You will start the professional marketing course by understanding the methodology that we follow. Through this module of the brand management course, you will have an understanding of expectations from a brand manager in today’s digital world, and how it varies across companies and industries. We hear from the experts on their journeys and their suggestions on how to navigate your careers as a brand manager.

We’ll discuss:

• Setting some ground rules
• A day in the life of a Brand Manager
• Role of digital in your marketing role
• Business Planning and Management
• Brand Communication
• Brand Strategy Development
• Brand Innovation
• Understanding the course content
• Understanding the project expectations

In this module we start how all businesses start – with a problem or an idea. But we do what most people forget to do. We break down the problem before jumping to solutions.

We’ll cover the following:

Your current users aren’t using your app enough? Let’s not be too sure that it is a product issue. Could it be that the expectations that were set in your ad copies were too high? Could it be that the target audience that your campaign went for was wrong? Could it be that you are not sending them notifications at the right time? Could it be that your onboarding process doesn’t educate the user about how awesome your app is? It could be any of these. or none of these. Before we start solving, let us figure out what all could be wrong.

This is the module where business owners, and brand managers should use various logic paths and create different hypotheses across consumer, the brand’s proposition, channels, media, and copies, etc.

We will discuss:

• Various logic paths and create different hypotheses
• Marketing loops– how to think & build retention as part of the design itself
• Mind Maps
• Mind Maps across various industries

A great communication brief comes from fundamental understanding of core marketing concepts. From here, you will start making a communication brief to address a LIVE business problem.

We’ll cover the following:

• Understanding the context of the category and brand
• Define the relevant competitive set for your brand
• Plot the competitive and category landscape
• Plotting the positioning profile statements for the entire landscape

Here we uncover the magic of digital to reveal insights on the category dynamics

Exercises and Project work:

• Identifying use cases, Segmenting the keywords – for ads, for content etc.
• Generating Insights about competition, category, brand using Keyword Research

Tool Deep Dive: Google Alerts to know what is being spoken about your brand

• Setting it up
• Generating insights about competition, category, brand using Alerts

Tool Deep Dive: Social Listening

• Getting familiarized with the tool, setting it up
• Generating insights about competition using Social Listening

This module of the brand management certification is about learning how to frame the opportunity for your brand through our proprietary frameworks.

We’ll cover the following:

• Identifying the life-stage of the brand and the category
• Plotting the Brand Opportunity Framework
• Getting familiar with the Growth Equation
• Tapping opportunities through the Consumer Funnel
• Role of habits in marketing
• Isolating the Opportunities and Action points for the brand

After identifying the opportunity, we start to deep dive into our users. This includes figuring who to go after. But before you get there, you need to understand the various options available for you.This is where we get talking to consumers and understand the core of our communication brief.

We will cover-

• Traditional Research Techniques – U&A study, Segmentation Research
• Discussion Guides-  How not to ask leading questions, what they say vs what they mean, when to use what form of answers
• Making consumer understanding richer using digital tools 
• Difference between observation and insights illustrated through examples

This is where things get interesting and getting to the crux of our communication. We will cover segmentation and targeting in this module of the professional marketing course.

We will cover the following:

• Good vs Great Personalities
• Framework to craft the Personality for your brand
• Traits that define a personality

Brand Purpose

• Why do brands target?
• Need states vs demand occasions – strategic vs tactical choices
• Consumer Typologies
• Segmentation or hyper-segmentation – how to fetch the user understanding
• How to target using Targeting Matrix

Here we deep dive into one of the most critical tools to understand your own website data. Some companies use other Analytics tools but the focus here is to build the fundamentals on this so that it becomes a skill that can then be applied on any other tool (which is never too different).

We will cover the following:

• Getting familiar with the platform
• Understanding the visualization & usage of different data points
• New vs returning user behavior
• Consumer Journey & identifying drop-offs at every stage

This module of the brand management program focuses on narrowing down a consumer profile which is your super consumer and you focus on building all their behaviours and reasons for their behaviour in this one document.

