Lee Rafkin

Lee Rafkin is Founder & CEO of Rafkin Brand Consulting, an independent strategy, branding, and marketing communications firm established in 2002 in New York City. Rafkin has over 25 years of experience as a brand manager and chief marketing officer, a technology start-up founder, an executive at large global brand consulting firms, and as an independent brand consultant. Over the course of his career, he has worked with over one hundred clients in most major categories on four continents. He loves to create, write, design, and sell winning ideas, and is comfortable in the boardroom, the conference room, and out in the field.

In addition to running his own successful firm, Rafkin has held senior leadership roles at Futurebrand (IPG), Siegel+Gale (Omnicom), and Consumer Dynamics (Independent). As Managing Director at Consumer Dynamics, Lee managed consulting teams and led numerous insight-driven consulting projects around the world for companies like Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé Health Sciences, Novartis, Medtronic, PepsiCo, Kraft, Pernod Ricard, Starbucks, University of Maryland, Estée Lauder, Aveda, MAC Cosmetics, and Tom Ford Beauty.

As Global Director and Practice Leader at Siegel+Gale, Lee built a successful global practice that fused brand strategy, user experience, information design, and plain language writing to transform complex consumer interactions into trusted brand experiences for clients that included Aetna, American Express, and Bank of America. For the Internal Revenue Service, Rafkin and his team redesigned and rewrote all taxpayer communications, using data visualization and information design best practices to dramatically increase comprehension and compliance.

Prior to Siegel+Gale, Rafkin was Executive Director and head of Latin American consulting at Futurebrand, where he was based in São Paulo, oversaw consulting teams in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, and built a strong regional brand consulting practice, working with clients like Nestlé and Banco Itaú. 

Earlier in his career, Lee was Marketing Director for the consumer products division of Nickelodeon, the #1 kid’s cable TV network, and a Brand Manager at Nabisco and Pillsbury.

Rafkin teaches a strategic branding course and is an advisor to CEO’s at XRC Labs, a New York City-based incubator and business accelerator at Parsons School of Design at The New School. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and has an MBA in marketing from the Kellogg School of Management.