PATRICIA R. BAYERLEIN

With over a dozen years of experience in international marketing and communications, Patricia Bayerlein has advised local governments on international relations and developed business-to-business markets in Europe and the Pacific Rim.

At Gagen MacDonald, Patricia is leading the organizational redesign of the corporate affairs division at a global Fortune 100 Company as well as enabling the team to develop and implement a global communications strategy. Her most recent experience was designing a new approach to identify and measure barriers to effective information flow and their impact within a client organization.  The outcome was a new process to help leaders use improved information flow and dialogue to better deliver on strategic initiatives critical to company success. 

She has also audited corporate communications practices for Payless Shoe Source to transform their internal capabilities from “inform and report” to “influence and lead” to support a new brand positioning that affects 25,000 employees worldwide.  Patricia has drawn on her experience with International Truck and Engine Corporation (formerly Navistar) as well as McDonald’s Corporation to help other clients do the same through coaching the HR organization on using communication strategies and tools (including employee surveys) to effectively drive change, engage the workforce and connect change initiatives to business results.

Earlier, Patricia was a director of marketing at Cendant Intercultural, a leading training and consulting firm. During her tenure there, she worked on such diverse projects as testing employer branding concepts across ten countries; auditing global workforce practices for multiple Fortune 500 companies and advising several multinational companies on building global leadership capabilities for international assignees.  Her clients included Dow Chemical, Eastman Kodak, and Motorola.

Patricia began her career in international marketing working for a global electronics manufacturer that developed products for such companies as Bosch, Black & Decker, Hitachi, Motorola, Nokia and Panasonic. She was responsible for managing marketing strategies for emerging markets and measuring international customer satisfaction. Patricia also spent two years as international relations advisor to the Mayor of Kawaguchi City, near Tokyo, where she was one of twenty-five candidates selected worldwide to support international communications for local government initiatives. Along with being conversant in Japanese and German, she’s studied Sanskrit, Hindi, French and Classical Chinese. She is a member of the Institute for Public Relations Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation.

Education: Northwestern University, B.A., Art History and Art Theory and Practice
University of Wisconsin, Ph.D. candidate/FLAS Fellow, Asian Studies