BEM2033 – BRANDS & BRANDING INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT GUIDELINES
ASSIGNMENT TOPIC
Choose a brand and critically evaluate its current branding strategies. Applying appropriate brand concepts and theories covered in the course, discuss its future development”.
Word limit: no more than 2,500 words
Contribution to Module Mark: 50%
1. STRUCTURE
A recommended structure for your assignment is as follows:
Introduction (around 250 words):
In this first part you should provide a brief introduction of the brand and its market context. If you have chosen a foreign brand that you think the examiners might be unfamiliar with, you might choose to provide further clarification either in the assignment or as an appendix.
Brand Audit (around 700 words):
In this part, you should provide a critical evaluation of the brand and its current branding strategies.
You are expected to apply relevant theories / frameworks into practice and in a manner suitable to the brand of your choice and its context. You should conduct both parts of brand audit: brand inventory and a brand exploratory.
With regards to brand inventory, you should – verbally and visually – profile the product(s) and/or service(s) of your chosen organisation explaining how they are marketed and branded.
When it comes to the brand exploratory, your evaluation should be based on secondary research data gathered from publicly available sources which should be appropriately referenced.
In light of lack of available secondary data or in order to provide additional evidence to support your arguments (in the next part), you might choose to conduct your own primary research to understand the brand’s current performance with its target customers.
Primary research data collection techniques you might want to employ could be for example a simple questionnaire or a focus group (or both) depending on the type of data you seek to gather.
Note that conducting your own primary research is NOT a requirement as long as you provide sufficient secondary data as evidence to support your arguments.
If you do choose to conduct your own primary research, you should include a paragraph in which you explain the methodology followed, and briefly outline details such as sample selection and data analysis techniques.
At the end of this section you should state clearly what is the problem that the brand faces, and/or the opportunity that the brand should capitalise on. It is important to ‘place’ this problem and/or opportunity on the Brand Equity Pyramid Model in order to provide solid foundation for the next part.
Brand Development Strategy (around 1,000 words):
This is the most important part of your assignment. In this part, you should apply one (or more – depends on you) suitable concept(s) / framework(s) covered in the module in order to take the brand forward.
This will depend on the problem and/or opportunity that you have identified in the previous section. It is important to start this part by stating the objectives of your brand development strategy. What are the main objectives of your strategy? What will it try to achieve? You should make sure that you connect these objectives with measurable and timely targets (for example: increase brand awareness by 10% in
6 months from launch of the campaign etc.).