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Business & Entrepreneurship

Designing Brand Strategy

When:

04 August - 15 August 2025

School:

Aalto University Summer School

Institution:

Aalto University

City:

Espoo

Country:

Finland

Language:

English

Credits:

2 EC

Fee:

1170 EUR

Early Bird deadline 28 February 2025
Designing Brand Strategy
Top course
Designing Brand Strategy

About

Join an intensive course focused on branding and design thinking. This project-based course allows students to work in small teams to redesign the brand of an established Finnish company.

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.

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.

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.

Course leader

Antti Surma-aho holds a doctorate in product development from Aalto University and currently works as a design researcher at Deloitte, making him knowledgeable in human-centric research in both academia and industry. Henrik IlvesmaĢˆki holds a Master of Science in Architecture degree from Aalto University and Master in Architecture 2 and Master in Design Studies degrees from Harvard University. He is the founder of Studio IlvesmaĢˆki, an architectural design and brand consulting agency.

Target group

This course does not require previous experience in the topic. This course best fits beginner-stage designers, including for example both bachelorā€™s students in non-design majors, and early-stage bachelorā€™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 learn 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 othersā€™ feedback.
- Understand reasons for design decisions using the Toulmin model for 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 organizationsā€™ brands from various angles, such as vision and mission statements, products and services, as well as their competitorsā€™ activities.
- Describe the characteristics of prominent Finnish brands.

Fee info

Fee

1170 EUR

Interested?

When:

04 August - 15 August 2025

School:

Aalto University Summer School

Institution:

Aalto University

Language:

English

Credits:

2 EC

Early Bird deadline 28 February 2025 Register for this course

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