Bachelor of Business Administration in Brand Building and Management

Purpose

The purpose of this qualification is to provide qualifying students with the appropriate knowledge, skills, and attitudes to effectively pursue a career in Brand Building and Management. This is a career-focused qualification designed to suit the needs of the workplace and not a generic qualification that would warrant electives across all the years of study. Students are given flexibility to explore diverse areas of the Brand Communications and Management fields through working on live briefs (Brand Challenges), in their 2nd and 3rd year.

In addition, 3rd year students undertake a 4-week internship in a communications or management company. Students are encouraged to actively choose a field of specialization in their internship, for example, they are placed in a company where they are able to undergo experiential learning in a number of diverse fields such as; brand strategy, project management, strategic planners, portfolio managers, account/client services managers, marketing manager, and brand architects.

Offering this choice in the third year will ensure that learners, after having been exposed to brand building and managing for a period of two and a half years, will make an informed and mature choice that enhances their employment.

Rationale

This qualification is a career-focused bachelor's qualification. The philosophic underpinning is to consider new business models, new structures, and new systems with appropriate thinking, leadership, and management styles that will be more relevant to developing economies. The rooting of the qualification as opposed to a commerce qualification is to make the point that Vega's approach comes off a humanities platform and considers commerce only in the context of making meaningful difference that creates and adds value to a complex set of stakeholders.

This hybrid approach to art in business is a global trend, and the link to humanities is absolutely relevant to developing economies. This is a specialized qualification with a definite set of career outcomes such as: brand manager, product manager, brand assistant, marketing manager, brand strategist, brand architect, portfolio managers, account/client service managers, communication managers, strategic planners, media planners, media strategists, business entrepreneurs, and indeed for all twenty-first-century functional managers, such as human resources who need to apply their specialized skill in the context of building brands.

This qualification will address critical topics such as Economics, Logistics, Finance, Organizational Studies, Project Management, Governance, Ethics, Consumer Behaviour, Consumer Insight Research, Corporate Social Investment, and Human Resource Management directly relevant to Branding. This qualification is developed with the desire to:

• Meet the learning needs and aspirations of individuals through the development of their intellectual abilities and aptitude.
• Contribute to the socialization of enlightened, responsible, and constructively critical citizens.
• Contribute to the creation, sharing, and evaluation of knowledge.
• Provide higher education to students who choose the more occupationally driven learning qualification provided in an environment of small classes and small campuses.
• Deliver employable students equipped with scarce skills needed to grow the South African Economy.

As quoted in Kotler and Keller, Charles Bymer states that 'brands represent enormously valuable pieces of legal property that can influence consumer behavior, be bought and sold, and provide the security of sustained future revenues to their owners.' Therefore, it is imperative that this qualification integrates an understanding of the critical and creative process required in the branding field, as well as relevant digital skills with economics, finance, management and organization studies, communication skills, and brand strategy. The motivation behind this multidisciplinary approach is to meet the demands of changing industry sectors both locally and globally.

The design of the qualification ensures that students will have the option of further studies in a number of fields. Other stakeholders that have been considered are the regulators in the form of the Council on Higher Education (CHE), Department of Education (DoE), South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA), and the Department of Labour (DOL). This qualification was developed taking cognizance of the requirements of the mentioned regulators, ensuring the academic integrity for all stakeholders. The applicability of this qualification to meet the needs of all the stakeholders is further underscored by the fact that this qualification provides a very strong experiential learning component. This qualification will therefore not only deliver students to the marketplace with a solid knowledge and theoretical basis but also provide entrants with experiential knowledge and skills.

This is somewhat unique as not all providers make provision for experiential learning in three-year qualifications.