Hello everyone. My name is Begona Gonzalez Cuesta. I am a professor of this world storytelling and representation and ethics, at the School of human sciences and technology. I am also the dean of communication and media, and the director of faculty and student experience at our university. Welcome to the specialization on branding the creative journey. Branding is one of the most relevant activities that a company or an organization must develop in our interconnected world. This specialization, aims to make branding concepts accessible to every learner, and to teach them to analyze and apply all the relevant concepts using the broad and diverse toolkit of branding. It begins by giving you the tools, so that you can understand brand behavior, understand the language of a brand, and learn about the rational and emotional elements behind brands. It's important to think strategically when building brands. But it is also essential to understand how they behave when they are out there in the real world and people start interacting with them. Branding is about conversation and co-creation with customers, audiences, and users. At the end of the day, what is relevant, is how people live the brand. The brand is about the story, the personality, and the culture of the organization. What do you stand for? What you are like? How do you behave? Brands needs to relate to the experience of the customer and to the purpose of the organization. The specialization then moves on to giving you the tools, so that you can understand the value of branded content and how to develop a content marketing strategy. Davenport and Beck analyzed how we live in the era of the attention economy. The most valuable gift that an audience can give to a brand, is their attention, in the middle of the communication ecosystem, saturated with all types of content. The amount of content we face every day is just a manageable. This of course, has changed many aspects of our lives and has transformed dramatically the fields of marketing and communication. We also attempt to understand the language of images. These days we are constantly bombarded by images, by videos, by all type of information. So the question is, how do brands breakthrough all of these noise and tell their story in a way that gets people interested and involved? How do we tell stories through images? What are all the elements that go into creating an image? So, we'll learn how to analyze brands and the brand personality traits. We also go through the process of coming up with concepts for images which cancel those brand stories. So, we go from the process of analyzing the brand, to creating the concept, and then finally, coming up with those high-impact ideas for how to sell the brand story. Finally, we explore the synergies and the intersection of two sets of activities; branding and customer experience. Well, there are different approaches to defining a branding strategy. A branding project implementation impacts many departments under customer facing activities. In this sense, it's essential to understand branding efforts in the context of customer experience. In this course, we use a framework adapted from customer journeys mapping, for focusing and organizing your thinking about the operational implications of your branding projects. Through the framework, we derive an operational language for aligning activities and measuring impacts across multiple departments, and the customer touch points they manage.
