As many products and services are becoming commoditized, brands are becoming increasingly important as key non-price differentiators. As a result, brands now have the potential to play an even greater role in creating value for customers as well as for the company. In this course, you will learn how to create and manage successful brands. We will discuss the key factors that enable brands to create value, focusing on the strategic aspects of building strong brands. You will learn about brand management in three different formats. First, you will learn from the lectures and the assigned course materials, which provide the background necessary to address the problems we will discuss in class. The second venue for learning is class discussions. Here you will have the opportunity to present your point of view and defend it against those of your classmates. Our goal for the class discussion is to come up with a viable solution for the branding problem faced by the company. Finally, the third learning venue is the individual case preparation and the case-related discussions within each team prior to discussing the case in class. The ultimate goal of this course is to enhance your knowledge of branding and brand management. Specifically, this course aims to: (1) introduce the key elements of brand management, (2) provide a sound framework for brand-focused action planning, and (3) sharpen your leadership, analytical, and communication skills. The course involves a mixture of case discussions and lectures, with an emphasis on developing a strategic approach that will enable you to understand the environment in which a company operates and identify opportunities and threats, identify and solve brand-related marketing problems, and develop actionable brand management plans.