Week 1 of Digital Marketing @GA

I could not ask for a more enthusiastic and engaging group for this session of Digital Marketing at GA’s Atlanta location. In our first two sessions, there has not been a dull moment.  So far, we’ve delved mainly into creating a brand and articulating that brand’s message.  Last night we got a great insight into why some people are more successful at articulating and achieving their goals through this wonderful TED Talk from Simon Sinek.

Understanding that “people don’t buy your what they buy your why“ had a profound effect on the rest of the evening’s learning.  After the video we started with a blank white board and named 4 brands that the group thought were “good” and then four brands the group thought were “bad”. Very interesting dynamics occurred during this discussion.

• Good brands: Coke, King of Pops, Southwest Airlines, Cami Cakes
• Bad brands: Uber, Comcast, Trivago, Monsanto

You can see the discussion starting to escalate below on Instagram,plus a demonstration of Comcast’s continued misunderstanding of “brand”, and then a good example of how not to do social media.

Module 2 of #dgm2 is all about brands. Here are 4 “good” brands and 4 “bad” brands and what each evokes in our audience. Funny, but the brands’ products were never mentioned.

A photo posted by Kevin Sandlin (@kevinrsandlin) on Jan 29, 2015 at 5:45pm PST

After praising the good and torching the bad brands, we realized somethig very curious: the words, thoughts, feelings, and other things evoked by these brands – good and bad – had nothing whatever to do with their products.  That really brought home how we must be intentional about creating our own brands (personal and company) based on a set of core values, taught to us by FAKEGRIMLOCK.

The final exercise for last night was for each of the students to create their own individual brand brief based on Mr. Grimlock’s MVP model above, and then get full-barrel feedback from someone else in the class, one-on-one. AS FAKEGRIMLOCK SAY…

In this #DGM2 class, we’re learning by doing, by creating our brands, then creating a strategy for marketing and promoting our brands successfully. Next week, we dig into analytics. Who doesn’t love analytics?!?