416 885 3911 graham@beloved-brands.com Located in Canada
Beloved Brands

At Beloved Brands, our brand training will make your marketing team smarter, so they will drive more growth on your brands

Investing in your people pays off. Our brand training program will make your marketing team smarter, so they make the right decisions and produce exceptional work that leads to higher growth for the brands they work on. 

At Beloved Brands, we train marketers on the best ways to think, define, plan, execute and analyze.

With our brand training program, we teach how to think strategically, how to define your brand positioning, how to write a strategic brand plan, how to make smart, creative decisions on advertising, and how to analyze your brand. 

marketing training

We train marketers on the best ways to think, define, plan, execute and analyze

brand management model

1. Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking is an essential foundation for brand leaders that forces them to ask the big challenging questions to focus on the decisions that steer their brand positioning and brand plan.

Our Strategic ThinkBox tool forces marketers to take a 360-degree holistic view that captures the unique circumstances before taking action. We show how to assess your brand’s core strength, the bond the brand has with consumers, the competitive dynamic in the market, and the brand’s business situation.

Brand leaders will learn to slow down to think strategically, to come up with the most challenging, interruptive questions before reaching for solutions. We introduce our five elements of smart strategic thinking, starting with a vision of what you want for your brand and investing resources in a strategic program. We push you to focus on an identified opportunity, leverage a breakthrough market impact, and find a performance result that pays back with added power and wealth.

Brand leaders will learn how to turn smart strategic thinking into the most challenging key issue questions that set up the ideal strategic objective statements to use in their brand plans. The best brand leaders are able to articulate the strategy throughout the organization to ensure all stakeholders and partners deliver against the same strategy.

The strategic thinking skills we build through our brand training

  • The best marketers take a 360-degree holistic view that uncovers your brand’s core strength, consumers, competitors, and situation
  • Be able to slow down to think strategically, to come up with the most challenging, interruptive questions before reaching for solutions
  • Make smart strategic decisions based on understanding the vision, focus, opportunity, market impact and performance result 
  • Able to articulate the strategy throughout the organization to ensure everyone delivers against the strategy

Our strategic thinking toolkit we use in our brand training

2. Brand Positioning

A winning brand positioning statement matches what consumers want with what your brand does best, always in relation to your competitors. Brand leaders must gain comfort in the functional and emotional benefits their brand delivers to consumers.

The four elements of a brand positioning statement include who you serve, where you play, where you will win, and why consumers should believe you. These are the consumer target, marketplace definition, the consumer benefit, and support points. 

Our brand positioning process starts by defining the ideal consumer target, framed with need states, consumer insights and consumer enemies.

We push brand leaders to take a consumer-centric approach to turn brand features into functional and emotional consumer benefits. Learn to work with our consumer benefit cheat sheets that use 60 functional benefits and 40 emotional benefits. Our brand positioning decision tools help summarize your brand positioning statement in a unique space that is ownable and motivating to consumers. Learn to add support points and claims to solidify the final brand positioning statement. 

Brand leaders learn to develop a brand idea that can steer how the brand shows up to every consumer touchpoint, and organize all stakeholders who deliver on behalf of the brand. Everything marketers learn with brand positioning can be transformed into learning how to write a brand concept, brand story, or an internal brand credo that can steer the culture.  

Brand positioning skills we build through our brand training

  • The best marketers define the ideal consumer target, framed with need states, consumer insights and consumer enemies

  • Find the winning brand positioning space that is own-able and motivates consumers, summarized with a positioning statement

  • Develop a brand idea that can steer how the brand shows up to every consumer touchpoint, and organize those who deliver

  • Take a consumer-centric approach to turn brand features into functional and emotional consumer benefits

Our brand positioning toolkit we use in our brand training

Brand Training Skills

3. Brand Plans

The brand plan is a decision-making tool to help get everyone on the same page. We teach how to write a brand vision, purpose, key issues, strategies, tactics, and execution plans. Then, we revisit our Strategic ThinkBox questions with a focus on how to translate smart, strategic thinking into key issues and strategic statements that form the foundation of the brand plan.

We teach how to make decisions on each element of a strategic brand plan: 

  • Vision
  • Purpose
  • Analysis
  • Goals 
  • Key Issues 
  • Strategies
  • Execution

Brand leaders learn how to build the ideal strategic slide that forms the basis of the brand plan presentation. It is essential to be strong in writing and presenting the brand plan to senior management and across the organization to sales, agencies, and partners. We provide templates for a brand plan presentation, as well as our one-page brand plan and brand strategy roadmap.

