The learning and relearning required for 21st-century marketers are at the center of the world’s leading Branding Education Courses, each designed to prepare marketers for career progression in an age of disruption. Led by renowned Professor Mark Ritson, the accredited Mini MBA in Marketing and Mini MBA in Brand Management courses separate the serious from the curious and offer you two ways to grow.

The Mini MBA in Marketing Course – Begins September 24th, 2024

A Transformative Journey To A Bigger Future

The Mini MBA in Marketing is an MBA-level, CPD-accredited course that gives you the tools and expertise to supercharge your career. On-demand modules based on Mark Ritson’s award-winning MBA teaching form the basis for applied, world-class learning.

Designed for marketers of all backgrounds, nationalities, and educational levels, over 90% of 20,000 alumni completed the course feeling more inspired, confident, and effective as a result of taking the Mini MBA in Marketing.

Join them with a full-year subscription to the Mini MBA Alumni Network included. Receive continued access to all of the course videos, readings, and resources. Plus, monthly Q&As with Mark, Alumni-led case studies on getting the most out of your learnings, and a global community of passionate marketers supporting and sharing your ongoing journey.

Complete The Mini MBA In Marketing In 10 Essential Modules

The Mini MBA in Marketing guides you through the core MBA marketing content in 10 in-depth, on-demand modules. Starting off with market orientation, you’ll learn the most effective and imaginative tactics and techniques for developing a successful marketing strategy.

1. Marketing Orientation, 2. Market Research, 3. Segmentation, 4. Targeting, 5. Positioning,
2. Objectives, 7. Product, 8. Price, 9. Integrated Marketing Communications, 10. Distribution

The Mini MBA in Marketing is designed to give you the tools necessary to advance toward your full potential as a marketer.

What Sets The Mini MBA In Marketing Apart?

• Inspiring Expertise: Mark Ritson, a leading figure in the world of marketing, education, and brand consulting will guide you.
• Real-World Application: Become a better steward of your brand and make a profound impact in your professional journey.
• Alumni Network: Join an exclusive Mini MBA Alumni Network, which provides continued access to all course materials, monthly Q&As with Mark, and a supportive global community of like-minded marketers.

Mark Ritson, A Leading Figure In The World Of Marketing

With a BSc and PhD in marketing, Mark has spent the past 25 years teaching his unique method to MBA students at some of the world’s top business schools, including award-winning courses at London Business School, MIT, and Melbourne Business School.

Not only has he taught in these prestigious programs but his teaching has been widely acclaimed with Mark winning the teaching prize at each of these institutions.

He has worked globally as a private marketing consultant for clients such as McKinsey, adidas, PepsiCo, Glaxo SmithKline, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, De Beers, Ericsson, Subaru and WD40. For eight years he has also served as advisor and in-house professor for LVMH – the world’s largest luxury group – working with senior executives from brands like Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon, Fendi, Tag Heuer, Dior, and Hennessy.

In a national survey in the UK, he was voted one of the country’s most admired marketers.

The Mini MBA In Brand Management Course – Begins September 17th, 2024

Brand Advantages Are Created Here

Whether you’re already a brand manager or a marketer interested in rounding out your skills, the Mini MBA in Brand Management provides applied, advanced (and very enjoyable) training in Brand Management.

The course gives you a complete brand planning process that you can use to enhance your own brand, as well as a simulator that tests your skills in a fully realized, competitive online setting.

You’ll also gain a full-year subscription to the 20,000-strong Mini MBA Alumni Network. Receive continued access to all of the course videos, readings, and resources. Plus, monthly Q&As with Mark, Alumni-led case studies on getting the most out of your learnings, and a global community of passionate marketers supporting and sharing your ongoing journey.

Complete The Mini MBA In Brand Management In 10 Essential Modules

Across 10 modules in 12 weeks, as well as interactive Q&A with Mark every two weeks, the course covers much of the same content as the second year of an MBA, following the complete brand journey from diagnosis through to execution and tracking.

