Strategic Design: The Art and Science of Branding

A process tour, not a skills tutorial

Su Mathews Hale and Michael D'Esopo, both senior partners at Lippincott, structure this class as a straight walk through their agency's branding methodology, using the real repositioning of AmeriSuites into Hyatt Place as the connective thread across all eight lessons. That choice gives the course a spine most branding classes lack: instead of separate lectures on strategy, naming, and design, each topic loops back to the same client problem, so a viewer can trace one decision (a tired, inconsistent select-service hotel brand) through research, positioning, naming, logo design, and measurable business results. The project brief at the end, rebranding Carnival Cruises for a millennial audience under a hypothetical Hyatt acquisition, asks students to apply the same sequence themselves.

The strategy lessons are the strongest material. D'Esopo lays out a discovery process built on executive interviews, employee surveys, customer interviews, ethnography, and competitive research, then shows how those inputs converge into a position statement ("larger than home"), a brand promise, a set of differentiators, and personality attributes. The detail that sells this section is specific: Hyatt Place's target guest was the "road warrior," a traveling salesperson missing the familiarity of home, and every subsequent decision, from oversized flat-screen TVs to a self-service check-in kiosk, gets traced back to that single insight. Watching a soft concept like "vibe" get operationalized into concrete room features is the clearest teaching moment in the course.

Design and naming get thinner treatment

The naming lesson explains the filtering logic well: hundreds of generated candidates get narrowed by legal search, linguistic analysis, and fit against personality criteria, with a good aside on why agencies withhold logo work until a name is locked. But it stays conceptual. Nobody demonstrates a naming session, shows a shortlist, or walks through how "Hyatt Place" beat its competitors. The design lesson has one genuinely memorable payoff, the disappearing dots that reveal an H at night, but otherwise describes the sketching-before-color approach in general terms rather than showing sketches or iterations.

The closing lessons on experience, research, organization, collaboration, and implementation move quickly and start repeating ground already covered. The scent, soundtrack, and "cozy corner" couch details are good, concrete evidence that branding extends past the logo, and the RevPAR and brand-attribute metrics in the implementation lesson give the course a rare finish: proof that a rebrand actually moved the business. But these later sections read more like a highlight reel than fresh instruction.

Verdict

This is a well-organized overview of how a top-tier branding agency thinks, anchored by a genuinely useful case study, but it teaches vocabulary and process more than transferable technique. Anyone hoping to leave able to name a company or sketch a logo will need to look elsewhere; anyone wanting to understand how strategists and designers actually collaborate on a real assignment will get real value in well under an hour.

What you will learn

• ·How to run brand discovery through executive interviews, employee surveys, customer research, and competitive analysis
• ·How to translate research into a brand position statement, promise, differentiators, and personality attributes
• ·How naming works as a filtered process: generate hundreds of candidates, then screen against legal, linguistic, and strategic criteria
• ·How logo design starts from black-and-white concept sketches tied to personality attributes before any color or typeface choice
• ·How to extend a brand beyond the logo into scent, sound, physical space, and staff-facing behavior
• ·How to measure a rebrand's success using RevPAR and brand-attribute tracking, not just visual approval