Learn to develop smart execution plans—brand communication, sales/in-store, and innovation—to ensure everyone is delivering against the same brand strategies 

Brand Plan skills we build through our brand training

  • The best marketers translate their smart, strategic thinking into key issues and strategic statements that form the foundation of the brand plan
  • Make decisions on all elements of a smart brand plan including the vision, purpose, values, goals, issues, strategies, and tactics
  • Strong in writing, and presenting the brand plan to senior management and across the organization—sales, agencies, partners
  • Able to develop smart execution plans—communication, sales/in-store, and innovation—that deliver against the brand strategies

Our brand plan toolkit we use in our brand training

Brand Training Skills

4. Marketing Execution

We teach how to make smart and creative decisions that find outstanding marketing execution with your creative advertising and media choices. Marketers need to build a creative brief, give feedback that inspires, and make decisions on marketing execution.  

Our marketing execution decision-making process works for any type of marketing execution project, whether it is brand communication, innovation, purchase moment, or consumer experience. Brand leaders will learn how to write strategic, focused, and thorough creative briefs to steer and inspire great work from any type of expert. 

We challenge how to be the best partner as you engage experts at agencies and throughout the organization. Our greatness comes from the greatness of others. Learn how to make smart and creative decisions on execution that delivers the strategy, helps tighten the bond with consumers, and drives revenue growth for the brand. 

We introduce our creative advertising checklist to find the most significant gaps and creates directional feedback to move the creative team. We use case study examples for you to try to craft your own feedback for the creative team. The tools and experience will help you make smarter decisions on execution.

Marketing Execution skills we build through our brand training

  • The best marketers are able to exhibit leadership on any marketing execution project including brand communication, innovation, purchase moment, or experience
  • Able to write strategic, focused, and thorough creative briefs to steer and inspire great work from experts
  • Partner with experts at agencies and throughout the organization to inspire greatness from the teams of experts
  • Make smart and creative decisions on execution that delivers the strategy and tightens the bond with consumers

Our marketing execution toolkit we use in our brand training

Brand Training

5. Marketing Analytics

Learn to dig in a deep-dive business review to assess your brand’s performance and set up smarter strategic thinking. We show how to look at the marketplace, consumers, channels, competitors, and the brand. We use our 60 best analytical questions to help trigger your thinking. 

Learn how to dig in on the market, taking a macro view, looking at economic indicators, consumer behavior, technology, and political issues. Regarding the consumer, we define the target, buying habits, trends, consumer enemies, and critical insights. 

Then, you will learn how to dig in on the sales channels to assess major customers, available selling tools, and programs. 

We teach how to assess competitors by looking at their performance, innovation, pricing, distribution, perceptions. Finally, we show techniques to evaluate your brand, using brand funnels, reputation scores, tracking results, pricing, and distribution. 

Our marketing finance 101 teaches how to evaluate the P&L, and the impact of price, cost, market size, and market share. We teach the key formulas you need to run your brand.

We show how to build the ideal analytical slide and provide a template for an ideal analytical presentation to set up your strategic thinking that goes into your brand plan.  

Marketing Analytics skills we build through our brand training

  • The best marketers understand all sources of brand data and knowledge—market share, brand funnel, consumption, qualitative, VOC, financials

  • Dig deep into data, draw out comparisons and insights, to build an analytical story that sets up a business problem

  • Write analytical performance reports that outline the strategic implications from in-market and sales performance

  • Able to lead a best-in-class 360-degree deep-dive business review for the brand that brings out the key issues to be solved

Our marketing analytics toolkit we use in our brand training

Brand Training program

Our brand management course menu

Brand Training

We have created bootcamp options by combining our brand management courses

Brand Strategy

3-day bootcamp 

      1. Why being a beloved brand matters
      2. How to think more strategically  
      3. Consumer & competitive strategy
      4. Deciding on your consumer target
      5. Defining your brand positioning
      6. Build everything around brand idea
      7. Build a marketing plan 

Brand Execution

3-day bootcamp

      1. Defining your brand positioning
      2. How to write a smart creative brief
      3. How to run the advertising process
      4. Making advertising decisions
      5. How to make media decisions
      6. Deep-dive analysis of your brand 
      7. Why being a beloved brand matters

Branding for Agencies

3-day bootcamp 

      1. Why being a beloved brand matters
      2. How to think more strategically  
      3. Consumer journey with insights
      4. Defining your brand positioning
      5. Build everything around brand idea
      6. How to write a smart creative brief
      7. How to run the advertising process

Video Training

Five 2-hour sessions

      1. How to think more strategically  
      2. Defining your brand positioning
      3. Build a marketing plan 
      4. Leading the marketing execution
      5. Deep-dive analysis of your brand 

