Summary of content

The brand is the most important asset that the company has. Successful brands represent the values, intention and image of the organisation to the wider environment. In the current climate it is important that brands contribute to the wider society and represent that contribution through both their external and internal brand strategy. This module provides students with the practical and applied skills to build a creative brand strategy for a client organisation. The module has a particular focus on current topical themes in branding such as brand purpose, brand activism, ethics and sustainability and focuses on the building of brands that represent PRME principles and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The module examines the concepts of brand purpose and the importance of ethical intention to the brand, brand building, corporate and private brand strategies, representations of the visual brand, and consumer brand equity. The module be split into two sections. Firstly, front loaded lectures will provide students with an in-depth perspective on the theories and concepts necessary to understand the essential elements of branding in the global and local arena. Secondly, students will work on developing a brand purpose strategy for an organisation to develop a digital presentation which represents the brand strategy. This will be presented to the organisation. Students will complete and individual assessment based on this presentation.

Students will be required to demonstrate the value creation of a brand strategy based around brand purpose to the client organisation. The development of group working and applied digital skills will enhance students learning so that they develop employability skills that support them in the digital marketing environment.
This module makes the students more attractive to employers because provides students with the practical and applied skills to build a creative brand strategy for a client organisation. Strategic branding requires working in tangent with the business aims, vision and operations, such as pricing, distribution and research and development. This will ensure for the companies that the students know about consistency and cohesion in all aspects of the brand communications.

The students learn some financial skills in this module since they need to be able to understand about brand equity in order to create added brand value and generate revenue. They learn about financial ratios, profit margin analysis, financial metrics, market share, price premium and transaction value. They also needs to understand about accountability as to know when a brand needs to be taken out of the market (cycle of product).

This module meets the United Nations’ PRME SDG 12 Responsible Consumption because the students learn how to create brands that are sustainable and they learn what are the advantages of being friendly for the environment.

Module structure

Assessment methods