In this module, we cover the following:

• WHO-WHAT-WHY framework
• Linkage between the What and the Why
• Pairing up Whats and Whys to identify Growth spaces for the brand

Basis the target consumer identified, we now get down to the real kraft of creating powerful marketing strategies through communication.

In this module, we cover the following:

• Identify Consumer Barriers and Triggers
• Isolating the brand’s key communication challenge
• Role of the Insight
• Undergo the Insight Discovery Process
• Insight Cheat-Codes
• Choose between Insight Directions
• Impact of Cultural trends on insights
• Identifying and evaluating a trend?
• Mistakes to avoid while looking at cultural trends
• Reach from Insights to a compelling proposition

This module of the professional marketing course covers the intricate aspects of developing and growing a brand with ample examples of Indian brands.

Brand Benefits

• Framing the functional and emotional benefits
• Understand the Reason to Believe (RTB), the key message strategy
• Activating Media platforms : Inputs for creative brief (assets, duration, format etc)

BIG IDEA: How to come up with stories

• Life Moments, Human Behavior, Exaggerating Benefits, Stunts & more
• Role of creative agencies

Here we cover a few critical fundamentals of building a great brand:

Brand Purpose:

• What is a brand purpose?
• Mistakes to avoid while writing brand purpose
• Writing the brand purpose – the actual HOW
• Brand Purpose – the 3T framework

Brand Personality

• Why is brand personality important?
• Link between purpose and personality
• How to identify & write a brand personality
• Framework for brand personality – order, ego, freedom, social
• Practicing the how!

Creative Appreciation

• Basics of creative evaluation
• Framework to evaluate creatives on strategic, creative and aesthetic aspects
• Creating content for digital
• Creative Evaluation Checklist

Packaging

• Bringing the idea to life
• Challenges faced in packaging development
• Steps to develop packaging

The advanced stuff! Once the brief is all ready, we will go deep into understanding the various kinds of extensions and the communication strategies for each of them.

• What is premiumization?
• Launching an extension vs a new format vs a new brand
• How do consumers evaluate value?
• Making a proposition which delivers on the value – as the consumer sees it
• Balance between price and benefit
• When should a brand reposition – linkage to brand opportunity

Traditional Researches

• Writing a research brief
• Research principles overview
• Understanding Major Researches: Segmentation, U&A, CPT
• Testing the Communication: Ad Evaluation
• Post Launch Dipstick

Digital Researches

• When and Why?
• Data Led testing– Using Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Youtube Analytics
• Understanding Customer Behaviour – Using CRM Tools (e.g. ZOHO)
• Using Google analytics to understand user vs non-user behaviour
• A/B Testing concepts, ads, copy – own vs paid assets
• Some new age tools for doing the researches online

In this module of the professional marketing course, we cover the fundamentals of how to use the various research data available to you. These are crucial starting points which are a part of your everyday life as a brand manager. This module covers a lot of concepts & techniques and helps you master it through various use cases, examples and exercises.

We cover the following:

• Retail Metrics: Monitoring business health (Nielson)
• Household Metrics: Metrics, Use Cases & Interpretation (HHP)
• Brand Equity Metrics: Metrics, Use cases & Interpretation (Brand Equity)
• Effectiveness of communication
• Unearthing insights by triangulating data
• Using Mind map to break down problems and test it using data

Now that we know what to say to the user to convince them to do as we please, you’d think we’d start running ads right? Wrong. A lot of marketers make the mistake of running ads before they have fixed their conversion machine. Not us. We first fix where they’d be landing after clicking on our ads. That is our Product. This is what converts your leads and gives you the conversion: the gold.

Search Engine Optimization

• How does search work?
• Introduction to SEO
• Running Audits and finding & fixing faults/gaps in the website
• Perform keyword research and explain its use in digital copywriting and SEO.
• On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Technical SEO
• SEO Analytics

Conversion Optimization : Landing Pages

This module covers the page where users would be landing after clicking on our ads. That is our Product. This is what converts your leads and gives you the conversion: the gold.

• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Golden rules of CRO
• Techniques for CRO
• Understanding the principles of UI & UX and setting it up on your product
• Creating the best landing pages by improving the user experience through AB testing on consumer pathways, the language used, call to actions, etc.
• Optimize the drop-offs and correcting the gaps before next set of campaigns
• Using Optimizely for A/B Testing

Now that we have a product that converts we will start running campaigns right? Sorry, you are wrong again.

We will first set KPIs upon which we can measure our campaign. Will it be the people who just see your campaign (impressions)? Will it be the number of clicks your ads get? The number of new users on your app? The increase in the user retention rate on your app?

We decide exactly what will tell us that our campaigns have succeeded. To take these decisions we will look into how much customer acquisition cost makes sense for you, how much money do you make of an average user (your customer lifetime value), etc.

You will learn what drives growth for a business/brand and how to translate that into your media plan

We cover the following:

• Running campaigns on various platforms
• How to choose Channels, set Objectives, create Audiences and allocate Budgets. 
• How to set up different Remarketing funnels for different users after you have segmented them into a specific type. A mom gets retargeted with a different ad and a college goer with a different ad. We learn how to set up coded streams to automatically trigger Swiggy ads for a piping hot ‘Chai-Samosa’ when the weather outside is rainy.
• How to do Influencer Marketing, how to reach out to them and use their networks to get out a campaign the legs it deserves.

We will specifically cover –

• Fundamentals of Facebook buying
• Aligning Facebook campaign to business goals
• Determine Target Audience & Ad format
• Measurement and Reporting
• Strategies & Optimization
• Google Ads : Paid Search, Video & Display & Analytics
• Twitter, Linkedin, Quora Ads
• Mobile Advertising

Details on each of these can be found in the brochure

“Who runs ads?” “Ads are so old school!” “Anybody can deliver growth by spending that much money!”. These are statements by experienced digital marketers. The fact is that there are scores of brands out there doing wonderful marketing without spending a cent on paid ads. They swear by Content or Inbound Marketing. This method states that you do not try to sell to the consumer. Or at least not explicitly. You just solve their problems. Inbound marketing relies on content that the user wants to consume themselves. It is the opposite of ads.
In this module we deep dive into how to figure out what content you should create, how to distribute it, how to engage your users and then how to set up an acquisition funnel over it to get conversions.

Here we focus on improving discoverability of our website for long-term success.We cover the following:

• Introduction to Content Marketing
• Content Marketing Model
• How to select topics
• Conduct keyword research and evaluate keyword for intent, volume, and competitiveness & identify use cases to create content
• Building a purpose-driven content strategy- Hub, Hero, Hygiene Model
• Tips to create great content

In this module we cover the following :

• Introduction to E-mail
• Explanation of Lifecycle marketing
• Creation of emailing lists
• Designing E-mails
• Understanding factors affecting deliverability of E-mail
• Nurturing your Leads
• Analysis of the E-mail data
• Optimizing and Testing E-mail

This module is all about perfecting and making impact once you have a great idea in your armour. We cover the entire gamut of media from planning to executing and finally measuring performance against the KPIs that were set.

• Basics of media
• Media Planning Process
• What should you measure? Metrics that matter
• TV Metrics
• Digital Metrics
• Setting Targets and making the right choices
• Translating the business objective into metrics and KPIs
• Scheduling Strategies
• Writing a great brief
• Evaluation of a media plan – approach note
• Measurement and optimization – ongoing process
• Post-Evaluation of a media plan
• Measurement & Improving ROI

Brand Innovation is a must-win battle for most categories and brand managers. And here, we decode the process and understand the nuances in each step to pave our way to a great launch!

We will cover the following in this module of the professional marketing course:

• Introduction to innovation principles
• Need for innovation
• Steps to a great launch
• Kinds of innovation
• Innovation tricks and tips

• Top-line vs bottom-line
• Parts of a P&L
• Driving ROI
• Evaluation of activities as a brand manager
• Impact of different activities on different parts of P&L
• Building Profitable Brands

This one will be all about practice, practice and practice! We introduce you to the competencies that you need to demonstrate in a brand management interview. We give directions on building your answers for each of these, followed by mock interviews to get you all ready!