Keynotes, workshops and lectures

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Big topics of today and tomorrow

Dr. Martina Olbert, Founder and CEO of Meaning.Global, is a global keynote speaker represented by Chartwell Speakers in London. Her core expertise is building meaningful futures, cultural understanding, societal shifts, macrotrends, human foresight, and helping clients navigate what all the changes we are going through right now mean to their business.

She is a trusted advisor to many of the world's most influential brands and organizations. ​She advises leaders on strategy, marketing, innovation, trends, value creation and growth to create more meaning and align business with humanity for a better shared future. Some of her clients include LVMH, Rolls-Royce, Facebook, Estée Lauder, Unilever, Heineken, Barclays Private Bank, KBC Bank, and Kantar but throughout her career, she has worked with clients across all sectors.

Martina is an inspiring speaker with a bold vision of reimagining business as a force for good and a driver of a more meaningful, sustainable and humanistic future. She views commerce as the most potent force for positive change in society. With her talks, workshops and client engagements, she helps her clients navigate what the recent changes in the world, society, culture, human behavior and our consumption 

patterns mean for the future of business – so that clients can capitalize on these shifts and make new and more empowered meaning.

She has spoken for clients globally at conferences and events in North America, LatAm, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, and Asia. Her talks and guest lectures include EXPO Dubai 2020 Global Sustainability Goals Week with the UN, King’s Business School London, Trinity College Dublin, Brand Week Istanbul, FashionTech Week Milan, Luxury Week, Internal Communications Conference in Berlin, Consumer Insighting Conference in Manila, What is Luxury? panel at the Atlantis Paradise Island Hotel in the Bahamas, and more.

Some of the reactions to her talks and thought leadership include: “seeing beyond the problems of today”,“reframing and refocusing worldviews for better understanding”, “exceptional and highly valued perspective”, “real depth made accessible”, “astonishingly valuable”, “revolutionary thought leader”, “true visionary”, and “giving us a road map forward”.

For speaking inquiries and Martina's availability, please email Martina directly at hello@martinaolbert.com.

1

Humanistic Realignment In Business

Bridging the gap between business and humanity to create more meaning

Business and humanity are badly misaligned today. In business, we look at people as workers and consumers instead of human beings whose interests we are supposed to serve. We are now hitting the limits of this old business narrative. We are standing at the edge of a new Humanistic paradigm and need to conceive a new way forward. We need to bridge the gap between organizations and people to better serve our complete humanity and the planet. We need a new business narrative that is more aligned with our own humanity: with what the core value of business is for people, what is needed today and where we are going next in the future. The new business narrative needs to shift from people serving brands as consumers to brands serving people as human beings to add meaningful value to their lives that elevates our human well-being.

Past engagements: EXPO Dubai 2022 – Global Sustainability Goals Week with the United Nations

2

A Better Shared Future With Brands

How brands can build a new shared future for people, business, and the world

How can we use brands as a force for good and the catalysts to drive a global social, cultural, economic and environmental change in the world? Business is the most powerful creative force in the world. It won’t be governments or capital markets that drive a positive change in the world – it will be commerce. Brands hold the emotional connections with people that are a part of our everyday life fabric and are nimble to adapt to changes in policies, global markets and demand. In this talk, Martina explores the changing dynamic between brands and people in the post-COVID world and what this can mean for our collective future. This talk is inspired by her latest study Reimagining Consumerism As A Force For Good.

Past engagements: King's Business School, King's College London in 2022

3

The Great Resignation

It's a great human awakening and it's reshaping the future of your business

We are in the midst of The Great Resignation. But are we? What we are witnessing isn’t the great resignation but the great human awakening. We are hitting the collective pause button on our lives lived autopilot under the mantra of brand aspiration, economic growth, dreams and desires, status-seeking and virtue signalling. This is the end of sacrificing our lives for the cultural hypnosis of "success" and the notion that it's out there and not within, to be determined by other people and how they perceive us based on our economic value in society. We are awakening to the greater reality of our lives: who we are, what we want and how to self-actualize to live lives filled with meaning. This is the beginning of real aspiration: to be human again and to live on our terms in a way that elevates individual and collective well-being. This societal change has a profound impact on the future of business, the future of work, leadership, management, the way organizations work and how they create value. Let's explore what this means for the future of your organization.

