Longtime Augeo Partnership Strengthens Carlson School Programs

For close to two decades, Augeo and its founder and CEO David Kristal, ’87 BSB, have been mainstays at the Carlson School.

From guest speaking to partnering with the school’s Institute for Research in Marketing (IRM) to sponsoring events and providing creative services, Kristal and his colleagues at Augeo have found countless ways to give back.

“We [do so] because our future depends on the next generation of ideas and the people who will create the next great innovations,” Kristal says. “From our perspective, we think of it as making an investment in our collective future.”

Augeo is a global leader in enterprise engagement and loyalty strategy and platform technology—a natural partner with the Carlson School because of the business expertise they bring to partnerships. For the past 10 years, Kristal and Augeo have worked with the IRM, which brings together the expertise of the Carlson School’s marketing faculty with top marketers and market research professionals from global brands. These partnerships create thought-provoking dialogue and drive the science and practice of marketing forward. This two-way conversation provides greater context for faculty research and encourages real-world adoption of that research, leading to better business strategies and more effective public policies.

In 2017, IRM began hosting the Ignite Conference, an event that expands on its mission and assembles leading researchers and the business community to discuss the latest trends in marketing. Augeo was a main sponsor of the 2021 Ignite Conference and supported the event with production and creative services.

“Research is really critical because it’s foundational,” Kristal says. “Given the pandemic, we wanted to reimagine what Ignite looked like. So we worked with the IRM leadership and board members to put on a virtual
conference that brought together a very impressive array of innovative business leaders throughout the country, spanning the fields of retail, healthcare, fintech, and manufacturing, among others. It was a great event.”

Augeo and the Carlson School have partnered on events for years. Together, the two developed the Augeo Luminaries Speaker Series, which showcases prominent global leaders at the forefront of disruptive innovation in a broad range of industry, nonprofit, and public sector fields. Distinguished authors, executives, entrepreneurs, investors, and changemakers have taken part in the speaker series, including The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and Valor Equity Partners Founder and CEO Antonio Gracias. 

“Our goal is to highlight the power of doing things differently on a global scale,” Kristal says. “These types of events are a great way to bring people together, and create a channel where people can share wonderful, imaginative ideas that have a chance to change our world.”