Professor Nader Tavassoli of London Business School contrasts traditional approaches to branding — where brands are a visual identity and a promise to customers — to brands as a customer experience delivered by the entire organisation. The course offers a brand workout for your own brands, as well as guest videos from leading branding professionals.

The aim of the course is to change the conception of brands as being an organisation’s visual identity (e.g., logo) and image (customers' brand associations) to an experience along «moments-that-matter» along the customer journey and, therefore, delivered by people across the entire organisation. Brands are thus not only an external promise to customers, but a means of executing business strategy via internal brand-led behaviour and culture change.

The Program

Brand Purpose & Experience

1. Traditional notions of branding.
2. Changing market conditions for brands.
3. A new approach to branding.

Brand Design & Delivery

1. Brand experiences as the basis for differentiation.
2. How to design brand experiences, as different from products and services.
3. Pricing as a differentiating brand experience.

Brand Leadership and Alignment

1. Aligning the strategies for business, brand and behaviour.
2. Strategic brand portfolio alignment.
3. Delivering global brand alignment.

Brand Practices & Engagement

1. How to design human resource brand best-practices.
2. A model for engaging employees with the brand.
3. The ABCs of behavioural change.

Brand Metrics & Returns

1. How brands create value.
2. Why brand valuation is not the same as the value brands create.
3. How to design a strategic and cross-functional brand dashboard.

What will you learn  

• How to build brands from a broad organisational perspective.
• How to lead brand-led culture change with human resource practices at the core (i.e., brand as a lever and not just an outcome).
• How to build brands in multi-brand companies, across cultures and geographies.
• How to measure brand health in new ways, that is, internally in addition to externally.
• How to value and capture returns to brands across the organisation — introducing the new concept of employee-based brand equity — and how this is different from the valuation of brands as intangible assets.