Rick Blake Email & Phone Number

Hartford, Connecticut Area

Hartford, Connecticut Area

Hartford, CT

• Reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer, led enterprise customer insights teams supporting Consumer and Commercial Property and Casualty Insurance, Employee/Group Benefits as well as corporate partners including.
• Managed staff of 16 and $6.5 MM budget. Achieved 100% employee engagement score past 2 years.
• Designed and redesigned foundational studies, including Brand Health, Advertising Tracking, Relationship NPS and Competitive NPS, to better inform efforts and deliver key metrics for customer dashboards.
• Developed and executed annual insights agendas with each business area to address distribution optimization, customer needs, competitive intelligence, innovation & product development, marketing communications, online.
• Consultative support to evolve brand architecture and inform annual updates to strategic marketing plans.
• Provided consultative leadership for CEO, CMO and Business Unit Presidents’ customer experience agendas.

Hartford, CT

• Responsible for leading enterprise advertising, sponsorship, and creative services teams for 6 months.
• Developed brand TV/digital spots and associated print & digital campaign.
• Managed NCAA/CBS, NASCAR Team and Professional Golf sponsorships.
• Creative services team delivered against dozens of sales collateral and print campaign briefs.

New York, NY

• Reporting to the Head of Global Marketplace Insights, led teams supporting, at various times, Consumer Card, Small Business Card/OPEN, Corporate Card & Travel, Merchant Services, American Express Bank, Global Network.
• Staff of 12 (NY, London, Paris, Sydney, Singapore and Miami) and external research budget of up to $18MM.
• Developed and managed insights agendas for each line of business in each region to support acquisition, new product launches, marketing campaigns, cardmember engagement and merchant acceptance.
• Designed & launched globally consistent key metrics studies measuring brand health, product strength and merchant acceptance across 44 lead card products in the 10 primary markets outside the US.
• Completed global consumer segmentation that drove comprehensive redesign of card portfolio strategy.
• Reengineered global agency relationships to reduce costs and increase preferential allocation of resources.

Greater New York City Area

• Led insights teams supporting US Consumer Card, Corporate Card and Travel, and Global Advanced Payments.
• Staff of up to 10 and external research budget of $10MM.
• Conducted qualitative and quantitative research to support the re-design and evolution of Amex’s website, the re-named & re-launched Small Commercial Business Card as OPEN, the replacement of the failed Optima credit.
• Responsible for creation and launch of Business Intelligence function including primary competitive intelligence, analysis and reference “desk” research. Group subsequently grew to over 25 staff.

Greater New York City Area

Greater Philadelphia Area

• Research team leader delivered B2C and B2B insight-based strategic consulting to clients in telecommunications, financial services and package delivery industries for this former Booz Allen Hamilton research division..
• Needs based segmentation and targeting strategy for B2B and B2C telecom services providers.
• New product development research for USPS leading to priority mail product that succeeded in fending off devastating inroads by data rich products from FedEx and UPS.
• Qualitative research with high net worth Cardmembers enabled American Express to craft communications to minimize attrition as they remove risky supplemental lines of credit from Platinum and Gold charge cards.

Greater Chicago Area

Designed and executed customer research studies for full-service advertising agency. Quantitative and qualitative projects included brand equity, product development & positioning, pricing, creative development, communications and awareness tracking studies for clients including Disney, Audi, State Farm and Discover.

Ann Arbor, MI

Consultant / instructor in international summer program designed to teach advanced research and statistical methods to social scientists

Core member of teams pursuing academic research in fields of Psychology, Political Science and Political Psychology.

Phd Candidate, Social Psychology

Ma, Social Psychology And Political Science

Ma, Political Science And Political Psychology

Ba, Psychology And Political Science