Dr. Wolfgang Frick is a speaker, business coach, brand expert and author of several books. He combines more than 30 years’ professional experience in retail, marketing and leadership with strategic insight, personal experience and a subtle sense of humour.
His career has taken him from sales through advertising and international marketing to the boardroom. He has managed brands in several countries, been responsible for pricing, product ranges and marketing, and negotiated with some of the world’s largest suppliers. Today, Wolfgang Frick brings this knowledge to the stage – not from the perspective of an observer, but from decades of personal experience in leadership roles.
His keynote speeches focus on leadership, decisiveness, appreciation, brand management, career change and the question of what role human experience plays in the age of artificial intelligence.
Wolfgang Frick does not offer ready-made solutions. He creates new perspectives, challenges entrenched ways of thinking and provides his audience with concrete food for thought and tools that can be directly applied to their everyday working lives.
Wolfgang Frick Lecture Topics
- 60 Shades of Leadership
When your business card suddenly ends up in the waste paper bin and your diary goes quiet, the most honest stock-taking of your professional life begins. The highs and lows of leadership, first-hand lessons learnt, and a toolkit for anyone who bears responsibility, is shaping their career, or wants to make a fresh start.
- Decisions Are Exchange Rates
Every decision is an exchange rate between what was and what is to be. Drawing on 30 years’ professional experience: why good decisions arise not from data, but from clarity.
- Value creation through appreciation
Based on over 500 staff appraisals: why appreciation is not a ‘soft’ virtue, but hard value creation. With examples from the boardroom, the post office and St Nicholas.
- Brands need a diagnosis, not a diet
When a brand falters, the ‘diet’ follows almost reflexively: cut the budget, streamline the product range, spruce up the image. But this only treats the symptoms, not the cause. Instead, Wolfgang Frick opens the medical records – and shows how to assess your brand’s condition honestly, rather than starving it into looking good. A keynote on brand management as a diagnostic process: uncomfortable in its analysis, concrete in its treatment.
- Skyfall with Style
The 7 stages of outplacement that nobody knows about beforehand – from inner detachment to the inner voice.
– Re-framing as a recipe for success
– The hidden job market – myth or method
- Natural intelligence over artificial intelligence
Why experience cannot be reduced to an algorithm.
An approach for the AI era. Where AI is genuinely an accelerator and where it degenerates into a dangerous source of information.
– Where AI helps brands and where it erodes their substance
– The three disciplines of natural intelligence
- Online can be beaten
Get the right concept and your shop will thrive …
How can high-street retail stand up to online retail without tilting at windmills? Every brand seeks the closest possible connection with the customer – both online and offline.
– Strengths of the brick-and-mortar business model
– How do I convey messages that are unique to the physical shop?
– Don’t be afraid of Amazon, Zalando and the like
- Brand management in a time of upheaval
Creating value at the point of sale: recipes for success in brick-and-mortar retail. Why are brands still brands? Which theories and beliefs help? What can brick-and-mortar do better than digital, and how do I make quick and confident decisions?
– Recipes for success in brick-and-mortar retail and responses to disruptive changes
– What can brick-and-mortar retail do better than online retail?
Workshops, Mentoring & Business Coaching
In addition to his lectures, Wolfgang Frick also offers workshops and personalised mentoring programmes for executives and companies.
His topics include, amongst others:
- Executive Training – From Administrator to Innovator
- Decision-making and Negotiation – Options trump arguments
- Outplacement – When your business card ends up in the waste paper bin
- Re-framing
- Brand Management Based on the ‘Marketing Sommelier’ Principle
In addition, he offers exclusive in-person workshops and one-to-one mentoring sessions in the ‘Raum für Weitblick’ (Room for Vision), situated at an altitude of 1,036 metres. Away from the hustle and bustle of day-to-day management, the focus there is on reflection, personal development and clarity.
Who is Dr. Wolfgang Frick
Wolfgang Frick laid a dual academic foundation early on. He studied economics in Innsbruck and communication studies in Salzburg. He subsequently completed his PhD on ‘Corporate Design as an Identity Strategy’, focusing on the gap between a brand’s self-image and its public image.
His professional career began in the sales department of a Viennese coffee roasting company. This was followed by many years in the retail sector: as an advertising manager, as an international marketing manager and later as head of marketing at a family-run business in Vorarlberg. There, he designed more than a thousand product packaging designs and doubled the brand’s advertising recall.
Fourteen years of his career took him to Switzerland. Most recently, Wolfgang Frick served as a board member responsible for purchasing and marketing, overseeing pricing, product range and branding, as well as a purchasing volume of around 800 million Swiss francs.
Since 2021, Wolfgang Frick has been working independently as a ‘marketing sommelier’. He supports brands with positioning and transformation, guided by his credo: ‘Diagnosis rather than a diet’. First examine, smell and taste – then judge.
Today, he is a speaker, business coach, podcast host and author of several books. In 2026, he was named one of the Top 111 Public Speakers in the DACH region.
His talks are not based on theoretical knowledge alone, but on decades of practical experience in retail, marketing, brand management and general management.