Why we include Classes with Membership

On-Line Management Training

Webinars will be held monthly tackling an array of business and leadership topics. This is open to anyone on your leadership team to join. A calendar of topics and instructors will be maintained on our website.

Topics important for them to learn:

• How to run effective meetings
• Effective problem-solving and decision making
• Leadership models
• How to communicate effectively
• How to manage conflict
• Accountability, partnerships and alignment
• Managing the business dashboard

Anatomy of a Famous Brand - 2.5 days

Our flagship marketing course provides a world-class, scientific approach to marketing which will guide all your branding efforts moving forward.

During this intensive workshop you’ll walk away with a customized brand plan that clearly outlines your objectives, target audience, brand “DNA,” position in the marketplace, and unique “palette” of brand codes—everything needed to win more customers and become the dominate brand in your market.

Brand Foundations - Level Up!

• Developing your own marketing philosophy
• The Brand Paradox & 1st Rule of Marketing
• 3 Perspectives of Brand Equity
• 11 Evidence-Based Marketing Principles that unlock brand growth

Advanced Marketing Models & Frameworks

• The “Demand Pools” Marketing Model
• The “Make It Easy” Marketing Model
• The “Associative Network Theory” Model of Brand Building

Constructing Your Winning Brand Plan

• What exactly is a marketing strategy anyways?
• Goals & Objectives
• Determining the correct goals & objectives to support brand growth
• The difference between company objectives, marketing objectives & campaign objectives
• Selecting the right marketing KPIs to track and measure brand growth

Targeting the “Right” Audience

• Les Binet “How advertising works” definition
• Why sales activation requires targeting
• Why brand building requires scale
• Sophisticated Mass Targeting

Brand “DNA” - Positioning Your Brand in the Mind of the Prospect

• Intro into brand positioning & the 3 Cs of positioning
• Avoiding complexity and the dreaded brand “onion”
• The point of brand positioning and why it matters
• How to determine your own Brand “DNA”
• Building your “Differentiation Lattice”

Brand Codes - Identifying and Building Your Distinctive Brand Assets

• Differentiation vs. Distinctiveness
• The Epidemic of Sameness
• The story of the Coca-Cola bottle and the emergence of brand codes
• What are brand codes & why they’re critical to growing your brand?
• Building a “palette” of brand codes
• Brand code types
• The importance of code diversity
• Where to find brand codes
• How to determine the strength of your brand codes
• Should a brand code have meaning behind it?
• Brand code application: dos & don'ts
  • Weber’s Law as a guide to update or change your brand codes
  • Code obscurity
  • Code application done right
  • Codes as a unifying bridge to align your messaging
  • The 3 Rules of Code “Play”
  • Internal use of brand codes

Category Buying Triggers

• Category buying triggers and why they matter
• Tangible vs. Intangible Buying Triggers
• Category buying triggers brainstorming and selection
• Revisiting targeting and positioning
• Leveraging category buying triggers to plan your ad content calendar

Brand Architecture

• What is brand architecture?
• Choosing the appropriate architecture for your brand
• Changing your brand architecture without killing your business

Brand codes influence on your brand architecture

The ‘Brand Fame’ Campaign Creator - 1 day

Pound-for-pound, nothing fuels long-term brand building and profitable growth more than fame-creating advertising campaigns. Highly creative fame campaigns significantly outperform all other types of campaigns across all business metrics and can quadruple the speed at which your brand grows long-term.

That sounds great, but how do you get there? What are the characteristics of a fame-creating ad campaign?

Fortunately, that’s our bread n’ butter—and making your brand famous and extremely well-liked is precisely what you get in this workshop.

