TORONTO: KELLOGG-SCHULICH

Designing Brand Experiences
Today’s business leaders aspire to design brand experiences that provide a competitive edge in the marketplace. Achieving this ambition requires brand owners to focus on five pillars for success: (i) a deep understanding of the basic dimensions on which competition takes place in their industry; (ii) the right goals and metrics that lead to coherent experiences for customers; (iii) the primacy of building customer penetration over customer loyalty; (iv) the crucial importance of increasing brand salience and reducing customer friction over time; and (v) the Incorporation of design elements in brand experiences that make them distinctive and set them apart from the competition. This course introduces conceptual frameworks and practical tools for designing winning brand experiences that will lead to a competitive edge for your brand and success in the marketplace.

Future Proofing Brands
Brands that have thrived over an extended period of time – think Apple, Disney, and Ford – have one important commonality: They are agile adapters to changes in customer preferences, competitor actions, and technological trends. This course will enable you to develop “future proof” brands, that is, brands that are proactive in their responsiveness toward changes in their business environment. It will introduce conceptual frameworks and workbench tools that are directed toward the systematic development of a program of innovations at different levels of the brand including the market offering, the target customer segment, the business model, and the underlying technology. As part of the course, you will work on a group assignment that will require you.

Digital Strategy: Individual and Organizational Transformation for a Digital Age
Many leaders today find it challenging to cope with the increasing pace and unpredictability of change. For a large number of companies, the root cause of this change is disruption fuelled by digitization of products, processes, and business models. In this course, we will seek to define the skills, competencies, and behaviours that leaders require to succeed in environments characterized by digital disruption. Then, we will link leadership with strategy and organizational transformation. As a digital leader, you must lead the organizational transformation required to take advantage of digital opportunities and neutralize digital threats. We will introduce a set of frameworks to guide your transformation journey, and challenge you to apply your digital leadership skills to drive successful implementation in your organization.

Mergers and Acquisitions Strategy
Business headlines are dominated by exciting announcements of the next mega-acquisition and about the size, scope and dominance of financial investors like private equity firms and pension funds.  However, when the dust settles, we also hear about the difficulties managers have in realizing the benefits from these deals and how complex a successful integration program can be.  This course focuses on the three strategic steps in the M&A process: developing an M&A strategy, assessing the target, and negotiating a deal, and developing and implementing the merger integration plan.  We will examine these topics using business cases, lectures, role-plays and classroom discussion of deals currently in the news, all with the goal of helping students to develop their own perspectives on how to tilt the odds in their favor when they are involved in an M&A transaction.