KRISTEN BRANCH

Teaching at the Intersection of Identity, Strategy + Sport.

Kristen is an educator whose teaching connects academic inquiry with real-world brand development in sport and culture. She is currently seeking teaching opportunities in sport branding, brand strategy, and related areas at the undergraduate or graduate level.

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

Teaching Philosophy

Oscar Wilde’s instruction to “be yourself; because everyone else is already taken” is not simply a provocation. It is a strategic position and the anchor of my teaching philosophy. Before students learn frameworks, analyze case studies, or build a brand, I ask them to look inward. To examine their own identity, lived experiences, values, and beliefs as the source of their deliberate differentiation, the foundation for an original perspective that is entirely their own. In this exercise, authenticity is not a stylistic choice, it’s taught as a structural source of unique strength. Students who understand this leave the classroom with more than an education. They leave with a point of view. And in a world where algorithmic culture and AI generate sameness at scale, that point of view will be both a strategic advantage and a valuable professional asset.

I teach branding as a meaning-making discipline, distinct from marketing. At its best, a brand creates emotional bonds between people and organizations, movements, businesses, and products. It guides and shapes behavior, establishes recognition, and becomes valued and valuable by facilitating achievement of ambitions, large and small. Marketing asks how we reach people. Brand asks who we are, what we stand for, and why that matters. One distributes. The other defines. A strong brand strategy functions as an organization’s root system, the living pathways that inform leadership, marketing, product development, communication, design, and advertising. Everything orients from it. Both disciplines are essential, but they require different thinking, skills, and frameworks. In sport, this distinction matters most. Athletes, teams, leagues, sponsors, and media properties operate as meaning enterprises. While performance and activity generate attention, their enduring value is shaped by what they represent. Students are taught to build, govern, and sustain that meaning as a deliberate strategic practice.

I believe everyone has the capacity to be both an artist and a designer, a perspective that is distinctive in sport management education and one I believe is urgently needed. Artists express meaning through a medium that influences culture on a micro and/or macro level. Designers apply creativity to solve complex problems within real-world constraints. These are not opposing instincts; they are complementary capacities. Teaching sport management students to think like artists and designers is not a creative indulgence. It is the foundation of the strategic and cultural thinking the industry now demands. As AI continues to reshape industry and the nature of work itself, cultivating this dual capacity in students is not just valuable. It is urgent.

I model this duality through my own practice. My research advances original theoretical frameworks, the Emotive Movement Theory of Talent Brands and the Sovereignty Brand System™, contributions that reflect genuinely new thinking in the field. Innovation is not a teaching method. It is a disposition. And it is one I bring into the classroom alongside the frameworks, the briefs, the pitches, and the critiques.

Why sport? Sport is one of the few forces in the world that creates genuine shared meaning at scale. It crosses cultures, geographies, and social and political divides, forming communities rooted in belonging and collective identity. That is not a marketing opportunity. It is a responsibility. I teach brand strategy and design thinking as disciplines in service of that responsibility, tools for shaping culture with intention, integrity, and lasting impact. The next generation of sport management leaders will build brands, author narratives, and put meaning into the world. I teach with the conviction that meaning, done well, is a force for good. That is the standard I hold myself to and the one I set for every student who comes through my classroom.

Teaching Statement

Sport is one of the most powerful brand environments in the world, and brand development and management roles are rising across it faster than the industry can fill them. I am here to develop the next generation of professionals who can.

I bring over 20 years of applied practice across global CPG, publishing, sport, and entertainment into a classroom grounded in the complexity and cultural influence of the modern sports landscape. I teach the strategic frameworks used by leading global agencies, emphasizing the full brand development process: consumer insight and audience segmentation, positioning and whitespace identification, value proposition and narrative development, brand architecture, and the translation of strategy into coherent expression. All grounded in the art and science of evidence-based insight development through qualitative and quantitative research with iterative testing that makes the work rigorous, testable, and defensible.

My approach is intentionally multi-modal and course specific. In Brand Strategy and Systems in Sport, students move through three phases: lecture and framework acquisition, case-based analysis, and a live client brief, producing professional-grade work that goes directly into their portfolio. In Athlete Brand and Enterprise Development, students analyze historical talent brand trajectories, engage with current NIL scenarios, and develop an original, identity-sourced talent brand for a student-athlete. In Design Thinking and Creative Strategy for Sport, open-ended challenges require students to navigate ambiguity and move from insight to action through iterative cycles of development and critique. Across all courses, students are consistently making, testing, and refining ideas, evaluated continuously on the quality of their thinking at each stage, their capacity to incorporate feedback, and their ability to defend strategic decisions under questioning.

