Charles Spinosa
Group Director and Leader of Marketing Practices
Charles Spinosa
Over the last decade, Charles Spinosa has developed a unique market-expansion practice devoted to helping clients enter hard-to-penetrate markets. As an off-shoot of core practice, Charles and his teams have used his core methods to start a value chain practice dedicated to helping suppliers and purchasers find hidden efficiencies for cutting costs, making amicable pricing arrangements, and raising profits on both sides of the table.
The marketing practices at VISION help clients develop new product and service concepts to extend brands into difficult markets, reposition brands, build customer communities, integrate new media and traditional marketing, work with Investor Relations to gain new investors, and increase value chain efficiency.
ABB-ALSTOM, CEMEX, the Warner Music Group, AmericanCentury Funds, the San Francisco Chronicle, Celtic Football Club, the Bank of Ireland, Bancomer, KSTS-TV part of the Telemundo Group, and the InterAmerican Development Bank have all benefited from working with Charles and his teams. The recent work with CEMEX has been written up at ChangeMakers.Net
In order to show others the commercial value of identifying and resolving value conflicts, Charles and his colleagues actively publish. Their "Strategies for Viral Marketing" appears in Kellogg on Integrated Marketing, edited by Dawn Iacobucci and Bobby J. Calder (John Wiley & Sons, 2002). "Taking an Expanded View of Customers' Needs," Marketing Research (Winter, 2000) details the market-expansion approach to listening for value conflicts. Charles introduced his cultural approach to understanding innovation in Disclosing New Worlds (MIT Press, 1997).
Peter Aspen of the Financial Times described Disclosing as: "A brave attempt to reformulate the relationship between democratic rights and economic progress in an age when the triumphalism of technological advance masks an unconfident vision of the future."
Before management consulting, Charles taught English at Miami University in Ohio, philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and published widely in both fields. He earned a Ph.D. from Berkeley and a B.A. from Columbia, where he graduated magna cum laude.