Building a brand is exciting, but it is not sufficient. When your company scales, grows, changes, and thrives, so must your brand. That’s why we wrote this guide: to teach you the fundamentals of brand management in marketing and provide you with the tools you need to manage and sustain a great brand.
What is Brand Management?
Brand management is the process of controlling your brand’s reputation and improving your audience’s impression of your brand in order to increase brand awareness, equity, and loyalty.
While branding is the act of creating your brand, brand management is the process of monitoring and sustaining it.
Because your brand is alive and breathing, it is continuously evolving. It is also extremely vulnerable to external forces such as news, trends, and current events. In a world where journalists, influencers, and social media users (to name a few) influence practically every narrative, brand management is how you can take control of your company’s story. It is communicating value and building loyal relationships with your followers, admirers, and consumers by utilizing your branding and brand assets.
The Importance of Brand Management
Brand management is crucial because it determines how the public perceives items. Without brand management, consumers may not stay loyal to a product line or opt to repeat purchases with a company after a favorable experience. Good brand management may result in not only increased short-term revenue but also increased long-term financial success thanks to long-term customers.
What is the Goal of Brand Management?
The purpose of brand management is to create a particular perception of a product or company. The brand management team seeks to influence public perception of a product or organization by strategically establishing the font, language, message style, and marketing plans.
The Elements of Brand Management
Equity, recognition, and loyalty are the three important components of brand management. Whilst it may be difficult to quantify the benefits of each, brand management has a direct role in creating all three components of a brand.
#1. Brand Recognition
Brand identification is a common first step in brand management. If a corporation cannot elicit good emotions in consumers when they see a brand, that brand may not be worth managing. Furthermore, brand recognition requires ensuring that brand awareness elicits a favorable response rather than brand opposition.
This is especially crucial for new items entering the market; a corporation must determine how to best manage that brand and invest upfront resources to make the brand more recognizable. On the other hand, more established businesses must select how many resources to invest to maintain or strengthen a brand’s current position.
#2. Brand Equity
The commercial value of a product’s image is known as brand equity. Since a corporation does not gain direct dollars of value from its products having strong brand equity, brand equity frequently leads to higher sales as people connect a product or brand with more worth. Positive experiences, associates, and demonstrated value help to build brand equity over time.
Imagine the example of a billboard advertising Powerade. Powerade may have better brand equity than a generic brand due to its favorable name association (through collaborations with professional sports leagues and a vast market). A brand’s value can increase over time in the same way that a company’s value might improve over time as it gets more valuable.
#3. Brand Loyalty
A customer may recognize a brand, and a customer may even place a high value on a brand. Yet, brand management has failed if that customer is readily persuaded to switch to a competitor product. The goal of brand loyalty is to create such a deep bond between the consumer and the brand that the consumer cannot imagine switching from the company’s products.
Whereas brand awareness occurs on the front end of brand management, brand loyalty is a long-term achievement that can be gained in a variety of ways. Businesses must demonstrate that their products suit the needs of their customers. Furthermore, organizations must ensure that great customer service ensures that a consumer has a positive experience throughout the life of the product.
Best Brand Management Strategies
Now it’s time for some techniques to get you started on your brand management journey.
#1. Do More, Be Different
Do you have a distinctive, eye-catching perspective on what you’re selling? What distinguishes your product from the competition? Why should people purchase your product?
Concentrate on your why. Recall why you fell in love with your brand in the first place, and leverage that feeling to help develop your branding.
#2. Evaluate
Do you have a strategy for evaluating? Examine what works well and what doesn’t. Be prepared to repeat this process throughout the life of your company.
When something works, do more of it. If something doesn’t work, consider how you can improve it. The key to branding is to keep developing.
#3. Marketing Online
The key to the future is digital marketing. There are numerous factors to consider when launching a brand, and having a digital marketing component is one of them. Digital marketing encompasses everything from stunning images to social media strategies.
Investing in a graphic designer and social media manager may be worthwhile. Because humans (particularly those who buy) are essentially visual, having a beautiful design is essential for effective brand recognition.
Similarly, everything in digital marketing is now done online. Here is also where your brand message comes into play, as you can really emphasize what you want your brand to say and be. You are essentially invisible if your company is not online.