I prepare students for the realities of professional practice. The power of persuasion and the craft of the pitch deck are central in conveying how strategy is ultimately communicated to clients and to the world. I teach students to do this with confidence and clarity. Beyond the pitch, I prepare students for additional realities: brand clarity, using the language of the industry with precision; the ability to direct others through creative briefs and requests for proposals that articulate strategic needs clearly; understanding the difference between market research and design research, and when each is appropriate; and the agency landscape, knowing which partners to engage, what they are built to do, and how to manage those relationships without losing strategic coherence. Most peers will not develop that fluency until years into their careers. Students who leave my classroom will have it from day one.

Frameworks and fluency matter the most when they’re applied. Real-world clients, sourced from my network, and live briefs put both to the test, producing portfolio work students can carry directly into their careers. When a student who arrived on day one, uncertain of the difference between brand and marketing, stands at the end of a semester and delivers a confident pitch, that is the evidence of growth that matters.

My classroom reflects the diversity of the professional world that students are entering. I accommodate different learning styles on request, providing adaptive support for students with specific learning needs, and structuring group projects as simulations of professional collaboration. Different lived experiences are not variables to be managed. They are sources of perspective that strengthen the depth and originality of the work.

I currently assist in teaching Semiotics of Social Movements with Dr. Feinman in the Master’s in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts, where I also mentor thesis students. I studied under Debbie Millman, whose work on branding and meaning-making has been foundational to how I think about both teaching and research. My goal is not to master teaching. It is to keep getting better at it, class after class.

Teaching Interest Areas: Courses + Contributions

The frameworks that leading global agencies and corporate brands use to build, govern, and sustain enduring brands are not yet being taught systematically in sport management education. These proposed courses are designed to change that, contributing to a more rigorous and practice-ready standard of brand education in sport management through curricula organized across three tracks and a co-curricular series:

Brand Development & Management Course Sequence

A four-course progressive sequence in organizational brand strategy, the centerpiece of this curriculum contribution and a program that does not currently exist in sport management education. Each course builds on the previous, moving students from foundational frameworks through applied complexity to live client brand building and repositioning at the highest level of professional practice.

Every athlete, team, league, and sponsor operate within a brand system. Brand strategy is an organization’s root system, and this course teaches students to build and nurture it from the ground up. Students learn branding as an upstream discipline distinct from marketing, moving through the full agency framework: consumer insight methodology, audience segmentation, invisible brand asset identification, value proposition development, narrative and messaging systems, etymology, and the art of naming in service of emotionally connective brand positioning, and the translation of strategy into coherent brand expression. Lecture and framework acquisition are followed by case-based analysis of sports brands and a final project, presented to the class as a pitch, applying learned methodologies to solve a real-world brand problem. Students leave with the foundational knowledge, skills, and toolkits that prepare them for Level II.
Most brand challenges arrive without warning. A competitor enters the market. An audience shifts. A partnership creates narrative tension. An organization expands into new territory and risks losing coherence. This course builds on the foundational framework of Level I by introducing the complexity and pressure of real-world brand conditions. Students tackle a complicated brand scenario with constraints, developing a comprehensive strategic response that goes beyond positioning to include a full governance framework, brand guidelines, and a phased implementation roadmap. The deliverable is not simply a brand strategy. It is a brand system, the complete governing document from which an organization can make decisions, evaluate partnerships, and sustain coherence as it grows. Lecture and case-based analysis are followed by a final project and internal pitch applying the full methodology to a complex real-world brand problem. Students leave prepared for the live client engagements of Level III and IV.
Every established brand reaches an inflection point. A team relocates and loses its community narrative. A sponsor outgrows its original positioning. A consumer brand loses cultural relevance as audiences change. This course addresses that inflection point directly. Working in groups, students engage with a real external sport brand facing a genuine repositioning challenge. Drawing on the full toolkit developed across Levels I and II, students conduct competitive analysis, audience research, and brand audits before developing a complete strategic recommendation. The course culminates with groups formally presenting a comprehensive brand strategy to the client, including revised positioning, updated narrative architecture, and visual identity system if applicable, governance criteria for the transition, and a phased implementation roadmap. Students leave with a flagship portfolio piece, a real client relationship, and the analytical and strategic fluency to lead one of the most complex and consequential challenges in brand practice.
Every great brand begins somewhere. A startup league needs to differentiate in a crowded landscape. A sports entity launches with cultural ambitions but no foundation. A consumer brand entering the space needs an entry point. This course addresses that moment, the blank page, which is both the most creatively demanding and the most consequential challenge in brand practice. Working in groups, this course places students at this starting point with a real client, conducting intake discovery, competitive analysis, and audience research before developing a complete brand strategy from the ground up, including positioning, narrative architecture, visual identity direction, governance criteria, and a phased launch roadmap. The process mirrors professional practice at every stage. The course culminates with groups presenting a formal client pitch of the full brand strategy. Students leave with a flagship portfolio piece that demonstrates the highest level of brand-building competency and the professional experience of having delivered original brand work to a real client.

