We are exposed to many brands every day in our environment as well as direct advertisement. It is estimated that an average American sees as much as 16000 brands every single day! What does each brand mean to us? How do we respond to each brand? How should brands be marketed to have the highest impact? How do brands compare?

This is where marketing comes into place. With so many brands competing for attention, we have little time to notice them all. We have learned to filter out a lot form our complex environment so we can focus on what matters to us. Only a select few brands can stand out and become memorable or at the extreme end of the scale, come to define a particular way of life on a global scale.

This engaging exercise is designed to kick start a discussion on branding for delegates who attend a course on branding, marketing or a similar topic. It can be used for:

• Branding
• Logo design
• Brand familiarity
• Analysis on use of colour, shapes and common patterns in logos
• Typography
• Social trends
• Behavioural patterns

The exercise requires a pre-course activity where delegates have to prepare materials and bring them to the class.

This exercise is ideal for team building and negotiation where delegates learn to share their resources and also negotiate with each other in a competitive environment. They will learn that cooperation can be much more effective than direct competition or being difficult.

In this exercise, delegates practice working together towards a common goal; making the tallest free standing tower given simple materials. The exercise is competitive and requires creativity as well as good leadership, division of task, resource management and decision making.

This fun activity helps delegates to exercise their creativity and use their whole brains (left and right side) to solve the problems presented here. You can also run this exercise as a competition between groups and provide a prize at the end.

This exercise helps delegates to understand the importance of several key principles, such as “Parkinson’s Law” as well as managing their performance in the face of change or increasingly challenging environments. It is also useful for teamwork, decision making, leadership and creativity. You can use this exercise to teach “Parkinson’s Law” in a time management course.

This is a physical exercise with an aim to encourage team work and collective problem solving. Use the variations to adjust the difficulty. It also highlights the importance of self-organisation and the necessity for leadership when confronted with challenging tasks.

You can use this exercise to explore teamwork, leadership and the ability to work under pressure and cooperatively to solve a problem.

This is a simple yet challenging exercise which puts pressure on a group to solve a problem as the clock is ticking. To successfully survive the task, the group must learn to work together quickly and efficiently.

This is a physical exercise that encourages self-organisation within a team when confronted with a challenge. You can test the group to see how quickly they can come up with a self-assigned leader who would then go on to coordinate the group’s activity to increase their efficiency.

This is powerful exercise in helping people to think out of the box and become more creative. The setup primes people to think creatively about everyday objects and design their own version. This however may not lead to a lot of creative activity as most people will use what they already know or have seen. Next, you will give them a creative task that they are totally unfamiliar with and hence are forced to be a lot more creative and use their imagination to interpret the requirements.