| Lee Rafkin is Founder and President of Rafkin & Company, a boutique strategy consulting and brand management firm established in 2002.
Rafkin is a passionate and visionary marketing leader with over twenty years of global experience launching, building and managing successful brands in a wide variety of industries. Prior to founding his own firm, Lee was Executive Director at Futurebrand, a global brand consultancy owned by the Interpublic Group. Lee led Futurebrand's Latin America region, acquiring a branding firm in Brazil and overseeing other offices and client engagements in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela.
While at Futurebrand, Lee was the global client executive for AOL International, leading a wide range of high-level projects in China, Europe, Japan, Canada and Latin America. Lee's AOL work includes naming, positioning and launching a joint-venture Internet brand in China, repositioning the Netscape brand and identity, developing a single global brand positioning platform for AOL services in eight countries, and developing brand training tools and seminars used by AOL worldwide.
At Rafkin & Company, Lee has led consulting projects in the media and entertainment, news and information, technology and Internet, shopping center development, retail, lodging, healthcare, financial services, professional services and consumer products sectors. Since founding the firm, Lee has worked at the senior level with blue-chip clients including AOL, Discovery Networks, Reuters Media, Animal Planet, SPEED Channel, Sony Music, The Chicago Tribune, Tribune Interactive, Boston Globe Media, UBS, ConAgra, Kroll, Gaylord Entertainment, Cardean Learning Group, GBMC Healthcare, The Mills Corporation, Simon Property Group, The Grand Ol' Opry, and the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem. He also frequently partners with other agencies and creative shops like Interbrand, Landor, Desgrippes Gobe, Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners and The Rockwell Group.
Over the past five years, Lee's projects have included launching a national media network in shopping malls, branding America's first indoor Snow Dome, branding and launching a global digital news brand targeting Influentials, developing licensing strategies for a collection of cable network brands, respositioning cable television networks in the U.S. and Latin America, developing digital branding strategies for a large metropolitan news organization, leading executive-level brand councils, and developing strategies to transform a tired country music brand into a dynamic "country lifestyle" licensed products brand.
Prior to consulting, Lee worked on the client side in senior level marketing and brand management roles. Lee was the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Savos, Inc., a successful wireless Internet start-up company that was sold in 2000. Previously, Lee was the Director of Marketing for licensed consumer products at Nickelodeon, where he worked with partners like Mattel, Hasbro, Target, Toys 'R Us and others to successfully launch the Rugrats and Blues Clues licensed merchandise programs. Prior to Nick, Lee was a classically trained packaged goods brand manager at Nabisco and Pillsbury, working in such "sweet" categories as desserts, breakfast, cookies and snacks. Lee started his career in international investment banking at Merrill Lynch.
Lee is a marketing thought-leader and frequent speaker at industry events and conferences. He earned an M.B.A. in Marketing from Kellogg, and a B.A. magna cum laude from Brown University. He has lived and worked in Brazil and the U.K., and is conversant in Portuguese and Spanish. Lee is also active in economic development and historic preservation, and sits on the Board of the Maplewood Village Alliance (Maplewood, NJ) and the Board of Trustees of the Montrose Park Historic District Association (South Orange, NJ). Lee lives with his wife and two children near New York City in South Orange, New Jersey. | |
