Post by Insa Stroman

Back to China as a student & Branding in the AI-Digital Age   Over two decades ago, my international journey started in Shanghai & Nanjing with internships & studies. This June I participated in a module on Branding by #KEDGE China at #SJTU Xuhui campus jointly with #FS #EMBA and #KU. Being familiar with the country & people, it felt like coming home.   Branding as introduced by Michel Gutsatz is universally applicable whereever organizations, humans, LLMs, interact. Company Branding extends to external (customers) and internal stakeholders (employees/associates). A Personal Brand is part of charismatic leadership, and for a CEO, it can account up to 44% of a company’s market value. -> Branding shapes what people think and feel; Marketing focuses on how to reach, persuade, and inspire them to act -> moderate companies sell products, good companies sell technologies, and best companies sell brands (Robert Mundell) -> Brand Identity (of sender) is perceived through signals & experience as Brand Image (at receiver), the two should overlap as much as possible to unfold power, through consistent Distinctive Brand Assets & seamless Customer Experience -> a Brand Constitution is a dynamic, operational framework which codifies the entire identity (promise, emotion, data) in a semantic corpus which is lovable for humans & legible for LLMs -> Branding translates Functional Needs to Symbolic Needs, and Technical Features to The-Job-to-be-Done. Storytelling narrates the World Before, the Insight, the Mission, and the Proof.   Charley Dong explained how GEO (generative engine optimization) can be implemented through the STREAM framework.   Students from Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, KEDGE Business School and Korea University / 고려대학교 contributed to the entrepreneurial start-up pitch day.   Kudos to Yang Lu & Dr. Barbara Drexler, to my cohort, esp. Dr. Jian (Helen) Liang & Jing Wang for cultural moments in Shanghai & Hangzhou, and the business visits at Fosun 复星 and AGIBOT.