The New Fundamentals of Brand is a modern brand communications course for those building in fragmented media and cultural environments.
Traditional marketing education tends towards MBA style pedagogy. Massive corporates with big budgets, clearly delineated roles and responsibilities, isolated, stable operating environments, the luxury of moving glacially through segmentation, targeting, positioning, comms.
These fundamentals are all solid, but simply not enough to deal with the challenges the majority of those working in brand actually face each day.
Marketers have been trained for a linear, campaign-driven approach to brand building. Centrally created hero assets to distribute, ruthless adherence to brand guidelines, a glacial ‘run-it-up-the-chain’ approach to content approvals, and media planning that draws a clean separation between paid, owned and earned.
This control-oriented model cannot hold in an environment that is characterised by overwhelming complexity.
Media fragmentation is stretching the surface area of brands out to infinity across channels, platforms, geographies, and niches. Local brands are managing the creative output of global enterprises from 20 years ago. And increasingly, the message is delivered mediated through another’s brand: a creator, a reddit comment, a brand collaboration, a community activation, AI search.
The New Fundamentals of Brand is designed to teach how to orchestrate coherence out of this chaos.
Marketers do not need yet another set of frameworks and theories sold as ironclad laws.
Instead, over 7 weeks, marketers will learn a series of new fundamental skills:
- How to construct coherence infrastructure to maintain a stable brand when there are thousands of autonomous outputs
- How to scale brands bottom-up through niches rather than purely through top-down communications
- How to understand culture, fast and slow, and build through it
- How to articulate and defend complex brand decisions inside organisations
Live sessions. Case studies from brands and leaders succeeding today, not decades ago. And an applied assignment that teaches learners how to build or restructure their brand communications system.
Built and taught by Eugene Healey, a strategist and educator who has advised the world’s biggest brands and taught thousands of students while lecturing in brand management at the University of Melbourne.
It’s a mess out there. Let’s make some sense of it.
