Brand Management Essentials

WHU’s Brand Management Essentials Program is an intensive seminar providing professionals and executives with the skills and tools to build and sustain powerful brands. During the 3-day interactive development program, we will explore the key elements and facets of branding. We will equip you with the knowledge, skills, frameworks, and tools to manage your brand strategically, differentiate it from competition, and to make it desirable for your customers. Our objective is to provide you with actionable insights, comprehensive frameworks, and applicable tools for managing and sustaining brands within a short time frame.

You will better understand why brands matter and how they can create value for customers, partners, and your firm. You will discover how to use deep customer insights to craft a compelling and distinctive brand positioning. We will provide you with concepts and ideas, how to bring the organization and employees behind your brand, and to manage all touchpoints to create a unique brand experience outside the organization. Together we elaborate on ways to grow your brand and the entire brand portfolio. You will further explore ways on how to analyze the performance of your brand.

The program is dynamic and practical. It combines a mixture of interactive lectures and discussions, group work, guest lectures, real-life branding cases, and experiential learning activities. We will especially focus on how companies have experienced and coped with challenges in branding. Based on current empirical research, conceptual frameworks from academia and consultancy, we will develop a common framework to analyze and drive recommendations for brands.

By the end of the program, you will be able to better understand the strength and weaknesses of your brand, analyze your unique and specific branding challenges, and devise sound and practical solutions to leverage the brand’s opportunities. We inspire and empower you to assess different viewpoints on branding and think critically about these viewpoints to make relevant strategic decisions on how to develop your brand in the future. The program concludes with reflections on what you have learned and a plan to utilize in the future that will help you apply the insights you gained during the program.

Prior to the program, you will have the opportunity to share your program expectations and your professional challenges in an individual, conversation with Professor Brexendorf (ca. 15 minutes). During the program, you are also welcome to share your experiences and current challenges with your peers in order to learn from each other.

• Learn and reflect why brands matter and how they create value
• Learn how to craft a compelling and distinctive position for your brand
• Understand how to implement the brand internally and to create a unique brand experience externally
• Learn how to grow and leverage the brand’s potential
• Enhance your branding knowledge and practices to create and sustain a desirable and strong brand

Certificate

You will receive a WHU Executive Education Certificate after successfully completing the program.

This program is targeted at…

• executives responsible for strategically managing or driving brands in their company
• marketing and non-marketing managers
• executives, who have made a transition into a brand function
• executives, who plan a future career in brand marketing

The minimum number of participants for this program is 12.