For your team · Brand Architects
Marketing & Brand Management · Marketing & Brand Management
Build, position, and defend a brand through 8 quarters of campaigns, crises, and cultural moments.
Brand Architects gives each team a brand to steward across 8 quarterly campaign cycles. Every quarter starts with a brief tied to the brand's industry: positioning challenge, audience, budget cap. Teams write a positioning statement, tagline, and 100-180 word campaign concept, then allocate the budget across 6 channels (paid, earned, owned, influencer, retail, experiential). Before submitting, they can pre-test the work through a Focus Group — three LLM personas in the target demographic argue back in character and quote what lands, what falls flat. At quarter close, a 4-persona Creative Panel (Creative Director, Brand Strategist, Cultural Critic, Media Buyer) scores the work and writes verdicts. Mid-quarter crises fire with a ticking response window and are graded on speed, tone, and transparency; 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 aesthetic is moodboard, not Bloomberg.
Every team is scored on four pillars that compound across the sim. They aggregate into a composite the leaderboard ranks by, and the professor can see per-pillar deltas in the gradebook.
Average Creative Panel score across all quarters — craft and originality.
Crisis response quality and cultural-moment alignment.
How much the audience cares — the hero metric. Compounds across quarters.
Engagement and reach per dollar spent across all campaigns.
Before submitting any campaign, run it past 3 LLM personas who argue in character — Mom-Test-style critique, not flattery. Iterative refinement.
4 expert LLM personas (Creative Director / Brand Strategist / Cultural Critic / Media Buyer) score every campaign, each from their own lens.
Crises fire with a ticking response window. Speed + tone + transparency scored by an LLM crisis-comms grader.
Pride, Super Bowl, election cycle, climate week — opt in for Brand Love gain, get it wrong for a crisis.
Four pillar gauges visible on every screen, polled every 20 seconds. Always-on awareness of brand state.
8 quarters (one quarter per week in 8-week format; faster in 5-week intensives).
Designed for ~15-30 students in teams of 4-5. Each team gets a brand to steward.
Undergraduate or MBA marketing courses, brand management, integrated marketing communications, advertising and creative strategy.
Only sim with a Focus Group hero feature — iterative LLM persona feedback BEFORE submission. Visual identity is moodboard / creative-agency, not Bloomberg-terminal.
One of many pre-authored prompts from the sim’s Q1–Q2 closelibrary. Grounded in the team’s actual decisions and used as a scheduled teaching moment.
Q1–Q2 closeYour positioning in one sentence
Read your Q1 positioning statement aloud, then look at the campaign concept you built on top of it. Do they actually match, or did the concept drift toward whatever felt Super Bowl-shaped? Which team's statement and concept lined up most tightly — and did the Creative Panel notice?
Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle via LTI 1.3. Students launch from your LMS with single sign-on; one-click grade publish posts scores back with the rubric breakdown as the comment.
Per semester. No platform fee, no per-section charge, no seat minimums. Institutional invoicing available.