We were recently invited by University College London to run a branding session as part of their Consulting Skills Programme for PhD students. The session was titled “Building a Brand. Practically.” and was attended by 24 doctoral students.
As the title suggests, the workshop took the delegates through the process of understanding how to build a brand in a very practical way in less than three hours. This was no mean feat but the students grasped the ideas very quickly and applied them with aplomb to their selected brand.
The groups had to solve a very practical business problem for one of three ‘client organisations’. These were:
· MindDice
· Mindings
Great causes looking to achieve inspiring results so please support them if you can.
Oli Pinch, Training Manager, UCL Advances notes:
“The Consulting Skills Career Development Training we run for UCL PhD Researchers is a fully funded week long programme UCL Advances runs in partnership with the UCL Graduate School. The programme helps UCL PhD researchers develop transferable business-related skills we feel will help them irrespective of the career path they follow. Participants learn about the consultancy cycle from UCL Consulting, work in teams to solve real business problems and undertake key-skills sessions from a select group of experienced trainers.
We invited Darren to run a session on brand building due to his extensive commercial experience in that space. He also holds a branding PhD which we felt delegates would find particularly interesting given they too are undertaking doctoral research.”
Tia Kansara, who recently defended her Doctorate in Building Physics and Thermal Comfort (phew!) and is co-Director of Kansara Hackney Ltd outlines:
“Darren has a very easy style in explaining the biggest and most common brand marketing mistakes. I very much enjoyed the way he broke down rather complicated branding and marketing jargon for our team. The best take-away for me was when we learnt Darren’s technique for profiling potential clients. This exercise allowed me to learn how I could help categorise the client’s values and needs and simplify our product to align to these. The profiling also helped our team to understand gaps in our marketing approach, how can we have missed them!? I will be applying various techniques I learnt from Wavelength about retaining clients; learning how clients respond to the cues in my marketing campaign and how to simplify language.”
Reflecting on the session, Raphaela Heussen, who is a doctoral candidate in genetics / mathematical modeling and founder / director of Beba Mtoto notes:
“Darren is a really dynamic and hands-on instructor. I took away from the course that branding is not only for big multinationals, but really for anyone who interacts with others. I learned how to pay attention to how we are perceived and how to take an active role in shaping these impressions.”
Commenting on the session, Darren Coleman notes:
“It never ceases to amaze me how branding folk come up with ingenious ways of over complicating branding. Sure it’s complex but in three hours you can achieve a lot with an engaged and motivated group. I’d like to think that all of the delegates got a lot out of the session and more importantly could apply the knowledge they acquired to three very worthwhile organisations.”
Why not learn more about UCL’s Consulting Skills Programme for their PhD students? Great programme.
The still images were provided courtesy of the good folk at IDM Media. Thank you for sharing them guys.