1. The What & Why of Brands, 2. Brand Management, 3. Brand Diagnosis, 4. Targeting,
2. Positioning, 6. Brand Codes 7. Brand Objectives, 8. Brand Architecture, 9. Tactical Execution 10. Budgeting & Brand Tracking

This course is designed for marketers with an interest in Brand Management as well as Brand Managers who want to stay ahead.

Why Choose The Mini MBA In Brand Management?

• Comprehensive Journey: You’ll cover the complete brand journey, learning the most important concepts in brand management, from diagnosis to execution and tracking.
• Brand Simulator: Experience a fully realized brand simulation that will challenge and enhance your strategic thinking.
• Alumni Network Access: Gain a full-year subscription to the Mini MBA Alumni Network, offering ongoing support, case studies, and monthly Q&As.

At the completion of either branding education course, you will receive an official certification.

Don’t Let The Future Leave You Behind

For 50 marketers who see comfort zones as a dangerous place, The Blake Project and Branding Strategy Insider have designed a uniquely powerful learning experience. One that challenges today’s thinking about brands and brand management. One that helps prepare marketers for tomorrow and breaks them free from yesterday’s marketing conference format.

We call it The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World.

This year (our 5^th) we are focused on Brand Leadership in an Age of Disruption.

Our ‘Speaker Experts’ include:

Microsoft marketer Geoff Colon, Author of Disruptive Marketing. Geoff will bring his unique perspective to help marketers gain clarity on what’s ahead and recognize opportunity in the fray.

We will analyze the critical elements of a disruptive marketing campaign with Rob Siltanen, Creative Director of Apple’s iconic ‘Think Different’ Campaign and copywriter of ‘Here’s to the crazy ones’.

Carmen Simon, Author of Impossible To Ignore offers an inside look into how brands can encode brand messaging in the mind. The key is to understand that our world is based on what customers remember — therefore brands must ensure that what is remembered counts.

Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator who believes in sharing “non-obvious” ideas. He is the author of five best selling business books including Non-Obvious and Likeonomics. Rohit will show marketers how to identify trends in their marketplace and fuse that insight with their brand strategy.

In addition, we have several brand strategy experts joining us including Adam Kranitz, Paul Friederichsen, Robert Strand and Kevin Randall. With a virtual reality experience presented by Microsoft HoloLens.

The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World is unlike any other conference you’ve attended before:

• Everyone in the room is an expert and gains from the sum of the expertise in the room.
• Our competitive-learning format is fun, energized and impactful.
• The walls are down, there are no podiums or stages, there is no hierarchy – your uniform is jeans.
• The focus is on learning outcomes, not ticket sales.
• Small is powerful, with only 50 marketers participating in hands on learning.
• This is marketing’s ONLY issues-based, problem-solving event.
• As in your marketplace, some will win, some will lose, all will learn.

No Attendees. Only Participants.
The best pathway for learning is through participation, not observation. The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World will help prepare you for what is now and what is next. To do that, we’ll put you on a team of 10 and offer you opportunities to compete, lead and learn alongside other marketers in a unique environment. The challenges you’ll tackle are based on and influenced by the actual issues that you and other participants are facing.

It all takes place at The London Hotel in West Hollywood, California May 1 – 3, 2017.

Our schedule…

Monday, May 1st – Kickoff Mixer: 7- 9pm at The London Hotel Rooftop Pool

Tuesday, May 2nd – Day 1: 8am – 5pm, at The London Hotel / 6:30pm – ? Team building event and dinner

Wednesday, May 3rd – Day 2: 8am – 5pm, at The London Hotel

Who Should Participate?
We have reserved these two days (and a kickoff mixer on the evening of the 1st) for 50 senior B2C and B2B marketers who see professional growth as a mandate for success and who seek a learning experience superior to last century’s format of marketing conferences:

-Marketing oriented leaders
-Marketing professionals (brand managers, product managers, directors, vice presidents, CMO’s, brand strategists etc.)
-Advertising agency professionals (account executives, planners, creatives, agency heads)
-Marketers facing brand strategy issues
-Marketers seeking a competitive advantage
-Professionals in charge of brand building, brand management, human resources
-Professional brand consultants, digital consultants and researchers
-Marketers who prefer participation over observation
-Marketers who don’t believe that last century’s format of marketing conferences advances them as leaders.

