Dr. Franck Celhay receives the AFM Prize for Pedagogical Innovation for his course co-designed with Romain Diant of Studio Asensò.

On May 11, Dr. Franck Celhay of Montpellier Business School was awarded the 2023 Teaching Innovation Prize by the AFM (Association Française du Marketing) for his course “Brand Content / Brand Design: conceiving a brand with a mission”, built alongside Romain Diant of Studio Asensò, and taught to final-year students in the Grande Ecole and Master of Science programs.

This 30-hour module trains students in the software of the Creative Cloud Suite in partnership with Adobe, the industry standard for all marketing and communications careers.

“While teaching soft skills is fundamental in Grande Ecole, it must not be to the expense of technical skills. The decision to develop such a pedagogical module is based on the daily need for marketing specialization students to use these creative tools during their internship, alternance or first job,” explains Dr. Franck Celhay.

The module is structured in three phases. First, MBS is dedicated to its mission of training leaders in responsible economic transition, and asks students to imagine a brand with a mission, committed to social and/or ecological issues. “From this CSR-based foundation, the participants then focus on the Brand Content aspect, creating a brand identity, defining its positioning and starting to integrate the first graphic elements based on keywords and mood boards,” adds the lecturer.

“In the final phase, students draw on their newly acquired expertise in Adobe Suite software to design a flexible, responsive visual identity system, based on a graphic charter, a master logo, variations and additional resources to bring it to life,” explains Dr. Celhay.

“At the end of the course, students will be able to add their knowledge of these essential corporate software applications to their CVs. However, the aim is not to turn them into graphic designers, but rather to train industry experts who, aware of the difficulty of the exercise, will be able to bring a new perspective and better analysis to discussions with graphics teams, and perceive the added value of an original creation compared with what can be offered by some templates and resources accessible via image banks or AIs,” concludes Dr. Franck Celhay.