Designing Brand Strategy

About

Today, the competitive business landscape demands strong, distinct brands to capture consumer attention and loyalty. Mastering brand strategy is crucial for making your brand stand out and resonate with the crowd.

Through hands-on project work, lectures, and practical real-world examples, students will be introduced to various topics around research, design, and branding, including desktop research, semi-structured interviews, argumentation techniques, conceptualization, graphic design, and brand analysis.

In this course, both branding and design are defined broadly. Firstly, branding refers to the different tools that organisations use to differentiate themselves from competitors. These include company logos and names, as well as product designs, reputation, and communication.

Secondly, design refers to the ways in which novel products, services, and strategies are created when there are no clear optimal answers. These ways of working include empathizing with stakeholders, building and testing preliminary ideas, and iterating towards a promising solution

Course leader

Antti Surma-aho and Henrik Ilvesmäki

Target group

This course does not require previous experience in the topic. This course best fits beginner-stage designers, including for example both bachelor’s students in non-design majors, and early-stage bachelor’s students in design disciplines.

Participants must have completed a high school or vocational degree or equivalent by the time the course starts. However, they do not have to be a degree student at a university to participate in our courses.

Additionally, all summer school course students must be 18 years or older, as it is the legal age in Finland

Course aim

After completing the course, students will be able to:

Build knowledge in unfamiliar design settings by doing in-breadth and in-depth research, namely desktop research with source criticism and interview research with semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis.

Do design in an iterative manner, where the student produces ideas and learns from their talk-back, newly emerging information, and others’ feedback.

Reason for design decisions using evidence-based and persuasive argumentation.
Reflect and evolve their own way of doing design by looking back on the design activities undertaken and by assessing goal-solution fit.

Additionally, through project work on strategic brand design, students will learn to:

Analyze organizations’ brands from various angles, such as vision and mission statements, products and services, as well as their competitors’ activities.

Describe the characteristics of prominent Finnish brands, such as Fazer, Iittala, and Nokia

Fee info