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Marketing Communications
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Brand Evolution Strategy

IMC 549

This course is offered in:

M.S. Integrated Marketing Communications

Top Three Course Takeaways

  1. How corporations are failing to reach their customers and finding themselves on the DeathWatch list.
  2. How Digital Disruption represents the most direct way to utilize technology to create transformational programs.
  3. Complete a Survival Planning Canvas for a company or brand to ensure their future viability.

Course Topics

  • An Introduction to the Concept of Survival Planning and the Survival Canvas
  • Sizing up the Triple Threat of Brand Extinction, Talent Erosion and Business Implosion/The Demise of the Corporation
  • Shift Happens: New Competitive Landscapes, New Business Models
  • Put yourself out of business/Heresy
  • Brand 2.0, North Star and P.B.E.C.
  • Discover New Worlds: Digital Disruption, Talent Resurrection, Customer Obsession, Corporate Citizenship
  • Change the Business You’re In
  • Feedback on Canvas and Plans, Addressing Implementation, Continuity and Sell Through

WORKLOAD:   (8-10 hours per week)

This course explores strategies and tactics that are used to help brands innovate to compete within their marketplace. Students examine disruption and disruptive technologies, changing consumer demands, internal and external pressures from startups, talent erosion and changing market dynamics.

Course Learning Outcomes:

  • Explore a framework that incorporates innovative startup strategies, technologies, business models and/or approaches to help brands (small or large) thrive.
  • Embrace “heresy” thinking to challenge norms, conventions and incumbent thinking.
  • Build a brand modernization framework that considers how brands will need to be built in a time where advertising is no longer dominant.
  • Leverage the four pillars of: Digital Disruption, Talent Resurrection, Customer Obsession and Corporate Citizenship to prepare a (return to) growth plan.
  • Complete the Survival Planning Canvas for a company or brand on “DeathWatch” and prepare Survival and Growth Plans for the brand.

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