Anticipating, pre-empting, containing and recovering from a crisis, security breach, product recall or operational failure is now an essential cross-functional discipline and contingency planning priority for global businesses. During the 2010 CMO Council  Summit, scheduled Dec. 9 in San Jose, California, chief marketing officers from AIG, 24-Hour Fitness, and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) will share how they have rallied C-level executive support to act responsibly and effectively in times of crisis or compromise.

The session will feature a headline presentation from David Horlock, vice president of global inspections and audits at Intertek, a company active in product safety, component testing, ethical sourcing, and supply chain sustainability. Based in Hong Kong, Horlock has worked closely with clients to ensure the quality, integrity, sustainability, responsibility and compliance of operations, suppliers, products, labor conditions and work environments worldwide.

The executive panel, titled Corporate Incident Response: A New Measure of Business Performance, will look at the impact of corporate crises -- whether man-made, "cyber-propagated" or naturally inspired -- on a company's ability to protect brand reputation and shareholder value. Joining Horlock for this session will be Tony Wells, chief marketing officer of 24-Hour Fitness, Rich Smith, chief marketing officer of AIG, and Aaron Weinstein, chief marketing officer of the San Francisco Bay Area mass transit system.

The CMO Summit will gather keynote speakers and panelists from across the C-suite to share in their experiences, insights and best practices for optimizing three key areas of collaboration: Customer Experience, Marketing Effectiveness and Operational Efficiency. The full-day event, themed around Synchronizing the C-Suite, will focus on ways chief marketers can more effectively enjoin and collaborate with CEOs and functional leaders in the finance, information technology, procurement, legal, operational and other customer-facing and back office environments.

Marketing and business leaders from Accenture, Chrysler, Prudential, Juniper Networks, Taleo, Denny's, Motorola, Lenovo, Wells Fargo, ADP, Papa Murphy's, Nokia, FNC, Farmers Insurance, SAP, Orbitz, Egon Zehnder, SunPower, Merkle, Cisco, CA, AIG, Franke, and Wrigley's are expected to be among those attending the event.

The CMO Council's CMO Summit (www.cmosummit.org) is the premier networking and thought leadership event in marketing and the official peer-to-peer networking event for the CMO Council (www.cmocouncil.org), an organization of more than 6,000 global marketers, controlling more than $200bn in combined annual marketing spend. Invitees across both the B-to-B and B-to-C market sectors will be invited to attend this exclusive retreat to network with peers and tap into this global network of insight, access and influence.

For more information, visit www.cmosummit.org.

Source: CMO Council