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 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.

In this exercise, delegates practice delivering a quick sales pitch. The structure of the pitch is based on the FAB methodology; Features, Advantages and Benefits. Most people miss the advantage and instead focus too much on features. This exercise helps them to understand the significance of benefits and advantages over features.

Use this exercise to get delegates describe themselves as they like and showcase it to others. There is a lot you can learn when people have to state something about themselves. The choice of words, pictures and diagrams can mean a lot on what their life priorities are which can be surprising at times. This exercise is suitable for team building and helping a group of a people to understand each other better.

This is a creativity exercise in a form of a template that you can customise in a variety ways. The format is that the group comes into possession of a large number of a certain used old product. The groups need to think of creative ways to sell them. Naturally, teams that can work together and use systematic creative methods have a higher chance to come up with novel ideas.

This series of exercises help the delegates to practice writing by observing and improving a variety of different sources. The list is intended as a starting point so you can get ideas about potential exercises. You can extend this list by thinking of many other ideas.

Some people believe that they are not creative. The belief comes to define their attitude towards any problem and can limit their capability irrespective of their creative ability. Almost everyone is creative and uses that creativity on a daily basis in everyday tasks such as cooking, rearranging furniture, professional organisational skills, report writing and so on. Unfortunately, they may not see these activities as creative. It is a good idea to push these individuals into doing classic creative tasks to show them that they can be just as creative as others if they want to. Once their self-limiting attitude is corrected, their confidence is increases and they can start to see their own talent. The viscous cycle can be broken.

This is an exercise in describing objects so that delegates can improve their communication skills. It’s all too easy to use jargon and assume that everyone knows what you mean. However, you may need to downgrade and describe a product, a feature or a concept in simpler terms. This entertaining and competitive exercise helps the delegates to train their vocabulary skills and learn how to communicate effectively.

Imagine if your company was a supermarket. Which one would it be? Supermarkets tend to have personalities. It seems that in any society certain classes prefer certain types of supermarkets, and supermarkets respond accordingly as well for supplying appropriate products to this kind of customers. In this exercise, delegates examine their company and decide on its qualities and how best it fits into the supermarket analogy. This analogy helps them to understand their company better.