Branding: Creating and Managing Your Corporate Brand

Your brand is the vehicle that propels your product or service into your customer’s lives, and into their hearts. A good brand is much more than an attractive image combined with some witty type. Your brand must reflect the heart and soul of your product, and offer a promise that you can live up to.

This two-day course will get you started on the road to creating a perfect brand. The first day will cover the basics of branding, including how to develop a visual identity from start to finish. We will also give you some graphic design tips to help you communicate your expectations to a professional designer. The second day will focus on how to put your brand out there in the right way. We’ll also talk about how to keep your brand energized and alive with monitoring and evaluation tools.

• Define what a brand is (particularly a strong brand) and what branding is about
• Define various types of brand architecture and brand extension
• Identify your brand’s products, the features of those products, and their values
• Write a mission, vision, and style statement for a brand
• Describe the basics of positioning a brand
• Understand the basics of creating a visual identity,
  including a brand name, slogan, and logo
• Help your employees live the brand by empowering them to be ambassadors and creating strong brand touchpoints
• Effectively plan an internal and external brand launch
• Monitor and evaluate your brand, and understand how to respond to the results

To begin, participants will explore what a brand means and what branding is all about. Participants will also discuss some popular brands and what makes them stand out.

Next, participants will get started on the branding process by learning how to identify a product’s features, benefits, and values.

A mission statement is where you can express your big dreams for your product. In this session, participants will learn what a good mission statement looks like. They will also get some hands-on practice in creating a mission statement for a product of their choice.

Next, it’s time to outline how you want things to look for your brand in the short term. This session will give participants some tips for creating a vision statement and share some sample statements for a fictional company.

Positioning describes how your brand will be seen in the minds of customers. Participants will learn what a positioning statement looks like and they will take part in a positioning workout to get some hands-on practice.

The next component of your brand identity is the style statement: what attitude will your brand have? This session includes both a theory and practice component.

Now it’s time for the fun stuff! To begin, this session will recap what we have covered so far. Then, participants will get practical tips on creating a brand name and a slogan.

Although we can’t turn participants into professional graphic designers, this session will help them understand the basics of graphic design. Concepts include image perception, color spectrum analysis, font types, and types of visual identities. A pop culture quiz rounds out the session.

To begin the second day, participants will learn how to transform company employees into brand ambassadors and how to create a unique experience at each brand touchpoint.

Next, we will share ten easy ways to connect with customers.

This session will share some ideas for making internal and external brand launches a smashing success.

In order for a brand to be as successful as possible, it must evolve with your company, your customers, and the marketplace. This session will introduce participants to the basics of brand evaluation.

To begin, participants will learn about one of the most popular tools for brand analysis: the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) matrix.

Next, participants will learn how brands can be evaluated with a balanced scorecard.

The final evaluation tool that we will explore is Simon Middleton’s brand matrix, which plots strength, weakness, positivity, and negativity.

In this session, participants will learn what to do with brand evaluation results. We will also share the six most common signs of brand trouble.

Next, participants will learn about refreshing a brand, re-launching a brand, and re-branding. They will then apply their knowledge to a case study.

To wrap up the day, participants will learn about various kinds of brand architecture and brand extension.