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Brand Architects

Marketing & Brand Management

About This Simulation

Brand Architects gives each student team an 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. Each quarter opens with a brief tied to the brand's industry — positioning challenge, target audience, and a budget cap. Teams write a positioning statement, tagline, and 100-180 word campaign concept, then allocate the quarter's budget across six channels (paid, earned, owned, influencer, retail, experiential), each with different reach economics and different Brand-Love multipliers. 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, a Creative Panel of four expert LLM personas (Creative Director, Brand Strategist, Cultural Critic, Media Buyer) grades the campaign from each of their lenses. Mid-quarter Crisis Desk events fire with a ticking response window and are graded on speed, tone, and transparency — unresponded crises hit Brand Love hard. A published cultural calendar (Super Bowl, Pride, Climate COP, Holiday, and others) offers optional opt-ins that reward cultural fluency and punish tone-deafness. Four brand-health pillars — Awareness, Brand Love, Premium, and Crisis Resilience — compound quarter over quarter and drive the final leaderboard.

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
Allocate marketing spend across six channels (paid / earned / owned / influencer / retail / experiential) with intentionality — 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
Measure marketing effectiveness through reach, engagement, and MROI across all campaigns

Week-by-Week Overview

Q1: Foundation & first campaign

Read the brand foundation (its history, customer, competitors, taboos), receive the Q1 brief, and build the first campaign. Positioning statement, tagline, 100-180 word concept, budget allocated across six channels. First Focus Group + first Creative Panel run at quarter close.

Q2–Q3: Channel discipline & audience test

Cadence sets in. Focus Group before every submission. Learn which channels compound Brand Love vs. which just move Awareness. Second cultural moment lands (typically Pride).

Mid-arc: Crisis Desk & Trust Deposits

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.

Q4–Q6: Cultural calendar under pressure

Climate COP / Earth Week, then holiday season. Tone-deaf participation triggers crises; earned cultural fluency compounds Brand Love. Budget caps grow each quarter, so does the panel's standard.

Q7–Q8: Legacy & final positioning

The last two quarters. The Creative Panel judges the final campaign against everything you've built. Composite score across all four pillars (Creative Quality, Campaign Response, Brand Love, Marketing ROI) sets the cohort leaderboard.