The New Fundamentals

What's Missing In Marketing Education?

Most marketing education was built for a stable operating environment where brands had the luxury of moving glacially through phases: segmentation, targeting, positioning, comms.

These fundamentals haven't changed. But the environment has, violently.

We were trained for a media era that was top-down, centralised, campaign-driven, predictable. Plan, create, burst, track, repeat.

Come 2026, everything has gotten simultaneously more complex and more compressed. Brand building is now non-linear, always-on, and increasingly built bottom-up through mediated contexts: influencers, partnerships, community activations, collaborations. We cannot control this level of creative output as tightly as we have in the past. We must, instead, learn how to orchestrate it.

Our static plans no longer work in fluid worlds. Marketers do not need yet another framework to fill out. We need to sharpen our judgment - to know how to decide what matters, what to ignore, what to do next, and how to articulate and defend those decisions to the rest of the business.

We’re offering something that fills this gap, through an educational experience that’s designed to engage, entertain, and create connections between participants.

What You'll Learn

Here's the modules we'll cover.

→ The Old and New Fundamentals of Brand

What has and hasn't changed. New models for understanding how brands are actually built now.

→ Creating and Assessing for Coherence

How to build an orchestrated brand system that delivers coherence across increasingly diverse channels and outputs. The new role of creators and mediators in getting to mass market.

→ Building Culturally Attuned Brands

The importance of cultural attunement in modern brand building. How to diagnose relevant cultural currents and integrate them meaningfully into brand strategy. Models for both reactive and proactive cultural attunement.

→ Developing Judgment and Persuasion

How to build proper arguments for brand to the business. What counts as evidence. How to be convincing when the room is skeptical.

This is not just a brand strategy course. It's about how to actively manage brands under the actual challenges and constraints marketers face today.

What You'll Do

The lessons of this course are not ones you can learn passively. This is a course you do, not watch. It’s definitely not a stack of frameworks for you to memorise and never use.

We reviewed what actually develops judgment across atelier education, PhD advising, research labs, writers' workshops, and on-the-job learning. That research shaped every structural choice.

You will absorb, reflect, and complete tasks on your own time. But all learning is better shared. You’ll be placed into groups where you’ll push each others’ thinking, challenge assumptions, and gain perspectives you’d never get from within your own organisation alone.

Commitment & Timings

The course starts w/c 4 May and runs for 5 weeks.
You’ll commit 4 to 5 hours each week, through:

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Live Seminars with Eugene where you listen and actively discuss.

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Readings that break down or flesh out concepts, so you get more out of the seminar. 

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Activities that apply directly to brands you work with, which have immediate professional relevance.

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Studio groups where learners evolve one anothers’ thinking and productively critique work. We’ll curate groups of ~5 people who stay together throughout the course, but you’ll do activities individually. Where possible, you’ll be matched with people in the same city.

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Feedback and reflection built in throughout.

We're hosting from Australia. Each week will have a 60 minute live seminar. There will be two streams to select from to account for different time zones.

Stream

AEST
(Melbourne)

CET

EDT

PDT

9:00 AM Wed

01:00 AM Wed

7:00 PM Tue

4:00 PM Tue

6:00 PM Wed

10:00 AM Wed

4:00 AM Wed

1:00 AM Wed

Timezone Calculator

Who This Is For

→ This is for people who are already working in or with brands.

→ You've felt the gap between the ‘timeless truths of marketing’ and what managing a brand now demands

→ You may have come from strategy, performance, digital, PR/Comms, product, design - or a bit of everything, and you’re looking to understand brand deeper as a complete system

→ You’re looking for something that combines the intellectual rigour of a university but delivered in a way that makes learning enjoyable, and actually relevant

→ You’re interested in being part of a deliberately diverse cohort: different industries, seniority levels, perspectives

This is not a brand strategy/management 101 course. You’ll need a grasp of the basics.

What You'll Walk Away With

This course is designed to give you the strategic clarity, cultural literacy, and decision-making capability needed to build brands in an increasingly chaotic operating environment.

→ An orchestrated brand system

A system-level understanding of how your brand creates coherence across creators, platforms, cultural moments, and mediated contexts. This is work you can use the week the course ends.

→ Knowing when and how to leverage trends

The ability to sense a cultural moment and decide if it's relevant to your brand, and know how to effectively apply it across channels.

→ Genuine judgment capability

The confidence to make decisions without needing perfect frameworks, to assess 100 outputs and understand whether things are moving in the right direction.

→ The language to persuade skeptics

How to ask the right questions and build cases for decisions that convince finance, performance, legal, and execs brand is worth investing in.

→ A peer network that gets it

A deliberately diverse cohort who understand the same challenges you face. People you can message when you're stuck on a brief, need a gut-check on a decision, or want perspective on a platform idea.

Your Teachers

Eugene Healey

Lecturer

Eugene is the educator, brand strategy consultant, and creator for marketing’s era of entropy. He develops strategies for brands to survive a climate where media is fragmented, attention is fracked, and algorithms have dissolved mass culture into soup.

His work spans boardrooms and lecture theatres – consulting for global brands like Google, Spotify, Red Bull and FEELD, delivering keynotes at major industry conferences including Snap Forward and TikTok Newfronts, and formerly lecturing at the University of Melbourne's postgraduate Business School.

He regularly shares his insights on brands and culture to a following of over 500,000, and his thinking has been featured in The Guardian, Financial Times, Vogue Business, Dazed Magazine and Dieline.

Gabrielle Grist

Facilitator

Gabrielle is a designer, researcher and educator who likes to untangle the invisible logic behind how people, experiences and systems actually behave, and help people rewire it.

She specialises in strategic, service, and behavioural design, working across public and private sectors.

She currently leads design at a government agency, and has held teaching and Honorary Fellowship roles at The University of Melbourne.

Pilot Pricing

Pilot price

$499 USD

This is a one-time offer for this cohort only. Future cohorts will cost $1000+.

The content is complete and we have carefully considered the pedagogy. But this is a pilot, meaning we want to refine the experience based on real feedback. We need people who'll be okay with a quirk here and there, and honest about what works and what doesn't.

How to Apply

Applications are open now. Maximum 50 students.

We’re selecting a cohort that will challenge and enrich each other. Diversity of industry, experience and perspective matters more than seniority or job title.

Applying should take under ten minutes. If accepted, you’ll receive a payment link and onboarding details. Your spot is held for 7 days. If payment isn't completed by then, we offer your place to someone on the waitlist.

Apply Now