Designing Brand Strategy

3 August – 14 August 2026:  Lecture weeks (on-site at Aalto University campus)

• Daily lectures in the afternoons between 13 and 16 (Monday-Friday)
• Group project work and workshops

Alongside the lectures, students have independent work, either in groups or individually. Students can coordinate with their teammates to complete these assignments outside of teaching hours.

The total workload of the course includes both contact lectures and the estimated amount of independent work. Some of the courses also have pre- or post-assignments included in the independent working hours.

-> Find the total course workload here

After completing the course, students will be able to:

• Build knowledge in unfamiliar design settings by doing in-breadth and in-depth research, namely desktop research with source criticism and interview research with semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis.
• Do design in an iterative manner, where the student produces ideas and learns from their talk-back, newly emerging information, and others’ feedback.
• Reason for design decisions using evidence-based and persuasive argumentation.

• Reflect and evolve their own way of doing design by looking back on the design activities undertaken and by assessing goal-solution fit.

  Additionally, through project work on strategic brand design, students will learn to:

• Analyze organizations’ brands from various angles, such as vision and mission statements, products and services, as well as their competitors’ activities.
• Describe the characteristics of prominent Finnish brands, such as Fazer, Iittala, and Nokia.

We base our design-oriented learning outcomes on Crismond & Adams’ Informed Design Teaching and Learning Matrix [1]. The matrix describes various design strategies and how they are enacted by novice and informed designers. For example, Crismond & Adams state that novice designers tend to “treat design challenges as well-defined” ,whereas informed designers “delay making design decisions in order to explore, comprehend and frame the problem”. Our aim is to encourage informed design behaviors in course participants.

[1] Crismond, D.P. and Adams, R.S., 2012. The informed design teaching & learning matrix. Journal of Engineering Education, 101(4), p.738.

ESCO Learning outcomes

Please use the ESCO classification to describe the skills and competences gained:
https://esco.ec.europa.eu/en

• This course will be taught primarily through active learning techniques, namely an open-ended project on strategic brand design and smaller problem solving exercises.
• The strategic brand design project will be open-ended to allow multiple plausible approaches and solutions, forcing students to make and reason for decisions under uncertainty.
• Working on a specific company’s brand gives students a concrete starting point – rooted to, for example, e-commerce, transportation, or construction industries. Also, redesigning a company’s brand is sufficiently challenging for a design project, as companies strive to gain competitive advantage in changing environments – whether the change is in legislation, customer behavior, or technology development.
• The project will include a design brief, regular discussions with peers and course instructors, and presentations to the class. During the course, smaller problem solving exercises will be used to teach design activities and reasoning, such as customer research, brand analysis, and persuasive argumentation. These exercises will also be related to the strategic brand design project. For example, we may give student teams brainstorming tasks to identify potential data sources for brand analysis in their case companies.
• A typical class session might include a brief introduction to the desktop research methodology, time for individual research, discussions about findings in project teams, informal presentations to the class, and then reflections with the whole class about both the method and the results.
• Students’ work will be assessed based on the quality of their investigation and reasoning, as well as their use of appropriate methods.

Course workload
Contact hours, intensive course participation 30h
Individual work 10h
Team student work 36h
Total 76h (3 ECTS)

The course is graded as pass/fail.

Please note that the undergraduate courses offered by Aalto University Summer School can not be included in Aalto degree studies.

This course does not require previous experience in the topic. This course best fits beginner-stage designers, including for example both bachelor’s students in non-design majors, and early-stage bachelor’s students in design disciplines.

Participants must have completed a high school or vocational degree or equivalent by the time the course starts. However, they do not have to be a degree student at a university to participate in our courses.

Additionally, all summer school course students must be 18 years or older, as it is the legal age in Finland.

Alongside your CV, please include a motivation letter or video in your application. In your motivation letter or video, describe your motivation for taking this course. The recommended length for the motivation letter is 150-250 words, and 1-2 minutes for the video.

Tuition fees for Summer School courses

One course: 1270€ (incl. VAT 25,5%) 

• The course fee includes academic course sessions and assignments, an official digital Aalto University certificate and support from the Summer School team. The fee does not cover accommodation, daily meals, or transportation during the course
• Unfortunately, Aalto University Summer School does not offer scholarships for participants.

Social program fee

More information about the social program coming soon!

Learn about the Aalto University Summer School cancellation terms. You will receive the full terms before making the payment and confirming the course participation.

If you need a visa, we recommend applying by April 15th 2026.

• This is to ensure that we have enough time to process your application and that you have time to make the tuition fee payment, book a visa appointment and wait for the application to be processed.
• You can apply and be accepted to the courses after April 15th. In that case, we recommend that you pay at your earliest convenience so that we can deliver your invitation letter to you promptly.
• According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, the processing time for a visa application is 15 days. However, the processing time may be longer if a more detailed application examination is required.