Marketing Training Brand Management Training

Our marketing training teaches your marketers how to think, define, plan, execute, and analyze.

If you are running a marketing team, you need the best performance from everyone. With our Beloved Brands marketing training, you will see your team make smarter decisions and produce exceptional work that drives business growth. Our brand management training course teaches the marketing skills to help your people gain the confidence they need to reach their full potential.

Invest in our marketing training course, and watch as your marketers evolve into strategic thinkers and proficient practitioners who can navigate every stage of the marketing lifecycle with finesse. Elevate your marketing game with a training program that empowers your team to think, define, plan, execute, and analyze like never before.

At Beloved Brands, we believe that the fundamentals of marketing will empower ambitious marketers to achieve the extraordinary.

The five core marketing skills that we focus on are: 

1️⃣  Strategic Thinking.

2️⃣  Brand Positioning.

3️⃣  Marketing Plans.

4️⃣  Marketing Execution

5️⃣  Brand Analytics.

To illustrate, click to zoom in on our Brand Management Training flywheel. 

Get access to the best-in-class marketing training.

At Beloved Brands, our marketing training course focuses on essential marketing skills that your team needs to be successful in their roles. This is not a theory or academic program. Our program is built for the real world of marketing. We provide concepts, ideas, and tools to help your marketing leaders gain added confidence when returning to their jobs. 

We get participants to try whatever we teach in the session immediately. Our workbooks have key exercises they can use on the brand they work on. Importantly, we use lots of live feedback on their answers to ensure they fully understand each concept. 

Graham Robertson brings his real-world marketing experience, having led some of the world’s most beloved brands at Coke, General Mills, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, rising up to VP Marketing.

Our marketing training focuses on the fundamentals.

The five marketing skill areas that our Beloved Brands Marketing Training focuses on are.

Strategic Thinking

Our marketing training teaches how to ask tough strategic questions to slow everyone down and engage in debate of options to move forward. To start, your marketers need to be able to change brain speeds. They must engage in a slower strategic thinking style to uncover the issues holding back a brand. We provide various thinking tools so they approach strategy thoughtfully and analytically. We introduce our Strategic ThinkBox, which allows marketers to interrogate their brand. Significantly, our ThinkBox pushes them to take a holistic look at the brand’s core strength, competitive landscape, tightness of the consumer bond, and business situation. 

Brand Positioning

Our brand positioning process teaches how to decide on the target market, consumer benefits, and reasons to believe. To start, your marketers will learn to define the ideal consumer and frame the definition with their most significant needs, consumer insights, and their enemy. Then, we provide our benefit cheatsheets to help learn how to discover the functional benefits and emotional benefits that a brand can deliver. Importantly, marketers need to decide on trying to stake out a unique space that is motivating to consumers and ownable for the brand. 

Next, we teach how to use our brand idea tool and show how it helps to communicate the brand idea to everyone across the organization. It’s a great organizing tool for everyone who works on the brand–including sales, R&D, operations, or communication agencies. Finally, your marketers will learn how to take the brand positioning work and translate it into a brand concept, brand story, and a brand credo.

Brand Plans

We see the brand plan or marketing plan is a decision-making tool on how a brand will spend their limited resources. Moreover, the marketing plan communicates the expectations to everyone who works on the brand. Importantly, we teach marketers how to create the vision, purpose, goals, key issues, strategies, and marketing execution plansThey will learn how to write key issue questions and strategic statements that form the foundation of the marketing plan. In addition, our marketing training provides various marketing planning templates, including our one-page brand plan and ideal Marketing Plan presentation. 

Marketing Execution

Our marketing execution training starts with the concept of our Marketing PlayBox that matches up to the Strategic ThinkBox. To keep marketers on strategy throughout the execution stages, our Marketing PlayBox helps find in-the-box ideas that meet four dimensions: they are focused on our target, fit with the brand, deliver the message, and execute the strategy. 

