Live

Brand Architects

Marketing & Brand Management

Steward an established brand across quarterly campaign cycles (5 in the five-week format, 8 in the eight-week / semester format), in one market shared with the other teams and two AI incumbents. Split each quarter's budget between brand building and activation, pre-test concepts with an LLM Focus Group, then face a 4-persona Creative Panel and a launch audience — with a live Crisis Desk and cultural calendar in between.

Inside Brand Architects

What your students see

Screens from a class in progress. Click any screen to see it full size.

Every team steers the same brand

Teams start level in one shared market, so gaps come from their choices. The home screen shows Brand Score and class rank, market share, season budget left, role and brand health.

1 / 5

Every team steers the same brandTeams start level in one shared market, so gaps come from their choices. The home screen shows Brand Score and class rank, market share, season budget left, role and brand health.

Campaign desk for quarter 3, 'defend share in a value moment', with a $1.45M quarter cap, a consumer insight and a new positioning statement below last quarter's version. — Answer each brief with a campaignEach quarter brings a brief and a spending cap. Teams answer on a shared campaign desk, from consumer insight and positioning to the split between brand building and activation.

See what moved the brand and whyAfter each quarter, teams see what they spent, what it earned in share, revenue and return on marketing, and what pushed each brand health score up or down.

Crisis responses are scored and explainedA crisis can land mid-quarter with a response window. Replies are scored on speed, tone and transparency, and a crisis left unanswered costs Brand Love and sales.

One Brand Score ranks every teamThe Brand Score blends brand health (60%) with market share against each team's starting point (40%). It also feeds each student's suggested grade.

About This Simulation

Brand Architects gives every student team the same established consumer brand to steward across quarterly campaign cycles — 5 quarters in the five-week format, 8 quarters in the eight-week or 14-week semester format — in one shared category, where the teams compete with each other and with two AI incumbents: a category giant that defends its share and a value player that undercuts on price. Each quarter opens with a brief tied to the brand's industry — positioning challenge, target audience, and a budget cap — and some briefs change the market itself (a recession quarter, a holiday rush). Teams write a consumer insight, positioning statement, tagline, and 100-180 word campaign concept, split the budget between long-term brand building and short-term activation, and allocate it across six channels (paid, earned, owned, influencer, retail, experiential), each with different reach economics and different Brand-Love multipliers, while pacing a season budget that covers 90% of the quarterly caps. Before submitting, teams can pre-test the work through a Focus Group — three in-character LLM personas from the target audience who argue back in their own voice, quote what lands, and roast what doesn't. At quarter close, the same personas react to the live campaign as the launch audience, a Creative Panel of four expert LLM personas (Creative Director, Brand Strategist, Cultural Critic, Media Buyer) grades the campaign from each of their lenses, and the market turns it all into brand health, market share, revenue, and profit. Mid-quarter Crisis Desk events fire with a ticking response window and are graded on speed, tone, and transparency — unresponded crises hit Brand Love and sales. A published cultural calendar (Super Bowl, Pride, Climate COP, Holiday, and others) offers optional opt-ins that reward cultural fluency and punish tone-deafness. The leaderboard ranks a Brand Score — 60% brand health (Awareness, Brand Love, Premium, Crisis Resilience) and 40% market share against where the team started — and the gap between short- and long-term return on marketing puts Binet & Field's The Long and the Short of It into numbers students caused. Light roles (Brand Manager, Creative Lead, Media Planner, Insights Lead) and a short reflection after each quarter tie individual work to the team result.

LMSCanvas + LTI 1.3 compatible platforms·SSO + one-click grade publishHow it works

Share this with your team— printable one-pager for a chair or procurement./for-your-team/brand-architects

Learning Objectives

Write campaign concepts that solve a real brand problem, not just look good
Balance long-term brand building against short-term activation — and explain why short-term return on marketing flatters activation
Allocate and pace marketing spend across six channels (paid / earned / owned / influencer / retail / experiential) and a season budget, reading share of voice against market share — and defend the tradeoffs
Pre-test creative work with an LLM Focus Group and iterate before submission, rather than treating first drafts as finished
Read a Creative Panel verdict across four expert lenses and translate the feedback into next-quarter changes
Respond to brand crises within the response window on speed, tone, and transparency — protecting Brand Love rather than the legal position
Read cultural moments (Pride, Climate COP, Holiday, and more) and decide when to engage vs. when staying quiet is wiser
Manage brand equity as a multi-quarter compounding asset — Awareness, Brand Love, Premium, and Crisis Resilience — and the pricing power it earns
Measure marketing effectiveness through market share, contribution, and short- vs. long-term return on marketing

Week-by-Week Overview

Q1: Foundation & first campaign

Read the brand foundation (its history, customer, competitors, taboos) and the market it competes in, receive the Q1 brief, and build the first campaign: consumer insight, positioning statement, tagline, 100-180 word concept, a brand vs. activation split, and a budget across six channels. First Creative Panel and launch audience at quarter close.

Q2–Q3: Channel discipline & audience test

Cadence sets in. Focus Group pre-test before every submission. Learn which channels compound Brand Love vs. which just move Awareness, and how share of voice compares with market share. Second cultural moment lands (typically Pride).

Mid-arc: Crisis Desk & Resilience

Crises fire mid-quarter — product recall, exec misstep, supply-chain expose, data breach, or others depending on your industry. Written responses are graded on speed, tone, and transparency. Unresponded crises crash Brand Love and cost sales; Crisis Resilience softens the blow.

Q4–Q6: Cultural calendar under pressure

Climate COP / Earth Week, then holiday season. Tone-deaf participation costs Brand Love; earned cultural fluency builds it. Budget caps grow each quarter, but the season budget can't cover them all, so teams pace.

Q7–Q8: Legacy & final positioning

The last two quarters. The Brand Strategist judges the final campaign against the positioning you've built, and teams decide whether to harvest sales or keep building the brand. The Brand Score (60% brand health, 40% market share against the start) sets the cohort leaderboard.

See Brand Architects in action

A walkthrough from Jeff Forgrave, who built Boardroom Rivals.