What our clients have to say about our marketing training

As a former marketer, I followed Graham for years and was just waiting for the right opportunity to introduce him and the Beloved Brands concepts to a broader audience at Bush Brothers. That happened for us in 2020 when he conducted a series of training sessions for the Marketing Team. Though my colleagues can be a tough crowd to impress, Graham has received stellar marks from them.
The entire department, from top to bottom, has been engaged with Graham's Beloved Brands books and materials. Furthermore, the training concepts have positively impacted our business planning and internal communication processes. I highly recommend Graham
Brand Training
Robert Loggins
HR Manager, Bush Brothers Company
The team at Hearth and Home Technologies had the opportunity to work with Graham on Beloved Brands management and strategy planning. Graham went above and beyond to help us think about brand management differently. During the course of four days we learned transformative skills that will help bring our portfolio of brands to the next level.
Graham makes learning fun while leading the conversation with relevant thought leadership. He’s a valuable resource and a true partner in business. I would highly recommend Graham to any business looking to position and elevate brand strategy.
Brand Management Training
Jackie Schneider
VP Marketing, Hearth & Home Technologies
In all the training I’ve attended during my time at Hershey, I have never seen my colleagues stay so engaged throughout the day. I received feedback that they found the material to be spot on, delivering the right type of training and equipping us with the right tools. Also, they found Graham to be an engaging and approachable presenter. I really appreciated how Graham brought his real life work experiences into the dialogue as it helped establish instant credibility.
Brand Training
Erin Grosberg
Marketing Excellence, Hershey’s
Beloved Brands created and delivered a custom training program to meet the developmental requirements of a diverse team of Marketers. Graham puts the training in the context of their own businesses, resulting in the real-time application of the training modules. His philosophies push strategic thinking and get people to see the “what if” questions before jumping to solutions. Graham challenges you to think differently making each Marketer better.
Marketing Training
Doug Rozon
Director of Marketing, Henkel
brand training and marketing training

At Beloved Brands, we have worked with some of the best brands across many industries and around the world, including the NFL Players Association, Shell, National Geographic, Slack, the Mayo Clinic, Pfizer, Alexion, Loblaws, Jack Links, Hershey’s, Capital One, Advil, Bush’s beans, 3M, Henkel, Shopper’s Drug Mart, the NBA, Reebok, Miller beer, Wise chips, and Honda. We have done work in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Mauritius, the Maldives, China, and Thailand. 

Examples of our training engagements

  • Led 3-day boot camp brand management training for a leading food company, coaching the brand team on strategic thinking, brand analytics and brand planning.
  • Delivered a 5-day boot camp brand management training for a leading beverage company, coaching the brand team on strategic thinking, brand positioning, brand plans, judging advertising and marketing analytics.
  • Led 2-day training program on finding consumer insights, and writing creative briefs for a major confectionary company.
  • Led 2-day training session on creative briefs and judging advertising for a major grocery retailer. 
  • Created a five session lunch-and-learn program for an ad agency.

Beloved Brands is the playbook to keep at your fingertips

Beloved Brands book

Our readers tell us they reach for Beloved Brands a few times each week as a reference toolkit to help them with the day-to-day management of their brand.

  • To start, we will challenge you with questions that get you to think differently about your brand strategy.
  • Then, we take you through our process for defining your brand positioning. We will open your mind to new possibilities for how you see you can differentiate your brand. And, we use examples of brand positioning statements to bring the learning to life.
  • Next, we will show you how to write a brand plan that everyone can follow. Make sure all stakeholders know precisely how they can contribute to your brand’s success.
  • Moreover, we will show you how to run the creative execution process, show you how to write an inspiring brief, and make decisions to find both smart and breakthrough work.
  • Finally, you will learn new methods to analyze the performance of your brand with a deep-dive business review.

Above all, over 90% of our Amazon reviews receive five-star ratings, and Beloved Brands has spent numerous weeks as a #1 bestseller in brand management.

To order on Amazon
Brand consulting

Graham Robertson founded Beloved Brands in 2010.

For over a decade, Graham has been a brand advisor to the NFL Players Association, Jack Links, Shell, Reebok, Honda, The Mayo Clinic, Miller beer, and Pfizer.

Graham brings his experience into every client engagement. Throughout his marketing career, Graham led some of the world’s most beloved brands at Coke, General Mills, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, rising up to VP Marketing.

He has won numerous awards including Marketing Magazine’s “Marketer of the Year”, BusinessWeek’s best new product award, and four Effie advertising awards.

Contact Information

Email: graham@beloved-brands.com

Phone: 416 – 885 – 3911

Brand Management Toolkit
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Our Beloved Brands playbook will help you build a brand your consumers will love. Learn how to think, define, plan, execute, and analyze.

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