Rachel Zoe. Padma Lakshmi. These are the glamorous new faces of Bravo, princesses reigning over hit reality shows (The Rachel Zoe Project and Top Chef, respectively) that have the American public in a trance and begging for more.

And behind these women is another face, one you might not recognize (yet) but that is far more powerful: Lauren Zalaznick, the branding queen. As president of NBC Universal Women and Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, she oversees Oxygen Media, the iVillage site and Bravo Media. The latter is probably her greatest success story—so far. Since being named president of Bravo in May 2004, she has helped the network enjoy its three best years in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and the most critical recognition in its history.

Her skill at similarly reviving floundering brands Oxygen and iVillage— and launching projects like the Women@NBCU B2B marketing initiative—has earned Zalaznick a reputation in the industry as having a bit of a Midas touch. In fact, this year, she was even named one of "The World's Most Infl uential People" by Time (accompanied by a glowing write-up from Martha Stewart).

She credits her incredible track record to a simple drive to succeed.

"I love to achieve extraordinary success," says Zalaznick, 46. "I am, in general, a very motivated person to achieve really big, hard goals."

But Zalaznick didn't start out with her eye on television. After majoring in English literature and premed at Brown, she began working in the film industry, producing indie films like Swoon and Kids. She crossed over to TV in 1994 by joining VH1, and, in 2002, became president of the Universal-owned arts and pop culture network Trio. When Trio fizzled, Zalaznick joined Bravo.

Meanwhile, the sleepy Bravo network had shifted its focus from performing arts to pop culture in the early 2000s, and NBC Universal had purchased it in 2002. By the time Zalaznick was promoted from general manager to Bravo president in 2004, the revamped network had scored its fi rst big hit with a 2003 reality show. "It had launched the most successful hit, certainly in Bravo history, and maybe—I'd say a tent pole of cable success—a game-changer, a face-changer, and that was Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," she recalls. "And it was really revved up with momentum for continued success on the cable landscape."

The key to this success, Zalaznick says, was to identify Bravo's strengths in terms of content. She and her team identified five key subject areas, or "affinities": fashion, design, food, beauty and pop culture. "And what we did was focus development in those five buckets."

The next step was to "hyper-focus" on Bravo's target audience. "We identified this target and called them, in general, the 'affluencers,' she says. (Zalaznick was later featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine with the headline "The Affluencer.") "The affluencers are comprised of five segments, and we put a face on these audience segments. We put behavioral modeling around these segments; we thought about what they'd like to see, what they like to watch, what they do every day."

Putting two and two together—"keeping both the content affi nity and the audience segment in mind"—resulted in such hits as Top Chef, Flipping Out, Millionaire Matchmaker and Real Housewives, she says.

Zalaznick has been hailed for her ability to build distinct, lasting brands, over and over again. In the Time article about Zalaznick, Martha Stewart wrote that Zalaznick "has transformed that network so that you can now recognize a Bravo show at a distance. To do that kind of work in a very crowded field takes more than a producer— it takes a visionary."

Forging such strong brand identity is both a challenge and a necessity because of that crowded field, where it's "harder to get your message out, harder to be clear and consistent in your messaging in the face of that," Zalaznick says.

"All my brands are clear signals, clear flagships in the marketplace, remaining very, very true to servicing this audience that we sought out, identified and keep massively serving," she says. "And we just keep ringing the same bell in more entertaining ways."

The strength of these brands helped Zalaznick overcome another hurdle, the DVR revolution, which turned the traditional rating system on its head. "It is a much stronger place to fi ght from when you have a very clear sense of your brand," she says. "So people change the way that you're measured? You change with it. The marketing strategy became less 100 percent dependent on getting them to tune in every Tuesday at 10 to how do you get them to put you on their season pass list? We reacted very nimbly; we weren't afraid of new technologies and new ways of being measured."

Another major challenge has been the recession, which Zalaznick and her team approached in a very practical, scientific way. "We went right back to our audience and did a fabulous, very comprehensive survey called The Recessionomics Study," she says. "[They] identified about a dozen spending segments, going from what we call the 'recession-proof'... that's like on level 12, going all the way down to level 1, who are shutting down."

But the study revealed viewers in segments six through 11 were still spending, but in more strategic ways, Zalaznick says. "All along that continuum, we have an audience that we can bring to our advertising partners and say, 'We know their spending habits, we know their life stage behaviors, and you should still try to market to them.' So that is both a strategic and an institutional reaction to something terrible, which is a huge marketplace contraction."

Zalaznick says that she took a similar audience-focused approach to revamp the female-centric Oxygen network, which NBC Universal acquired in 2007. Since then, it has shattered every previous ratings record and had its best year ever in 2008. She added the community Web site iVillage to her portfolio in 2008, and a fresh, multistage rebrand is currently debuting online.

No matter what the medium, Zalaznick strives to stay in tune with the needs and interests of her audience. "We listen to them," she says. "We look at our ratings. We know when we're reaching them; we know when we're not. We really do read all the blog posts on the community message boards and figure out what they like, what they don't like, what they want more of, who they want to see more of."

She says her challenge is to use such insights as launching pads and "give [the audience] something a little different, a little off to the right, off to the left, on an angle they didn't expect and bring them a little further along."

In 2008, this extensive knowledge of her audience prompted Zalaznick to launch Women@NBCU, a combination of media assets reaching women across multiple platforms. She calls it "a very easy one-stop shopping place for advertisers and marketing partners" to access particular audience segments.

The Manhattan resident and mother of three says that the huge responsibilities she has tackled over recent years have been "highly motivating" and keep her "very sharp and fresh."

It seems that Stewart would agree. "She's natural," she wrote. "She's never contrived. She's always optimistic. I like so much that she sees the best in people and that, like millions of others, I get to watch her vision."