[MUSIC] Hello everyone. My name is Maria Eizaguirre, and I'm an anthropologist with a deep love for brands. This has led me to devote my career to either creating them or managing them as a marketeer. Originally an academic, my curious nature took me to business, where I have spent the past 18 years of my life in strategic planning, consumer insights, marketing and branding strategy in positions of responsibility in different big companies in consumer package goods and education. I am now at IE as a professor and academic lead of marketing efforts for several programs. Beyond my love for brands is the strongest passion for consumer behavior and consumer insights. Behind any branding effort, there is always a person. Brands themselves behave as people, and learning to decode their language, and shift from the most rational exercises like building a brand to the most emotional ones like summarizing the brand in symbols and identitarian elements, is a constant source of wonder and awe to me. Throughout this course we will be learning about the rationality and the irrationality behind brands. We create brands with a strategy in mind, and it is of paramount importance that we do it right, but the reality is that as soon as we put the brands out there, people will interpret them in different ways. We will see how brands live in the hearts and minds of consumers. They find their way into people's lives, become a part of them, and are able to elicit love and hate. This is how powerful a brand is. And we're not talking about marketing here, brands precede any marketing effort and one of the most important and valuable assets of any organization. As such, even if they are mostly created and managed by marketeers, the brand belongs to the whole organization and almost every function will impact it in some way or another. Though, of course marketing, communications including corporate communications, customer service, and human resources, are the functions which most directly impact the way a brand exists through time. If you've already got the basics of branding covered then you may already know that branding can be quite an involved process. Contrary to what many small business owners tend to think, branding includes a lot more elements and goes way deeper than a simple logo you display on your website and products. In case you haven't gotten that far on your branding knowledge yet, you can learn all about the deeper aspects of branding your business right here. I really hope you enjoy learning in this course as much as I have enjoyed creating it and teaching it. Welcome to IE and welcome to branding strategy and identity. [MUSIC]