Every year a wide range of brands from around the world join us. Past participants include AAA, Bayer, Bloomberg, Humana, Land O’ Lakes, Liberty Mutual, Pilot/Flying J, RJ Reynolds, TD Ameritrade, GlaxoSmithKlein, Wounded Warrior Project, Monsanto, Ogilvy, Kawasaki, GE and many more.

Join 20,000 Marketers Who Have Taken A Transformative Journey To A Bigger Future In Mark Ritson’s Mini MBAs In Marketing And Brand Management Courses.

1. Different approaches to market segmentation
2. What factors drive customers to insist upon certain brands
3. The primary drivers of human behavior
4. How to gain deep customer insight
5. The most useful brand, marketing and advertising research techniques
6. How to conduct qualitative research that uncovers customer attitudes, values, hopes, fears and desires
7. How to measure brand equity
8. The most important brand metrics
9. How to interpret and use retail sales performance data
10. How to recognize internal and external brand threats
11. When to position or re-position a brand
12. How to create and evaluate a brand positioning statement
13. The most successful brand positioning approaches
14. How to reframe product categories
15. How to create “category-of-one” brands
16. Strategies to differentiate commodities
17. How to craft compelling brand stories
18. How to evoke an emotional customer response to the brand
19. The key elements of a strong brand identity system
20. Brand naming strategies
21. How to write and or evaluate a compelling brand tagline
22. How to write and or evaluate a compelling brand “elevator speech”
23. How to create optimal brand architecture
24. The most powerful pricing strategies and tactics
25. The most powerful distribution strategies
26. How to establish the right marketing budget
27. How to defend your marketing budget
28. How to measure ROI for different types of marketing programs
29. What should be included in a comprehensive brand plan
30. How to select the best marketing agency partners
31. How to get the best work out of your marketing agencies
32. How to create and evaluate a strong creative brief
33. How to develop and evaluate an advertising campaign
34. The key elements of an integrated marketing plan
35. The strengths and weaknesses of each media type
36. How to build brands through word-of-mouth
37. How to build brands through proactive publicity
38. How to build brands online
39. How to merchandise and market brands at retail
40. How to anticipate and create strategies to address competitive response
41. How to align the organization in support of the brand
42. How to select and implement an effective customer relationship management (CRM) system
43. How to increase customer loyalty
44. How to transform loyal customers into brand champions
45. How to identify, screen and develop successful new products
46. What is required to launch a new brand
47. How to significantly increase the probability of success of a brand extension
48. Brand crisis response and management
49. How to manage brands across national borders
50. How to build global power brands

I hope this helps you to identify the gaps in your organization’s brand management and marketing competencies and training.

Join 20,000 Marketers Who Have Taken A Transformative Journey To A Bigger Future In Mark Ritson’s Mini MBAs In Marketing And Brand Management Courses.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

While some highly intuitive leaders have achieved great success from their intuition alone and while some advertising agency “creatives” have created brilliant campaigns without the benefit of research, most truly gifted marketers know how and when to use each side of their brain.

For instance, it is important to create “out-of-the-box” stimulus to present to customers in research, but it is also important to know which research technique to use and in what order questions should be asked to minimize biasing. It is even more important to know whether the research was constructed in a valid way that can be relied upon. If you are a marketing researcher, CRM expert, direct marketer or product manager, analytical skills and metrics are very important. If you are developing advertising campaigns, you had better have a very active right brain. The same is true if you are developing out-of-the-box publicity approaches.

One must know when to listen to research results and when to ignore them.  And one must be able to understand why qualitative research findings might differ from quantitative research findings and what to do about it. Sometimes analytics will indicate a particular market segment, product benefit, pricing strategy or merchandising strategy can take your brand to the next level. But it is equally as important to be able to get deep inside your customer’s head to understand his or her deepest values, attitudes and motivations.