*Anatomy of a Famous Brand is a prerequisite for this course

• Creativity in Crisis - Why creativity matters more than you think
• Separating features that lead to campaign success from those that lead to failure
• The importance of attention
• Choosing the correct campaign objective
• Determining your Campaign “Umbrella”
  • What’s the BIG Idea?
  • Hallmarks of a BIG idea
• Selecting your brand spokesperson
• Applying brand codes across your campaign

Measuring Branding Success: Research, Tracking, & Diagnosis – 1 day

While measuring branding activities can be elusive, it is not impossible. In this workshop, we’ll help you make sense of it all, so you have better data to evaluate your brand’s performance and make better decisions. After all, you cannot improve what you do not measure.

• The “Demand Pools” Marketing Model
• Determining your marketing and campaign objectives
• Selecting brand KPIs to track and measure
• A non-digital marketer’s guide to evaluating your digital marketing efforts
• Conducting a Brand Awareness/TOMA study
• How to diagnose the effectiveness of your branding efforts and take appropriate action
  • Separating brand effects from non-brand ones
  • Triangulating marketing effectiveness
  • Course correction: Determining possible solutions and remedies

The Share of Voice Amplifier: Media Planning & Negotiations – 2 Days

You can have the most creative and persuasively powerful message in the world, but it will do absolutely nothing for your brand if no one sees or hears that message.

That’s why the Share of Voice Amplifier provides you with a comprehensive look at media planning and negotiations giving you a tremendous advantage over your competition.

• Calculating an appropriate marketing budget & advertising spend to achieve your goals
• Determining the right media vehicle considering your message, budget, and goals
  • Broadcast vs. Streaming (OTT)
  • TV vs. Radio vs. Outdoor
• Understanding Media Efficiency vs. Effectiveness
• When to target vs. when to scale
• How to achieve scale while navigating the fragmented media ecosystem
• The Media Mix Multiplier
• The importance of attention and creating impact
• Expectations and how long before you see results
• Advertising “waste” and its value to your brand
• Choosing the appropriate spot length
  • How goals and messaging affect the spot length you choose
  • :05s /:15s/:30s/:60s – which gives you the biggest bang for your buck?
  • Bookends
  • Piggybacks
• Skippable vs. Non-Skippable ads
• Dayparting and building your schedule
• Evaluating media signal maps for your trade area
• Reporting agencies and avails
  • Comscore vs. Nielsen
  • DMA vs. Metro
  • Station rankers
  • Non-rated markets: what to do when a station doesn’t subscribe to a reporting agency
• Which media reporting numbers matter most
• How to approach and talk to your media rep (yes, this really matters)
• How to read and evaluate a media schedule
• The proper sequence of your media negotiations
• Getting value added and bonus spots - what should you ask for?
• Billing and agency discounts
• Navigating the streaming television ecosystem

Ad Writing with IMPACT- 2 days

This is when the ad campaign we create for you comes to life, capturing your audience’s attention, creating positive feelings and associations, and persuading more people to choose your brand.

Want to avoid generic, vanilla ad writing that fails to move the needle? This is the workshop for you.

• Deconstructing ads: what makes for an effective ad
• Ad writing ingredients that provide capture attention and provide impact
• Writing for sales activation vs. brand building
• Introduction to behavioral science
• Psychology of prices
• How to attract attention and elevate impact
• Boosting memorability

• Making it timely and relevant
• The importance of market orientation
• Writing for radio vs. television
• The magic of origin stories: how to communicate the core values of your brand to bond and convey trust
• How to write effective, realistic (not corny) dialogue
• How to write recruitment ads and their real value to your brand
• Using AI to help improve your ad writing

The Ad Writer’s “Hot Seat” - Is there an ad script you want reviewed and critiqued? Tom will deconstruct your ad script and provide direct feedback…as long as you can stand the heat.

“Anything Goes” Marketing Q&A - Got marketing questions? Maybe you want advice on budget allocation? Or, how about guidance on media planning and negotiations? Tom’s got answers.

No burning questions you need answered?

That’s okay too. We strongly encourage you to be a “fly on the wall” and learn from questions submitted by other group members.