This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

In consumer marketing, a brand is what somebody thinks about a logo. In business-to-business, a brand is the answer to a different question: will I be blamed if this goes wrong.

Nobody is buying your product on its merits alone

Five to seven people sign off. The cycle runs for months. The sum is large enough that a bad decision costs somebody their standing in the company, so every one of those people is quietly asking whether choosing you is defensible. That question gets answered in three places, and only one of them is your website. The first is whatever they found before they contacted you — search results, comparison pages, what an AI assistant said when they asked it. The second is what your own employees say in public, because a buyer who reads bad reviews from your staff concludes the company cannot deliver. The third is the salesperson on the first call, who either confirms everything the brand promised or quietly contradicts it.

What this course covers

Forty-four lessons across those three layers. The foundation first: who owns the brand, the six layers it is built from, a same-day audit including how AI assistants currently describe you, positioning turned into six messages a salesperson can repeat, tone of voice taught to a model, campaign anatomy, and a dashboard that separates awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty. Then the marketing system: the first thirty days in the role, estimating a competitor's unit economics, a strategy the board will approve using 4P, STP and the Ansoff matrix, budget and return with acquisition cost and lifetime value, the brand plan, the digital funnel with attribution, team structure, and where AI actually helps. Then trust from the inside: audience research, a strategic audit with PESTEL, the value proposition, indicators and a dashboard that makes leadership care, the communication plan, a social media audit, an ambassador programme, and the lesson that links employee experience to customer experience directly. Then the channels: the site as an entry point, referrals, email, search, video, copy, paid placement, remarketing, each social platform on its own terms, and a monthly report. Finally the people who carry the brand into the room: what makes a salesperson credible, why customers do not trust one by default, coaching on metrics, compensation design, demand generation through a flywheel, lead scoring with a buyer journey matrix, the service agreement between marketing and sales, and the experiments that moved the number.

Two blocks were recorded for a hiring audience

The employer brand block is eight lessons about trust from employees and candidates rather than customers. Lesson twenty links the two brands directly, and that is why the block is here: in business-to-business, buyers read what your staff say before they sign, and a gap between what you promise the market and what you promise your own people is the first thing they notice. The channel block was recorded around recruitment marketing — the mechanics are general, the examples are about vacancies. And one more thing you should know before buying: within the sales block, nine of sixteen lessons are about hiring, training and paying salespeople rather than about branding. They are here deliberately, because the argument of this course is that a business brand is confirmed or destroyed by a specific person on a specific call. If you want pure brand strategy with nothing about people in it, that is a smaller course than this one.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 44 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the brand audit scorecard, the messaging matrix, the PESTEL frame, the value proposition method, the brand health dashboard, the buyer journey matrix, the lead scoring approach, and the marketing-to-sales service agreement

• The internal half of a business brand, which most branding courses leave out entirely

Where to start

Ask an AI assistant to describe your company to a potential buyer, then read the answer as if you were that buyer. Whatever it says is your brand today, whether you built it or not. Enrol now and start today.