Access to world-class brand training
You will learn how the best brand leaders think, define, plan, execute, and analyze. We take a realistic approach so you can apply it directly onto your brand. You can learn at your own pace to address any specific needs you have.
We have five main courses available:
- Strategic Thinking
- Brand Positioning
- Writing Brand Plans
- Advertising Decisions
- Marketing Analytics
Each Mini MBA course is $250 USD. Or you can sign up for all five for $1,000 USD.
1: Strategic Thinking Course
Strategic thinking is an essential foundation for brand management training, forcing marketers to ask big questions that challenge and focus brand decisions. With our Mini MBA, I will show you four ways to enhance your strategic thinking, using the brand’s core strength finder, consumer strategy, competitive strategy, and situational strategy. You will learn how to set a vision for your brand, focus your limited resources on breakthrough points, take advantage of opportunities you see in the market, find early wins to leverage to give your brand a positional power to drive growth and profits for your brand.
Strategic Thinking learning outcomes
- How to use the five elements of smart strategic thinking
- Leverage our strategic ThinkBox model using the brand’s core strength finder, consumer strategy, competitive strategy, and situational strategy.
- Build everything around your brand’s core strength
- Think strategically to tighten your brand’s bond with consumers
- Use strategy to win the competitive battles you face
- Think strategically, within the brand’s current situation
- Write strategic objective statements for each of the four strategies
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2: Brand Positioning Course
The best brand leaders target a specific motivated consumer audience and then define their brand around a brand idea that is interesting, simple, unique, motivating and ownable. With our Mini MBA, I will show you how to write a winning brand positioning statement with four essential elements: target market, competitive set, main benefit and reason to believe (RTB). You will learn how to build a brand idea that leads every touchpoint of your brand, including the brand promise, brand story, innovation, purchase moment and experience. I will give you the tools for how to write a winning brand concept and brand story.
Brand Positioning learning outcomes
Write brand positioning statements
Define your target market, with insights, enemies, and need states
Define consumer benefits, both functional and emotional
Come up with brand support points and claims
Understand the relationship between brand soul, brand idea and brand reputation
Come up with your brand idea
Write brand concept statements
Turn your brand concept into a brand story
Use the brand positioning and brand idea to build a brand credo
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3. Writing Brand Plans Course
The best brand leaders write brand plans everyone in the organization can follow with ease, including senior management, sales, R&D, agencies and operational teams. With our Mini MBA, I will teach you how to write each element of the brand plan, including the brand vision, purpose, values, goals, key Issues, strategies, and tactics. Real-life examples will give you a framework to use on your brand. You will learn to build execution plans including a brand communications plan, innovation plan, and in-store plan.
Writing Brand Plans Mini MBA learning outcomes:
- Use five strategic questions as an outline for your entire plan
- Write an inspirational vision statement to frame your marketing plan
- Come up with a brand purpose and brand values
- Summarize your brand’s situation analysis
- Map out the key issues your brand faces
- Write smart brand strategy objective statements
- Focus tactics to ensure a high return on effort
- Write specific execution plans for marketing communications, innovation, and in-store
- Do up a profit statement, sales forecast, goals, and marketing budget for your plan
- Use our ideal one-page brand formats for the annual marketing plan and long-range strategic roadmap
Brand Plans learning outcomes:
- Use five strategic questions as an outline for your entire plan
- Write an inspirational vision statement to frame your marketing plan
- Come up with a brand purpose and brand values
- Summarize your brand’s situation analysis
- Map out the key issues your brand faces
- Write smart brand strategy objective statements
- Focus tactics to ensure a high return on effort
- Write specific execution plans for marketing communications, innovation, and in-store
- Do up a profit statement, sales forecast, goals, and marketing budget for your plan
- Use our ideal one-page brand formats for the annual marketing plan and long-range strategic roadmap
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4. Advertising Decisions Course
The best brand leaders need to inspire experts to produce smart and creative advertising execution. I will provide tools and techniques for judging and making decisions on creative advertising from your agency. For judging advertising, we use our ABC’s tool, believing the best advertising must drive Attention (A), Brand link (B), Communication (C) and Stickiness (S). With our Mini MBA, I will provide a checklist for you to use when judging executions, then show you how to provide direction to your agency to inspire and challenge great execution.
Advertising Decisions learning outcomes:
- Understand the crucial role of the brand leader in getting great creative execution
- Successfully manage the 10 stages of the advertising process
- Write a brand communications plan
- Turn the brand communications plan into a creative brief
- Use smart and bad examples of the creative brief
- Use the ABC’s (Attention, Brand Link, Communication, Stickiness) advertising decision-making tool
- Give inspiring feedback on advertising that pushes for great work
- Use our six questions to help frame your media planning
- Line up media choices to where consumers are most willing to engage with your brand
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5. Marketing Analytics Course
The best brand leaders can tell strategic stories through analytics. With our Mini MBA, I will show you how to create a deep-dive business review, looking at the marketplace, consumers, competitors, channels, and brand. From there, I will teach how to turn your analysis into a presentation for management, showing the ideal presentation slide format. Also with our Mini MBA, I will also provide a Finance 101 for Marketers, giving you every financial formula you need to run your brand
Marketing Analytics learning outcomes:
- Analyze the marketplace your brand plays in, your consumers, retail channels you sell through, the competitors and the health of your brand
- Use 60 of our best analytical questions to ask
- Bring the analysis together into the drivers, inhibitors, threats, and opportunities
- Use financial formulas for compound CAGR, price increases, COGs. ROI
- Prepare a deep-dive business review presentation
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Our Mini MBA in Brand Management program combines all five of our courses
Access to our world-class brand management training includes strategic thinking, brand positioning, writing brand plans, creative briefs, advertising decisions, marketing analytics, marketing finance. Our program includes 35 engaging video sessions and key chapters from our Beloved Brands book. Our brand management program has been approved for 24 professional development hours by the CPD standards office.