Specialized Strand

Prerequisites: Brand Strategy and Systems in Sport I and II.
With my continued research and development of talent brand theory and practice, this strand has the potential to evolve into a dedicated, specialized track in time.

Cultural and Strategic Foundations

The following courses establish the methodological, design thinking, and cultural context that strengthen all brand work in sport. These courses may be taken alongside or as prerequisites for the Brand Development Track.

Sports are evolving, and with that evolution athletes as talent brands and their role as entrepreneur is forever changing. This course examines how identity-sourced athlete brands develop from personal authorship into structured systems of cultural and economic influence, grounded in historical analysis and my own emerging scholarship on the Emotive Movement Theory of Talent Brands and the Sovereignty Brand System™. Students analyze real talent brand trajectories, engage with current NIL developments, and develop an original, identity-sourced talent brand for an active student-athlete as a final project. The work is solution-oriented, research-driven, and directly applicable to the era students are entering.

Design thinking is a structured approach to solving problems that do not yet have a clear solution. This course introduces students to the design thinking process as a foundational methodology for brand strategy and creative problem-solving in sport. Students learn to move through five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test, applying each stage to real sport brand challenges that require original thinking rather than standard answers. The course emphasizes the capacity to sit with ambiguity, resist premature solutions, and develop multiple competing ideas before converging on the strongest strategic direction. Students build pattern recognition skills, learn to identify critical observations and their strategic implications, and develop the ability to move from insight to action through iterative cycles of prototyping, critique, and refinement. The course also develops pitch craft, because design thinking without the ability to communicate and persuade is incomplete. Students leave with a foundational methodology they will use across every course that follows and throughout their professional careers.
Sport has always been a stage for cultural expression and social change. This course examines how semiotics, meaning, identity, and collective action are expressed through sport over time, analyzing historical and contemporary case studies through the lens of semiotics and cultural theory. A central thread of the course is the comparative examination of men’s and women’s sport as distinct cultural and brand ecosystems, and the role that fans play in this system. Students develop original concepts for socially-driven brand initiatives within sport, positioning themselves as strategic thinkers who understand sport not simply as entertainment but as a driver of culture and a platform for lasting social impact. The course draws inspiration from my work in the Branded Social Movements program at the School of Visual Arts and my ongoing research into women’s sports fandom.

Applied Design and Experience

The following courses extend brand strategy into the specific applied contexts of product development and experiential design in sport, offering students specialized expertise in two of the most consequential and fastest-growing areas of sport brand practice.