To start, we show how the creative brief sets up the PlayBox, bridging the plan and execution. We go through the creative brief line-by-line and give marketers examples of the best and worst. Importantly, they will learn to use our Creative Checklist to help make smarter decisions on creative communications. We teach how to give feedback to your agency based on gaps they see with the checklist. Learn to make media decisions matching your consumer’s purchase journey. In addition, we provide a similar Innovation Checklist to compare innovation ideas. 

Brand Analytics

Our comprehensive brand analytics training teaches marketers how to lead a deep-dive business review. We outline the best analytical thinking so you can become a well-rounded marketer. Learn to look at the marketplace, consumer analytics, distribution channels, competitors, or other brands in their industry. And learn to assess the brand itself. Importantly, marketers will learn how marketing funnels can help assess the brand’s performance. We provide our best 64 analytical questions that marketers can ask of their brand. Finally, we show how to understand the financial performance indicators of the brand.

Contact information

For more information on our Beloved Brands Marketing Training programs, click on this link to email Graham Robertson: [email protected]

Marketing Training Brand Management Training

When you know your marketing team is missing out on the fundamentals.

When your marketers jump straight to tactics, they miss the underlying issues hurting the brand.

Without taking enough time to think strategically, marketers fail to build on their brand’s core strength, create a bond with consumers, win competitive battles, or improve the business situation of the brand.

When brands try to be everything to anyone, they end up being nothing to everyone.

Without a clearly defined brand positioning, the brand never establishes an ideal reputation with consumers. This allows competitors to define the brand. The execution team lacks direction, so the brand messaging appears random and confusing to consumers. 

When your marketers try to do too many things in their plan, none have enough resources to make an impact.

Marketing plans that fail to make firm decisions spread their limited resources across so many tactics that none of the ideas create a big enough impact to make a difference. With a lack of vision, the plan meanders and confuses those who work behind the scenes of the brand.

When marketing execution is not organized and aligned with the strategy, everyone operates in silos.

The brand communication, new product innovation, and sales never benefit from working together. Consumers get frustrated by the disjointed execution and never feel connected to the brand. 

When your marketers don’t go deep on analytics, they miss the brand’s underlying issues.

They miss out on understanding consumer trends, competitive dynamics, evolving technologies, shopper channels, and brand performance. The problems fester, and competitors steal away the untapped opportunities.

We have designed our marketing training program to build the fundamental skills that will help your team reach their full potential.

To illustrate, click to zoom in on our Marketing Training agenda. 

Start with our Marketing Skills assessment tool to see how you or your marketing team measures up.

Use > to move through the Brand Management Training presentation or x to see the full screen. 

Strategic thinking

When your marketers jump straight to tactics, they miss the underlying issues that are hurting the brand.

Without taking enough time to think strategically, marketers fail to build on their brand’s core strength, create a bond with consumers, win competitive battles, or improve the business situation of the brand.

Strategic thinking is essential for any brand leader to prepare them to ask the challenging questions that will shape their brand’s future. Most importantly, we teach real-world strategies, not ambiguous academic theory. As a result, we want all course participants to return what they learn to their jobs to ensure it will greatly impact their brand. 

Our marketing training uses our Strategic ThinkBox tool to force marketers to take a holistic view to capture the unique circumstances before taking action. We encourage your team to slow down and think strategically, which will help them come up with the most challenging, interruptive questions before searching for a solution.

We introduce the five elements of strategic thinking. First, every strategy should start with a clear vision. Then, you need to map out how the investment of resources is focused against an identified opportunity. From there, the strategy must create a market impact that leads to performance results that pay back with added power and profit.

We teach your team how to communicate their brand strategy across the organization, which will help ensure that their efforts align with the brand strategy. Most importantly, the depth of strategic thinking helps set up the brand positioning and marketing plan.

The strategic thinking skills we build through our marketing training.

