Creative Brand Strategy
TANG LILIN (0376668)
In Week 1, I learned that Creative Brand Strategy is not only about making visuals look attractive, but about building a brand through research, strategy, identity, and execution. This semester’s overall theme is Mental Health Awareness, but each student is expected to choose a more specific direction within this broad topic, such as stress, burnout, loneliness, emotional wellbeing, or healthy coping. The key idea is that a strong project must be relevant, meaningful, researchable, and suitable for branding development.
The lecture also emphasized that this module is process-based, which means the final outcome is important, but the development process matters just as much. Students are expected to research beyond surface level, show weekly progress, accept feedback, and carefully document their thinking in the e-portfolio. Strong work is not just about “nice final artwork,” but about clear concepts, strategic thinking, audience understanding, and consistent development.
Another important point from this lecture is that the semester will move step by step from research → strategy → identity → execution. Before designing anything, students need to understand the issue, the audience, the message, the opportunity, and the intended brand experience. This helped me understand that branding is not only visual, but also about communication, trust, and public impact, especially when dealing with a sensitive topic like mental health awareness.
For Week 1, the main task is Research and Direction Setting. I need to identify a clear topic direction, define the problem statement and audience focus, collect key findings and references, write an opportunity statement, and begin shaping an initial concept direction with mood and visual cues. Overall, this lecture made it clear that a successful project in this module should not start with design first, but with a thoughtful, audience-aware, and strategically grounded direction.
This week’s lecture mainly taught me that strategy should come before design. Before starting any logo, poster, or visual outcome, I need to first understand the issue, audience, message, emotional tone, communication goal, and brand experience. I learned that branding is not just about making something look nice, but about making sure every design choice has a clear reason behind it.
Another important point is that brand strategy is the thinking behind the brand, while brand identity is how that thinking becomes visible. The lecture introduced key strategy components such as purpose, vision, mission, values, positioning, personality, voice, story, heritage, and tagline. These elements help explain what a campaign stands for, who it is speaking to, and why the audience should care.
I also learned that when analysing a case study, I should not only comment on whether the design looks good. Instead, I need to ask deeper questions, such as why a certain visual style is used, how colour supports the message, what action the campaign encourages, and whether the identity creates trust, empathy, or engagement. This made me realise that good analysis is about explaining why the design works, not just describing what I see.
Overall, this lecture helped me understand that a strong campaign needs a clear strategic foundation before moving into visuals. It also gave me a clearer framework for analysing my case study and developing my own campaign direction in a more focused and meaningful way.
General Feedback
In Week 1, we were introduced to the module brief, the overall lecture content, and the main semester theme. We were asked to start thinking about our own project direction under the larger theme of mental health awareness. Mr. Max also told us to begin looking for possible campaigns and case studies that could support our research and help us understand how branding works in real awareness projects.
Specific Feedback
At first, my chosen topic was about how some people in intimate relationships find it difficult to express themselves during conflict. However, Mr. Max explained that this topic was not strongly positioned as a mental health problem, because mental health issues in this module are expected to focus more on a person’s relationship with themselves and the outside world, rather than only on problems within a romantic relationship. Based on this feedback, I adjusted my topic and changed it to how people can properly express their emotions when facing conflict. This made the direction more suitable for the module and more clearly connected to emotional wellbeing and self-awareness.
General Feedback
In Week 2, we had the second lecture, which focused more on brand strategy and case study analysis. During class, Mr. Max also gave each of us individual feedback on our chosen direction and suggested how we should select a suitable case study for analysis. This helped me understand that I needed to choose a case that was not only interesting, but also clearly connected to my topic and useful for strategic analysis.
Specific Feedback
The three campaigns I selected were all considered acceptable, but Mr. Max pointed out that Insomnia Awareness Night involves some scientific and clinical methods, so if I chose that campaign, I might later need to understand and reflect those scientific approaches more deeply in my own campaign development. This would require more effort and more specialised research. He recommended that I consider the third immersive campaign, InSomnolence, instead. However, after researching it more carefully, I found that InSomnolence is less focused on insomnia itself and more focused on encouraging people to discuss sleep and insomnia as a social issue. In the end, I decided to choose World Sleep Day because it fits the assignment requirements more clearly and is more suitable for research. More importantly, its purpose and direction are very close to my own topic and campaign goal, which makes it a stronger and more relevant case study for my analysis.
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