Brand Identity and Strategy

Overview

Brand identity and Strategy is a IE Business School course for those professionals who are ready to adopt a creative approach to empowering brands. Students will go through a journey that starts with understanding what a brand is and how they can build successful ones, whilst simultaneously segmenting their consumers appropriately. The course explores positioning and its importance to successful brands looking at perceptual maps and the well-known iceberg model. It culminates in development of real brand houses, which can be applied to the working world, and how picking the right name, colors and logo can be instrumental to a brand’s success. The course is delivered by Rhodes Scholar winning Professor, Dr Maria Eizaguirre, a member of IE Business School’s faculty.

Syllabus

Introduction to branding: Segmentation.

In this module, students will be welcomed to the course and introduced to what makes a brand and how they are built. They will explore how we decide upon which brands we love and hate and how that affects our perception of the brand. Finally they will look at segmentation and the iceberg model and how they can zero in on the correct consumer.

DEFINING THE VALUE

In module 2, students will learn what positioning is and how they can use positioning statements to attract consumers to their brand. They will learn what a good and bad positioning statement is and how they can build a strong perceptual map.

BUILDING A BRAND HOUSE

In module 3, students will gain an introduction to brand houses and be shown examples of some of the most interesting ones available to the public. They will start to explore brand personality and image and finally begin to create their own brand houses for a brand that they love.

BRAND MARKS AND VISUAL EXPRESSIONS

In week 4, we look in detail at the more visual aspects of a brand: the logo, name and colors. By understanding the nuances between different types of fonts, colors or logotypes, we start to see how brand identity is crafted, through some of the most well-known examples.