
Brand director, brand manager and marketing lead — who owns what
The role profile: competencies, indicators, place in the structure
The six layers of a brand as an operating system
Brand equity economics: why a strong brand multiplies sales
What a brand audit is: internal and external, five key blocks
A four-hour audit workflow using AI assistants
Competitive analysis and how AI models describe your brand today
Brand health metrics: awareness, consideration, net promoter, share of search
Mission, vision, values and purpose: how to actually formulate them
Brand architecture: branded house, house of brands, hybrid
The positioning statement formula and generating fifty variants
Naming with availability checks for domain, handle and trademark
Visual identity: logo, colours, typography, graphics, patterns
Logo design tools and when each one is the right choice
Verbal identity: tone of voice, brand vocabulary, do's and don'ts
The brand book, dynamic identity, copyright and trademark registration
Campaign anatomy: big idea, creative, channels, activation
Generating thirty campaign concepts in an hour
Creative production and copywriting with AI as co-author
Channel mix: organic, paid, public relations, influencers, partnerships
The brand metrics framework: awareness, consideration, preference, loyalty
Building a brand health dashboard
Social listening and monitoring mentions inside AI assistants
Brand equity valuation and a ninety-day implementation roadmap
The role of structured research in positioning decisions
The most common survey formats
Automation tools
Market benchmarks
Satisfaction, loyalty and engagement studies
Experience and value proposition studies
Pulse checks and exit conversations
Cross-group interaction and leadership performance studies
Types of question and how each one biases the answer
Response options and the use of scales
Questionnaire length and open-ended questions
Survey platforms and building a questionnaire step by step
Setting the task the study has to answer
Questionnaire design choices that affect response rate
Promoting the questionnaire
Reminders that work without irritating people
Report formats and which sections to include
Choosing chart types that do not mislead
Analysing open-ended answers and text analysis
Preparing recommendations rather than observations
What conclusions the answers actually support
How to plan actions from findings
Interim questionnaires to monitor change
Closing the loop with the people who answered
Evolution of the role from product manager to product leader
How the role differs from technology, marketing and chief executive roles
The product leader as the voice of the customer
Balancing business, users and technology
Product vision and mission
Finding product-market fit and sustaining it
Strategic priorities and product goals
Linking product strategy to business goals
The product life cycle
Portfolio matrices and other approaches
Decisions to invest, maintain or retire a product
Balancing core, adjacent and innovation bets
Methods for researching the market and customer needs
Jobs to be done and design thinking
Customer journey mapping
Tools for validating hypotheses
Roles: product managers, designers, analysts, researchers
Building the product organisation with tribes and squads
Agile and lean as the operating model
A culture of experimentation and learning
The north star metric and its supporting metrics
The pirate metrics framework
Product analytics platforms
Data-driven product management
Monetisation models: freemium, subscription, transactions, licences
Growth loops and product-led growth
Unit economics and the lifetime value to acquisition cost ratio
The product leader's financial accountability
The product as the company scales
Supporting global expansion
Managing technology and market risks
Embedding security and compliance into product processes
The product leader as a driver of digital transformation
Innovation: artificial intelligence and platform business models
Building partner ecosystems and open innovation
Where the role is heading in company leadership
The evolution of public relations into trust management
How communications roles differ from one another
Where the function sits in the organisational structure
What the chief executive and the board expect from it
What a communications strategy is and what it is not
Linking it to growth, trust, investment, sales and hiring
Reputation as an intangible asset
The positioning and messaging framework, objectives and indicators
Channels: media, social networks, owned media, opinion leaders
Corporate versus external communications
Building the team, and in-house versus agency
Processes and the communications calendar
Why the founder's personal brand is a company asset
The architecture of an executive personal brand
Thought leadership, speaking, interviews and social media
Managing risk and the boundaries of publicity
Types of communications crisis
Reputational risks and how to prevent them
The crisis response team and the principles of crisis communication
Working with media, social networks and employees at the same time
Why reach stopped being a useful number
Output, outcome and impact metrics
Reputation indices and brand trust
Defending the budget in front of the chief executive and finance lead
What a value proposition is and what it is not
Why ninety percent of them do not influence anyone's decision
The link to turnover, speed and quality of applicants
Typical mistakes, and examples of strong and weak propositions
Auditing what your site, adverts and social media already promise
What people actually read, even if you did not plan it
The gap between the internal and external version
Diagnostic tools that need no budget, and interview questions that work
The structure of a strong proposition and its mandatory blocks
Different propositions for different audiences
Linking the proposition to strategy and business stage
How to avoid sliding into marketing language nobody believes
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Read this before you buy: of the 46 lessons, 25 were recorded for an audience building a brand aimed at the people they hire rather than the people they sell to. If you want a course that is purely about consumer branding, this is not it.
Here is why I still built it this way. A new company has two brands and only one of them can wait. Before you have customers you need the first ten people, and they have to join something that does not exist yet — no product to try, no reviews to read, no logo they recognise. Solving that is the hardest positioning problem a founder ever gets, and everything you learn doing it transfers directly to customers.
The real problem with a new brand
It is not that nobody remembers you. It is that nobody has a shelf to put you on. The first comparison a stranger reaches for becomes your positioning whether you chose it or not — you are "a cheaper version of X" or "like Y but for small teams", and once that lands you spend years arguing with it. Most founders discover this after the logo is done, the site is built and the name is on the paperwork.
What changes when you do it in the right order
You start with one sentence: who you are for and what you replace. Everything else — the name, the palette, the tone, the campaign — gets derived from it rather than decorated onto it. That sentence takes an afternoon and a structured audit. The logo you were agonising over becomes a thirty-minute decision, because there is finally a standard to judge it against.
Where this comes from
I have built brand and people systems inside companies at very different stages, including Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. Over 1.6 million people have enrolled in my courses and more than 150,000 professionals have been trained through them. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries. Everything here has been run against real companies, not assembled from branding theory.
How the course is built
You begin with the brand itself: the audit, the positioning statement, the messaging matrix, naming with domain and trademark checks, visual and verbal identity, the brand book, and a launch campaign from big idea to channel mix. Then research, so the positioning rests on answers instead of guesses — question design, running the study, reading open responses, planning actions. Then the product the brand is attached to: product-market fit, portfolio decisions, journey mapping, metrics, monetisation and growth loops. Then going public: narrative, channels, the founder's own visibility, crisis response and communication metrics. Then the proposition you offer the people you want to hire, and the employer brand built on it, including the practical tools — landing page, creative, targeting, copy. And finally the launch inside the company, so everyone tells the same story without being told to.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 46 lessons and every future update
Active instructor support in the question and answer section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments run on your own brand as you go
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Why start now
Every month you operate without a stated position is a month the market invents one for you, and that borrowed position is much harder to replace than to set. The name, the site and the first hundred customers all get built on top of it. Enrol now and write your positioning statement today.