Ted Ekkers Email & Phone Number

Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Responsible for ensuring annual expense optimization savings are captured for Marketing. Delivered $30M annually through multiple large scale optimization projects with senior leadership in photography, printing, and creative services.Co-leading a Lean Six-Sigma project to streamline processes across five business units within Marketing which will allow for shorter planning cycles, reduced workload and improved speed to market while maintaining or improving output quality.Develop and maintain a pipeline of projects through periodic financial reviews and leadership meetings.Foster a culture of expense optimization across 2,000 member Marketing organization by publicizing projects, providing quarterly leadership updates, and publishing a monthly progress report.Lead a team of three managers to successfully drive projects that will deliver annual savings goal and create a culture of learning and excellence in problem solving and executive communication.

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Directed all consumer research needs and led innovation and strategy development for $7B portion of the Home pyramid of Target requiring partnership with other internal teams and management of three direct reports.Incorporated design thinking principles into various innovation projects to drive new strategies, concepts, and tactics for the business.Led Quality study to understand owned brand perceptions to determine which product attributes were required to drive quality and price perceptions.Oversaw annual research project to track consumer perceptions of the back-to-school and college guest to drive merchandising and marketing strategy and tactics while also providing in-season updates to ensure business leaders incorporated insights as they planned for the following year.Oversaw study in patio business to understand the multi-channel shopping journey and drive and align merchandising and marketing strategies across in-store and online businesses.

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Responsible for the research and strategy development for a $6B business unit. Required collaboration with ten manufacturers, partnership with other internal teams and management of a direct report.Managed a six-month research project and identified four key business initiatives to drive accelerated growth for a $4B cross-division business. Gained alignment with senior leadership to implement a new strategy and provided new creative direction for a multi-million dollar marketing campaign for 2011.Conducted surveys on private label commodities to provide feedback on attributes to product designers.Partnered with a major manufactuer to develop strategy to increase guest penetration in household commodities including concepts for new instore experience and marketing messages.Additional responsibility to manage four member Archives and Heritage Services team, which curates corporate spaces with historical vignettes, manages corporate archives and provides facts and context for external communications, marketing and legal partners.

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Directed over $1M in research annually and managed two direct reports to support the primary research needs of various business units.Won Quarterly Director’s Award for innovative and impactful research on Black Friday. Resulted in successful changes to advertising campaign, promotional strategy, store hours, and in-store signing.Received corporate-wide annual “Price Perception” award for co-leading a synthesis of various pricing research projects and leading a multi-phase research project on in-store value messaging.Developed a standard guest research study and accompanying metrics to measure and compare seasonal campaigns throughout the year.

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Developed weekly ad planning tools using guest, sales and market data to drive space allocation to optimize traffic in store for $10B+ commodities program.Co-led project to determine guest metrics and reporting rolled out to entire marketing and merchandising organization earning group president’s annual “Speed is Life” award.

Chicago, Il

Partnered across organization to develop direct mail campaign for financial advisors.

Austin, Texas Area

Evaluated environmental impact of logistics network, developed NGO partnership to facilitate environmental best practices in the trasnportation industry, and delivered executive communications to share the importance of sustainability issues on the brand,

Chicago, Il

Conducted primary and secondary research across multiple industries for boutique business research firm. Clients included Fortune 500 companies, startup companies, and private equity groups.

Ms, Natural Resources

Mba

Bs, Engineering