Experiential design is the intentional shaping of how people feel, think, and act during an interaction or event. It is central to how sport brands build loyalty, drive revenue, and create the emotional connections that turn fans into communities. This course examines how sport brands create meaning through physical and digital environments, drawing from real-world practice across live entertainment, retail, and sport to ground students in the full scope of experiential brand design with strategic intent and emotional precision. Grounded in a design thinking experience framework, students learn to define desired audience feelings and behaviors first, then build the conditions that enable those outcomes, with particular attention to the opening and closing moments that shape memory and meaning. The course combines case-based analysis of real sport brand environments with studio-based practice, culminating in a simulated brief in which students design a comprehensive experiential brand system for a sport organization, team, or athlete platform. Final deliverables include an experience blueprint, spatial and interaction concepts, and a strategic rationale, all presented in a final pitch. AI rendering platforms are used throughout as a design tool, teaching students to leverage emerging technology to visualize and communicate spatial concepts at a professional level. Students leave able to design experiences as integrated brand systems operating at the intersection of culture, emotion, and enterprise within the sport industry.
This course examines how sport brands develop, position, and bring consumer products to market, from concept development through packaging, retail strategy, and brand architecture. Students explore the historical evolution of consumer brand identities through the lens of culture, retail, and design, building informed judgment about where sport consumer brands stand today and where they are headed. Drawing from frameworks used across global CPG and sport, students learn to develop products that are both commercially viable and brand coherent, evaluated through iterative consumer testing. AI rendering platforms are used throughout as a design tool, teaching students to leverage emerging technology to visualize and communicate concepts at a professional level. Studio-based with real-world briefs, the course produces portfolio work that bridges brand strategy and product development in ways that are directly applicable to the contemporary sports economy. This course has natural potential to develop into a course sequence ending as an inter-college capstone, partnering Falk students with peers in industrial design, graphic design, package engineering, and fashion design.

Co-Curricular

A weekly visiting practitioner series utilizing my network to bring sport industry professionals into the classroom remotely and in person to share the realities of their careers: the good, the bad, and the ugly: what they would do differently upon reflection. Students gain exposure to diverse professional tracks, build industry networks, and develop the professional judgment that comes from hearing directly from people doing the work. This kind of access is rare in undergraduate education and would be a distinctive offering within a university curriculum.

Non-matriculated

An intensive week-long course designed for freshman sport management students exploring professional career pathways in sport in preparation for the semester-long Senior Capstone. Students visit active sport, entertainment, and brand offices across Los Angeles, hearing directly from practicing professionals about their roles, career trajectories, and how the industry actually operates. Drawing directly from my professional network in Los Angeles, the course gives students early exposure to the full ecosystem of sport business, teams, agencies, brands, and media, in one of the world’s most concentrated sport and entertainment markets. Modeled on the immersive symposium format and designed to be a once-in-a-career experience that connects academic preparation to professional reality from the very beginning of a student’s education.

For teaching inquiries and collaborations, please reach out directly. kris@paperrowte.com

Summary:
Areas of Teaching Interest

Sport Branding and Athlete Enterprise
Governance and Athlete Enterprise
Talent Brand Development
Semiotics and Social Movements of Sport
Consumer Insight and Brand Strategy
Design Thinking and Strategic Innovation
Experiential Design and Brand Environments in Sport Brand
Consumer Product Development in Sport

Academic Background

Honors | Brand Master Award | Most Persuasive Award
The Master’s in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts is the first and longest-running graduate program of its kind in the world. Founded and chaired by Debbie Millman, it brings together some of the most accomplished brand strategists, cultural thinkers, and creative practitioners working today in an intensive, accelerated program that is as rigorous as it is distinctive.
It is not a marketing degree. It is a deep, multi-disciplinary examination of brand as a force that shapes behavior, culture, and meaning; covering brand strategy, semiotics and visual communication, cultural anthropology, behavioral psychology, trend forecasting, economics, market research, and the full history of brand from its origins to its contemporary complexity. Students work on real-world client projects, engage with classic business case studies, and develop their individual brand thinking through one-on-one professional mentorship with leading practitioners.
It is where my independent scholarship on identity-sourced talent brands was seeded, where the Emotive Movement Theory and the Sovereignty Brand System™ took root, and where four years of graduate-level teaching as an assistant instructor followed.
Summa Cum Laude | Rhodes Scholar Nominee | June Thompson Reigner Scholar
Illustration is the study and practice of visual narrative: the discipline of constructing and communicating meaning through image, sequence, and story. At Syracuse, this meant developing a rigorous visual language: learning to see, to observe with precision, to translate ideas into images that communicate with clarity and emotional resonance.
At Syracuse, I spent four years developing exactly that capacity. I learned to look before I made. To understand before I expressed. To find the meaning inside a subject before deciding how to communicate it. That training evolved across mediums. It became the foundation of how I approach brand strategy: identity first, meaning second, expression third. The illustrator’s instinct to find the core truth of something and render it with precision and intention is the same instinct that drives effective brand thinking. Every brand brief I have ever written, every positioning framework I have developed, every identity system I have built traces back to that discipline. Syracuse is where the artist capacity began. Everything else followed from it.