Bachelor's & Master's Degrees – Alexandru Ioan Cuza University

Brand familiarity had a strong effect on brand attitude and purchase intention. Ad clarity did not carry across most measures, but video did produce significantly higher social endorsement than the static image. So the main hypothesis — that clarity levels the field for unknown brands — came out partly supported and mostly not. I wrote it up that way rather than forcing the result.

• •Branding. Rebranding project on Deichmann — market and identity audit, research, differentiation, verbal and visual identity changes with the reasoning, plus recommendations for the brand manager and for the agency. Logo concepts alongside. Separate presentations on David Aaker's brand portfolio strategy and on Byron Sharp.
• •New Media. Paper on whether internet use increases or reduces social connection — Castells, Rheingold, Kraut's internet paradox, Parks & Floyd.
• •Case studies in PR and Advertising.
• •Practical oratory. Paper and presentation on style and discursive expression, using Sălăvăstru's treatise and political speech examples.

• •Copywriting. Full client brief for Bindu Coffee Drinks & Food House in Iași — brand story, vision, mission, product range, project rationale, objectives, and primary/secondary audiences split by age and digital habits.
• •Event organisation. Six assignments including a mind-mapping exercise, plus a final portfolio.
• •Academic ethics and integrity.
• •Internship. Six-week analysis of the Palatul Culturii museum's Facebook communication.

• •Media planning. Seminar portfolio on Bindu — owned-platform audit with specific fixes, cross-linking, posting schedule, keyword and hashtag use, content variety, and an assessment of free tools (Hootsuite, Buffer, BuzzSumo). Separate assignments on a personal media diary, owned media, and media monitoring.
• •Public affairs. Case study on Nexen and community consultation in the Alberta oil and gas industry — the five-step consultation process, the APPA association's mission and committee structure, and the Canadian business ethics code.
• •Semiotic analysis of advertising. Ad classification and advertising psychology, working from Sebeok's introduction to semiotics.
• •Strategies of communication in the public sphere. Seven assignments plus two projects — Toyota Iași and PepsiCo.
• •Interpersonal processes and relations.

• •Corporate communication. Project on bahlui.ro, a civic think tank in Iași — mapped communication instruments across six stakeholder groups (newsletter, debates, instant messaging, video conferencing, website, email), then a corporate memorandum applying McLean's message-organisation principles.
• •Advertising campaigns. Full teardown of #pinkypromiss, a breast cancer awareness campaign by 24sata for Roche in Croatia. Agency and team breakdown role by role, evaluation of the client brief, and the reasoning behind the creative approach.
• •Audio-visual materials in PR and advertising. Three practical projects: a moodboard, a display ads set, and a social media project with a content calendar built in Milanote. Course covered digital imagery, visual brand identity elements, graphic style, and building social media templates in Canva.
• •Dissertation laboratory. Two staged submissions building toward the final thesis.
• •Internship: SocialBee Labs. Social media management platform. Customisable posts, profile and group management across social platforms, and promotional content. Fully remote.

The evidence on music improving product recall is weaker than the field assumes; congruence between music and the rest of the ad matters more than the music itself; and gender differences in response are real and under-studied. The conclusion includes its own limitations and a list of research gaps worth filling.

• •Integrated marketing communication. Multi-part team campaign project for Toyota in Iași, run as a mock agency. Part 1: SWOT + PEST and brand positioning. Part 2: primary research into hybrid-car purchase drivers with a questionnaire. Part 3: hypothesis against survey results, audience definition, and campaign objectives. Separate group project with focus group sessions and photo documentation.
• •Foundations. Introduction to advertising · Mass media systems · Press communication · Construction of the advertising message · Rhetoric · Ethics and communication · Fundamentals of public relations · Communication theory · Research methods.
• •Social campaign project and a creative brief assignment.
• •Field placement file.

• •Production of PR and advertising materials. The heaviest practical course. Built a full visual identity manual for a brand across five design iterations, plus a trifold brochure, a client-facing PowerPoint, and a colour system. Photography module covering composition, framing, and the shot scale from wide to extreme close-up. Video module covering camera movements and storyboarding.
• •Integrated marketing communication, continued.
• •Interpersonal communication, from Kory Floyd.
• •Photoshop project work.

• •Political communication. Team project profiling Vlad Voiculescu and the Cioloș technocrat government — party record, formation, and an assessment of strengths including transparency measures and bureaucracy reduction.
• •Propaganda.
• •Internal communication.
• •Communication law.
• •Rhetoric of the print image.
• •PR for NGOs project.
• •Paper on the role of music in message construction — the ground for the thesis.

🔬 Research methods that hold up

Questionnaire design, experimental manipulation and pre-testing, semantic differential scales, MANOVA, regression, mediation analysis, sample attrition handling. The master's dissertation is a properly specified experiment, not a survey with a chart on the end.

📚 Reading primary literature

Both theses are built on journal articles rather than textbooks, and both state where the evidence is thin rather than only where it supports the argument.

🎯 Brand + campaign work end to end

Rebranding, creative briefs, campaign objectives, audience definition, media planning, owned-channel audits, campaign teardowns.

🎨 Production, not just strategy

Visual identity manuals, photography, video and storyboarding, Photoshop, print materials, display ads, social templates and content calendars.

🌐 Two languages of the field

Romanian academic communication theory on one side, and the Anglo-American empirical advertising research tradition on the other, since almost all the source material was in English.