Past engagements: HRreview.co.uk Podcast

4

The Power of Diversity

Reframing the meaning of diversity to unlock innovation, new value and growth

Not understanding diversity is costing organizations millions of dollars annually in the new value they are not creating, simply because their old mindset is blocking them from seeing the new direction filled with opportunity. In this talk, you'll learn why our outdated thinking about diversity is stopping us from achieving real progress in business and how a simple yet powerful reframe can unlock the immense power of diversity as an engine for human creativity, social innovation, diverse value creation and future sustainable business growth. The key is to stop looking at diversity as a social representation tool that is supposed to check boxes and start seeing it for what it truly is: an engine for value creation and growth. Martina writes about this changing dynamic in business and why a fresh new take on diversity is important in her latest article The Real Value Of Diversity In Business.

Past engagements: STYLUS Trends Day in London on Reframing The Meaning Of Diversity

5

Purpose versus Meaning

Moving beyond purpose to achieve real meaningful value in people's lives

In this talk, you'll learn why we need to move beyond the overblown existential idea of purpose in business as the cornerstone of brand value and realize that the only real way to achieve purpose leads through meaning. We need to abandon the idea of aspirational brand purposes and come back to reality – to create human meaning that can add real meaningful value to people’s lives. To make purpose anything more than corporate greenwashing, smoke-and-mirrors and virtue signalling without any real social impact in the world, we need to finally understand that people don’t buy your why, they buy their own why. This customer's why isn’t purpose to brands, but the meaning they add to people’s lives. This mindset shift will put brands on more solid ground to build a more meaningful, sustainable and humanistic future. Martina writes more about this changing dynamic in business and why human meaning is the way to go in her article Purpose versus Meaning: Which Way Into The Future?.

Past engagements: Brand Week Istanbul, Leveraging Thought Leadership Podcast, Fireside Chat on The Speaker Show

6

Sustainability and Ecosystems

Unlocking the full potential of sustainability for creating new ecosystems of innovation

The pandemic has changed how we view Sustainability. It has served as a portal from one business reality into another. Before COVID, Sustainability was a dry subject focused on the supply chain, CSR, global compliance, rules and regulations, and environmental efficiency. The new understanding of Sustainability is as the natural extension of our own humanity – not just the matter of ethical sourcing, raw materials and human rights, but equally, as the matter of ethics, values, integrity, longevity, conscious creation, meaning, and awareness of the world we live in and the value we want to create. To unlock the power of sustainability, we need to reframe it from a threat to an opportunity: from environmentalism to creating new ecosystems of innovation that can serve the people and the planet. In this way, Sustainability is emerging as the new business consciousness – a new shared philosophy – to be embedded at the core of brands and organizations to produce new forms of meaningful human value.

Past engagements: 2023 Sustainability Thinkers360 Predictions, Consumer Insighting & Storytelling Conference in Manila

7

The New Meaning Of Luxury

How is the meaning of luxury changing today and where is it moving next?

The very meaning of luxury today is quickly changing from the tangibles to the intangibles. We don't crave material objects of desire anymore as much as we crave the new luxury staples: time, space, peace, serenity, human connection and experiences. What has caused this sudden change in our perception of luxury and what does it mean for the future? Listen to this talk by Dr. Martina Olbert, the author of the globally acclaimed The Luxury Report: Redefining The Future Meaning Of Luxury, as she explores the five cultural shifts disrupting how we experience luxury and what they mean for the future of luxury brands, hospitality, leisure, and investment sectors.

Past engagements: BOND Five Star USA Conference in Nassau, Bahamas, Milan FashionTech Week, Luxury Week, Frame Awards, NXTLVL Podcast: Restoring The Meaning Of Luxury, and The Luxury Renaissance Show

8

The Meaning Metric™

How can we adopt a new meaning metric to measure what actually matters?

We are drowning in data while we desperately lack sense and meaning. We have all the data in the world, but if we don’t know what is important to people to make their lives better and more meaningful while increasing profitability, it’s useless to us. In this talk, you'll learn why having more data isn’t necessarily better, why cultivating human understanding is key, and how shifting our perspective from data measurement to meaning measurement and adopting the new Meaning Metric™ to monitor and measure what people actually care about can help brands, organizations and media buyers alike unlock their efforts in the real human context that now hides in plain sight.

Past engagements: CX Emotion 2020 conference in London, the Festival of #NewMR, and the Insights Association USA