to apply the principles and strategies from the commercial world of brands to your most important product - You.

Catherine is the author of the award-winning You Are a Brand, How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success, winner of the Ben Franklin award for best career book 2007, a bronze medal in the IPPY awards and a finalist for 2007 career book in Foreword magazine.

Her new book is on women and success, titled The Female Brand: The Advantage of the Female Mindset in Career Success. As SVP, Director of Advertising and Community Affairs at Citigroup Smith Barney, Catherine Kaputa was responsible for world-wide branding and advertising at the well-known financial services giant for over ten years. Her role included overseeing all advertising: corporate image, wealth management, investment banking, and internet campaigns, many of which won awards for creativity and effectiveness.

Catherine led the award-winning I Love New York campaign at Wells, Rich, Greene, where she recruited celebrities and Broadway stars to appear pro-bono in the dazzling New York City commercials. Catherine’s first job in advertising was under the marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout at Trout & Ries Advertising. Catherine has also taught branding and advertising at New York University, Stern School of Business.

In 2002, Kaputa launched SelfBrand, a New York City-based brand strategy company that works with people, products and companies

Catherine been featured on CNN, NBC, ABC, CNBC, MSNBC as well as The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The London Observer, Forbes, Fortune, Pink and a wide range of other media. She has done speaking programs for a wide range of clients including PepsiCo, Microsoft, Intel, Whirlpool, UBS, BNY Mellon and Boehringer Ingelheim.

What Catherine Kaputa Talks About:

You are a Brand!: How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success
Successful products, corporate icons, and Hollywood celebrities all have what it takes to be in control and in demand — a unique brand.

Today, companies demand employees do more with less, be more entrepreneurial and affect bottom line results, and demonstrate personal effectiveness. That’s why personal branding has become a critical element of every leader’s skill set.

Based on the ideas in Kaputa’s award-winning book, You Are a Brand!, you will learn through vivid case-study examples and stories how to use brand strategies and principles and apply them to your best product— Brand ‘You’. The program covers the multi-step branding process, developing your own personal brand strategy and a personal marketing plan to bring value to you and your company. You’ll learn how to lead and work as a team member more effectively and create a strong productive organization needed to succeed in today’s changing environment.

The Female Brand: Creating More Female Business Leaders
Women are now over fifty percent of the workforce, but only a fraction are senior executives at corporations. Why is that? And what can we do - female executives who want to be more successful, and male and female executives supervising women as well as men - to bring more women up the pipeline?

This talk will introduce new findings in gender research and female aptitudes, along with new insights into why it can be different for women in business. Based on the research and ideas in Kaputa’s book, The Female Brand, executives will leave with fresh insights and practical ideas they can implement to foster female leadership, and create an environment where talented women thrive. Most important, female executives will learn key aptitudes they can harness to build a successful career identity that gives them impact and recognition.

Impact! Branding Yourself as a Leader
How would your organization be better if your managers were better leaders? After all, managers are plentiful, but leaders are rare. The difference between a good leader and a great leader - a leadership brand - is the ability to inspire confidence that the future will be better under your leadership. Leadership brands maximize the group’s potential and attract followers to their leadership.

Why many believe that leaders are born, not made, in fact we can all learn how to be better leaders. This talk will cover key aptitudes critical to leadership and how to cultivate them in yourself. Organizations need to cultivate a leadership brand mindset that reflects the organization’s brand and is consistent and recognizable across the organization and to people on the outside. Leadership is particularly important in today’s complex, global environment.

Leadership brands stand for something relevant and enduring - they inspire hope about the future. Strong leaders not only have intelligence and experience, they have soft power - the ability to inspire and attract followers and give them the strength to prevail - and cultivate a culture of leadership.

The Art of Pitching and Persuasion
Many of us never took a course in persuasion. Yet the ability to pitch our ideas and services, negotiate a good deal for ourselves or our company and persuade others impacts us every day in business. The art of persuasion is the basis of all effective branding, and this talk will cover strategies and tactics from the commercial world of brands, and how to apply them on the job to be more effective in selling your ideas and proposals. Through interactive examples, you will learn how to be more persuasive and successful in your pitches, presentations and negotiations.

Client Leadership: How to Brand Yourself as the Client Go-To Person
Business leaders with client impact are not easy to find. Just ask a client. A leader is someone clients would follow to a place that they wouldn’t go to by themselves. And that takes a lot of trust and belief in their ability to bring about a better outcome. In many careers - law, banking, consulting, advertising - it’s all about the client.

Clients are looking for business advisors they can trust - who they can count on for the right advice and solutions, not the expected advice and solutions. To be successful as a client leader, you need to be smart and hard working for sure, but you also need to be someone clients see as a brand apart from others, someone dedicated to their success, someone that they are emotionally in tune with. In this highly-interactive talk, you will learn though vivid case study examples key personal branding practices to create client impact.

The Innovative Branding Mindset
The innovative branding mindset is a method, a way of thinking and a state of mind. And it’s a mindset that everyone can learn even if you aren’t creative. At its core, branding is about creative disruption that overturns conventions and leads to breakout ideas, trends, messages, processes, channels and cultures. The innovative branding process is a collaborative process that believes that putting together highly diverse teams that come at the problem from multiple directions fosters the best creative disruption. In this highly interactive talk, you will learn how to adopt the innovative branding mindset to bring more success to your company and its businesses.

Building Your Brand Through Social Media - Bit by Bit
Thanks to social media, both personal branding and community are red hot. And social networking is not just for people in transition or entrepreneurs with something to sell or techies who know about bits and bytes. It’s something that everyone should participate in or you will be left behind. Many web 2.0 tools designed for building community and fostering lively discussions - like LinkedIn, FaceBook and Twitter - are great for executives and professionals who want to increase their visibility, expand their networks and stay on the cutting edge of what’s happening in their industry. This talk or workshop will show you how to bring maximum value to yourself and the company you work for through using modern social networking tools and tactics.