  • First, the best marketers take a 360-degree holistic view that uncovers your brand’s core strength, consumer bond, competitive dynamic, and business situation.
  • Then, slow down to think strategically, coming up with the most challenging, interruptive questions before reaching for solutions.
  • Next, make smart strategic decisions based on understanding the vision, focus, opportunity, market impact, and performance result.
  • Finally, articulate the strategy throughout the organization to ensure everyone who works on the brand can understand and deliver against the strategy.

Our strategic thinking toolkit we use in our brand training.

To summarize, click to zoom in on our brand management training tools. 

Brand Positioning

Too many times, brands try to be everything to anyone they end up being nothing to everyone.

Without a clearly defined brand positioning, the brand never establishes an ideal reputation with consumers. This allows competitors to define the brand. Essentially, the team who executes lacks direction, so the brand messaging appears random and confusing. 

Our marketing training program takes participants through every stage in defining the brand positioning. We teach your marketing team the four elements of brand positioning: who you serve, where you play, where you win, and why consumers should believe you. As a result, these four elements comprise the consumer target, marketplace definition, consumer benefit, and support points. 

With our marketing training, we start by determining the ideal target market. Participants learn to add flavor to the target market definition with moments of accelerated needs, consumer insights, and the consumer’s enemy. Most importantly, the deeper understanding marketers can gain about the consumer, the easier they know how to address their needs. 

Next, we show how to turn product features into consumer benefits–a balance of functional and emotional benefits. Uniquely, we introduce our “Benefit cheat sheets”  to allow participants to play around with 60 different functional and 40 emotional consumer benefits.

Brand positioning will be stronger if summarized in a highly motivating space to consumers and highly ownable for the brand. In addition, claims and support points help finalize the final brand positioning statement.

Your marketing team will learn how to develop a brand idea that can organize all stakeholders who work with the brand. Also, we provide tools to turn your brand’s unique value proposition into a brand concept. We also show how to build a brand story or credo to help steer the culture and operations behind the brand.

The brand positioning skills we build through our marketing training.

  • First, the best marketers define an ideal target market (consumers, users, shoppers) framed with accelerated need states, insights and enemies.
  • Next, marketers must take a consumer-centric approach to turn product features into functional and emotional consumer benefits.
  • Then, know how to find the winning brand positioning space that is own-able for the brand and motivating to your target, summarized with a positioning statement.
  • Finally, develop a brand idea that can steer how the brand shows up to every touchpoint, and organize everyone who works on the brand so they deliver.

Our brand positioning toolkit we use in our brand training.

To summarize, click to zoom in on our brand management training tools. 

“This was an awesome Brand Management Training course. In addition, I love the great tools that we will definitely be using every day on our brand.”

Brand Plans

When your marketers try to do too many things in their brand plan, none have enough resources to make an impact.

Essentially, brand plans that fail to make firm decisions spread their limited resources across so many ideas, that none have a big impact. And, with a lack of vision, the plan meanders and confuses those who work behind the scenes of the brand.

A Brand Plan is a decision-making tool to get everyone on the same page, to steer everyone who works behind the scenes of the brandIt is an important skill to gain buy-in from senior management but also from sales, agencies, and partners.

With our marketing training, your team will learn how to create a vision, establish the purpose, identify key issues, and develop strategies to solve them. Essentially, with this understanding of your brand objectives, they can formulate strategies and execution tactics. 

We revisit our Strategic ThinkBox questions with an emphasis on translating your team’s strategic thinking into key issues and strategic statements that can form the foundation of the brand plan. 

Brand leaders learn how to construct the best strategic presentation slides that comprise the foundation of their brand presentation. Uniquely, we provide PowerPoint templates to help you with a brand plan presentation.

The brand plan skills we build through our marketing training.

  • First, the best marketers translate smart, strategic thinking into key issues and strategic statements that form the foundation of the brand plan.
  • Next, be able to make decisions on all elements of a smart marketing plan including the vision, purpose, values, goals, issues, strategies, and tactics.
  • Then, be strong in writing, and presenting the brand plan to senior management and across an organization—sales, agencies, and partners.
  • Finally, learn 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.

To summarize, click to zoom in on our brand management training tools. 