So, what skills are important for a top marketer? A highly skilled marketer should possess each of these skill sets:

• Psychology – understanding human motivations in a deep way, knowing what makes people “tick”
• Selling – intuitively knowing what words, phrases and approaches connect with customers and cause them to want to buy what you are selling
• Communication – outstanding and persuasive written and oral communication skills
• Interpersonal skills – good listening skills, personal charisma, being likable, connecting with others easily
• Analytical skills – understanding budgets, financial statements, marketing research design, data analysis and statistics
• Broad cultural knowledge – knowing what your customers are exposed to and what is informing their fears and desires
• Broad exposure and experience across multiple disciplines – to stimulate creative connections between seemingly unrelated things

This is why I think of marketing as a “gestalt.” It is also why mediocre marketers outnumber marketers who are operating at a high level of functioning by a wide margin. Finally, it is why it is difficult for someone who is not a marketer to gauge the competence of any given marketer. In the end, it is this constant back-and-forth between right-brain and left-brain that makes marketing so fresh and interesting.

Join 20,000 Marketers Who Have Taken A Transformative Journey To A Bigger Future In Mark Ritson’s Mini MBAs In Marketing And Brand Management Courses.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

Explore thousands of thought pieces on brand management at www.BrandingStrategyInsider.com

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

• What a brand is
• The benefits strong brands deliver to organizations
• The brand management process
• What leads to customer brand insistence
• What contributes to brand loyalty
• What helps brands connect emotionally to their customers
• How to conduct a brand audit
• How to measure brand equity
• How to measure the asset value of a brand
• How to read and use point-of-sale (POS) data in managing brands
• Customer segmentation approaches
• Qualitative and quantitative brand research methodologies and approaches
• How to use projective, laddering and guided imagery techniques
• How to align brand values with customer values
• The different types of brand benefits
• How to turn your brand into a “customer badge” (self-expressive benefits)
• How to read brand positioning maps
• How to develop brand essence, promise, archetype and personality
• How to successfully (re)position a brand
• How to differentiate commodities
• How to create a “category of one” brand
• How to successfully extend a brand into new product or service categories
• How to create and manage a strong brand identity
• The various types of brand names and architecture
• Developing a brand identity system and standards
• How to develop a powerful brand tagline
• How to develop a brand “elevator speech”
• How to write a creative brief
• How to evaluate advertising campaigns
• How to develop a successful direct marketing campaign
• How to use publicity and word-of-mouth marketing to a brand’s advantage
• How to employ digital strategies to build brands
• How to build brand proof points into every point of customer contact (customer touch point design)
• How to develop a strong brand marketing plan
• B2B marketing tools and techniques
• How to use internal communication, education and training and organization design to align the organization in support of the brand
• How to develop a brand building organization and transform employees into enthusiastic brand champions (Brand Culture)
• Key considerations in brand pricing strategy
• Key considerations in brand distribution strategy
• Key considerations for digital strategy
• What is important to know about managing global brands
• The primary responsibilities of brand managers
• The primary responsibilities of brand identity managers
• Trends in brand management (Including disruptive marketing trends)

The Blake Project offers comprehensive one-to three-day workshops to teach all of these brand management skills, overall or in-depth on a particular brand management subject. We do this through conference companies in numerous countries in every region of the world. We are also brought in to deliver this as a part of university MBA marketing programs. Further, individual companies and organizations engage us to conduct these workshops for their employees.

We customize every workshop for specific learning objectives and industry. For instance, we have customized workshops for healthcare, consumer packaged goods, professional sports, digital media, financial services, medical device, technology, energy, fashion, municipality and adverting agencies to name a few. Our workshops are highly interactive and include individual and team exercises, numerous case studies, many tools, templates and checklists.

The Blake Project also offers a unique learning experience every year for 50 marketers, The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for A Changing World. (2017 participants pictured)

Need to increase your organizations marketing capacity? Contact us.

Join 20,000 Marketers Who Have Taken A Transformative Journey To A Bigger Future In Mark Ritson’s Mini MBAs In Marketing And Brand Management Courses.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers