Brand Experience Strategist
Creating offline and online brand experiences through creative strategy.
My name is Deniz Kökten. I am a Milan-based junior brand experience strategist with a diverse background spanning technology risk consulting and a master's degree in Digital Business Innovation, where I focused on brand management from a strategic and creative perspective.
My research examined marketing campaigns from a 360-degree approach, with a particular focus on event marketing as a strategic discipline, exploring how format selection and experiential design shape consumer-brand relationships. The projects I develop explore what it means to design brand experiences where strategy and sensation work as one.
I bring cross-functional expertise across brand strategy, experiential marketing, and audience engagement, with a particular ability to translate complex business challenges into coherent brand narratives. My practice spans both online and offline. I am drawn to environments where strategy and creativity converge.
Experience
Education
Full projects available upon request.
The following projects are speculative works, conceived as strategic and creative proposals to explore brand experience design across different contexts and industries.
A conceptual multi-sensory event designed for HELIOT EMIL's AW26 season at Spazio Maiocchi, Milan. Built around the theme of cymatics, the study of visible sound, the event translates the brand's universe into a continuous field of perception, operating across five sensory channels: sound, sight, touch, taste, and smell.
The project spans creative direction, experience design, and event strategy, integrating collaborators across biofeedback performance, spatial sound, gastronomy, and olfactory design. Five installations form the experiential core, each exploring the relationship between frequency, matter, and human perception. A limited edition product collaboration extends the concept beyond the event, embedding the brand's design language into a collectible object.
The Criterion Collection is an American film curation institution that has been restoring and publishing the world's most important films at the highest technical quality since 1984. Widely regarded as a cultural reference point among cinephiles, the brand currently remains accessible only within the United States and Canada.
Despite a strong cinema culture and a growing awareness of Criterion across Europe, the brand has no official physical or digital presence in the region. This project proposes a speculative festival activation in Milan as a strategic entry point, a way for Criterion Collection to test European demand, build an initial community, and establish brand visibility on the continent. The activation addresses experience design, product strategy, and community building simultaneously, laying the groundwork for Criterion's long-term growth in the European market.
Research
Strategic Decision-Making and Format Selection in Campaign Design: The Context of Event Marketing
This thesis examines how brand elements including identity, personality, and experience interact to shape consumer-brand relationships, and how storytelling operates as the strategic mechanism that translates these elements into consumer meaning-making.
Building on this foundation, the research investigates selected advertising formats based on their strategic use and role in audience engagement. Event marketing is then examined as an integrated component of campaign design, exploring how format choice, experiential richness, and brand-event congruity drive affective and cognitive outcomes.
Synthesizing these dimensions, the thesis proposes a holistic, 360-degree framework that connects campaign objectives, audience needs, and communication strategies across pre-event, during-event, and post-event phases, offering both theoretical and practical implications for brand experience design.