“I have truly enjoyed your insights and sharing of your experience throughout the process. Furthermore, excellent reference materials.”​

Marketing execution

When the marketing execution is not organized and aligned to the strategy, everyone who executes ends up operating in silos.

The brand communication, new product innovation, and sales never gain the benefit of working together. Most importantly, consumers get frustrated by the disjointed execution, and they never feel connected to the brand. 

Our marketing training shows marketers how to make smarter decisions that leads to better creative execution, such as marketing and advertising. We go through the creative process, creative brief, and creative decision-making.  

With our marketing training, your team will learn everything they need to know about the creative brief, how to give valuable feedback for better work, and how to make decisions on marketing execution. Our decision-making process works for any type of marketing execution at the different stages of a purchase journey.

We start by teaching how to write a creative brief that frames what marketers are looking for from their experts and trust them to bring your vision to life. And we challenge brand leaders to be the best partner with their agencies and engage experts across your organization. 

We created our ‘advertising checklist’ to help identify the gaps in the creative execution ideas that marketers see and frame the feedback they give to the creative team. We support our advertising learning with case studies to practice giving feedback to a creative team. The tools and experience will give your team the confidence to lead the advertising process on their own brand.

The marketing execution skills we build through our marketing training.

  • First, the best marketers can lead any marketing execution project, including brand communication, innovation, purchase moment, or experience.
  • Then, know how to write strategic, focused, and thorough creative briefs that will steer and inspire great work from experts, plus guide your decisions.
  • Next, learn to partner with experts at agencies and throughout the organization to inspire greatness from the teams of experts that marketers need.
  • Finally, be able to make decisions on marketing execution—to find the right creative and the right media—that deliver the strategy and tighten the bond with consumers.

Our marketing execution toolkit in our brand training.

To summarize, click to zoom in on our brand management training tools. 

“This has been a very informative marketing training session. In addition, I look forward to activating what I have learned throughout the sessions.”

Brand analytics

When marketers don’t go deep enough on brand analytics they miss the underlying issues facing the brand.

Essentially, they miss out on understanding consumer trends, competitive dynamics, and brand performance. So, the problems fester, and competitors steal away the untapped opportunities. As a result, the brand positioning, marketing plans, and execution are not good enough.  

Have you ever wondered how your brand stacks up in the marketplace? It’s important to lead a deep-dive business review and see where the brand could be doing better.

The deep dive should look at five areas, including the marketplace, consumers, channels, competitors, and the brand. We include our 64 best analytical questions on your brand. 

  1. To start, we teach how to dig in on their marketplace to gain a macro view by looking at economic indicators, consumer behavior, technology, and political issues. 
  2. Next, we show how to assess your consumers by looking at buying habits & preferences, consumer trends, and consumer insights they can use to build their brand positioning. 
  3. Then, marketers will learn how to assess potential channel customers. This includes major customers, the selling tools that are available to them, and all the sales programs. 
  4. Furthermore, Marketers need to know how to assess their competitors, including their performance, innovation, pricing, distribution, and perceptions. 
  5. Finally, participants learn new techniques to evaluate their own brand, including reputation scores, tracking results, profitability, and consumption.

 

We show how to create the best possible deep-dive business review slide presentation.  Everyone gets our PowerPoint template for a great presentation. With our training and tools, your team will be able to get to the issues that set up deeper strategic thinking and set up a great marketing plan. 

The brand analytics skills we build through our marketing training.

  • First, the best marketers understand all sources of brand data and knowledge—market share, brand funnel, consumption, qualitative, VOC, financials.
  • Then, be 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.
  • Next, dig deep into data, draw out comparisons and insights, to build an analytical story that sets up a business problem.
  • Finally, be able to write analytical performance reports that outline the strategic implications of the in-market consumption results and the sales performance. 

Our brand analytics toolkit we use in our brand training.

To summarize, click to zoom in on our brand management training tools. 

What type of marketing are you in?

We believe marketers learn best when they see our marketing concepts applied to brands that look like theirs. We have developed specific consumer, B2B, and healthcare examples to showcase our marketing tools. Click on the icon below to choose your interest area.

Consumer

B2B

Healthcare

Click on the X to expand to full screen, and use the arrows to advance the slides.

Get the right marketing training for your team.

Our brand management training programs are offered in three streams.

  • Consumer Marketing.
  • Healthcare Marketing.
  • B2B Marketing.

 

To help the participants, we use relevant brand examples for each of our marketing training programs. We believe they learn better when they see marketing concepts applied to a brand like theirs. As a result, it makes it easier for them to understand and apply their newly developed skills to their own business. 

To illustrate, click on the diagram above to zoom in to see our Brand Management Training examples. 

Mini MBA brand management Marketing training or Brand management training

The NFL Players Association team took our brand management training program.

Our playbook helps participants learn the concepts we teach in our course

Beloved Brands playbook

Marketers tell us they reach for Beloved Brands as a reference tool to help them with the day-to-day management of their brand. Most importantly, we are proud that 90% of Amazon reviewers have given Beloved Brands a 5-star rating. As a result, Beloved Brands has spent numerous weeks as a #1 bestseller in brand management. 

What our clients have to say about our marketing training

Bush Brothers Company

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 client comment
Robert Loggins
HR Manager, Bush Brothers Company

Hearth & Home

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.
Moreover, Graham makes learning fun while leading the conversation with relevant thought leadership.
He’s a valuable resource and a true business partner. I highly recommend Graham to any business looking to position and elevate brand strategy.
Brand Management Training
Jackie Schneider
VP Marketing, Hearth & Home Technologies

Hershey's

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.
Above all, 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 client comment
Erin Grosberg
Marketing Excellence, Hershey’s

Henkel

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.
Most importantly, Graham challenges you to think differently making each Marketer better.
Marketing Training
Doug Rozon
Director of Marketing, Henkel

Our client is strong

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, Indeed, 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 worked in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Mauritius, the Maldives, China, and Thailand. 

Examples of our marketing training engagements

  • Led 3-day Bootcamp brand management training for a leading food company, coaching the brand team on strategic thinking, brand analytics, and brand planning.
  • Delivered a 5-day Bootcamp 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 a 2-day training program on finding consumer insights and writing creative briefs for a major confectionary company.
  • Created a 2-day Brand Management Training session on creative briefs and judging advertising for a major grocery retailer. 
  • Created a lunch-and-learn Brand Management Training for an ad agency.
Mini MBA brand management Marketing training or Brand management training

The Goody marketing team in Saudi Arabia took our brand management training program.

Graham Robertson

One of the voices of today's brand leaders

As the founder of Beloved Brands, Graham has been a brand advisor to the NFL Players Association, Shell, Pfizer, Honda, The Mayo Clinic and many other organizations. He is known to assist leaders in defining their brands and figuring out the best possible future for their brands. Graham has trained some of the world’s best marketing teams. He will make your people smarter, and they’ll deliver their best possible performance on your brand.

Graham builds on his real-world marketing experience. Throughout his marketing career, he led some of the world’s most beloved brands at Coke, General Mills, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, rising up to VP of Marketing. He has been recognized for his contributions to marketing by winning Marketing Magazine’s Marketer of the Year award and four Effie advertising awards.

In 2020, Graham was ranked one of the top ten CMOs by The Silicon Review, and in 2022, he was recognized as one of the most inspirational leaders in business by Tycoon Magazine.

Graham shares his passion to challenge and inspire marketing minds worldwide, whether speaking at Advertising Week, or at the NBA Summer League, or to a room full of marketers in Bangkok, Thailand, or an agency in New York.

His bestselling book, Beloved Brands, is the playbook for how to build a brand that consumers will love. This playbook provides a step-by-step plan for any marketer who has to get things done and wants to set their brand up for success. Online reviews for Beloved Brands are overwhelmingly positive, with over 9 out of every ten reviewers giving it a 5-star rating.

Beloved Brands