Benefits of Brand Management
Now that you understand what brand management is and why it’s vital, consider the following advantages:
- Increases business
- Promotes client loyalty
- Increases brand identification and awareness
- Increases product pricing and value
- Increases sales by retaining consumers
Why would you not want to include brand management in your business strategy? Many products and services are made or broken by their branding.
There are numerous advantages to using brand management if you want to become a household name.
Brand Management Examples
Managing the customer’s perception of a product or service is known as brand management. Brand management examples include:
- Advertising
- Marketing
- Corporate identity
- Product Design
- Consumer service
- Public relations
For any company that wants to increase revenues or become the industry leader, brand management is critical. There are numerous methods for managing a brand, including advertising and public relations.
Examples of brand management practices used by businesses include:
- In order to gain more clients, a business may partner with another business that sells a comparable product.
- A firm may establish a social media account so that it can post images and videos of its products without fear of infringement or other legal difficulties.
- A corporation may desire to update its logo or tagline to appear more modern or appealing to specific groups.
Marketing vs. Brand Management
Brand management and marketing appear to perform the same thing; after all, both departments impact how external stakeholders view the company’s or product’s branding. There are, nevertheless, subtle variations between the two.
Marketing Initially Leads, and Brand Management Follows
When new firms or goods are introduced, those companies or divisions may not have a completely devoted team for brand management. Instead, they usually have a group of marketing specialists that oversee the early outward management of public opinion. That marketing team may be in charge of many basic parts of brand management, but their position frequently comprises much more than simply honing in on a branding strategy.\
Brand Management Is Specialized, Marketing Is Wide
As a product line or firm evolves, the brand in question may receive additional resources, particularly if the brand has been successful. At this step, the brand management team documents, defines, and formalizes the brand strategy. This plan is significantly more extensive than the marketing team’s initial plans. Furthermore, the brand management team is more likely to gather input from other departments in order to ensure broader, company-wide adoption of the brand management implementation strategy.
Brand Management Is Internal, Marketing Is External
A company’s marketing team is largely concerned with external relationships. This involves communications, event presence, public perception, and public relations. Whereas these elements may play a role in creating a brand, brand management is more internally focused on strategically establishing a plan of action. Brand management is more likely to establish the plan and gain internal buy-in, but marketing is more likely to implement the external strategy and gain external brand approval.
Effective Tips For Brand Management
The technique called brand management aids organizations in developing and maintaining a distinctive character. A good brand may set a company apart from its competitors and make it more appealing to customers. Here are seven pointers for successful brand management:
#1. Submit Rules to Your Team
It is critical to have guidelines in place for team members to follow. Setting ground rules makes it easier for the team to collaborate effectively. Consider the following questions when developing these guidelines: What is the team’s goal? What are the team’s objectives?
When working with a team, you will almost certainly be required to submit files or requests at some time. You must learn how to correctly submit items, whether for a project or simply to ask a question so that your team knows what you are seeking help with and can quickly deliver the assistance you require.
#2. Establish a Distinctive Brand Strategy
A brand strategy is a long-term plan to establish a successful brand in order to achieve specified objectives. To develop a distinctive brand strategy, firms must first identify what differentiates them from their competition, as well as their target audience’s needs and goals.
#3. Pay Close Attention to the Client’s Experience
A brand plan should consider the customer experience, and any organization should prioritize generating a great customer experience. There are many ways to create a pleasant customer experience, but one of the most crucial is to make consumers feel valued, appreciated and heard. Developing a brand strategy that considers the consumer experience is critical for any organization that wants to succeed.
#4. Make Consumers Your Main Priority
Customers should be the primary priority for any company that wishes to succeed. Developing a brand strategy that considers the consumer experience is critical for any organization that wants to succeed. Businesses may build a loyal client base that will continue to support the brand by focusing on the customer experience. A high degree of satisfaction, satisfying client requests, and generating a positive customer experience are all components of good customer service.
#5. Maintain Consistent Brand Assets
A brand serves as a guide for an organization’s products and services in order to maintain a consistent message. A logo, colors, typography, iconography, and other elements of the visual identity should be included in brand guidelines. Establishing rules helps to ensure uniformity across all brand users. It is critical to be clear and unambiguous when developing brand standards.
#6. Stick to a Single Brand Style in Your Content
Employ a single brand style for your material. This will help to keep your messaging consistent. To control the style and feel of your document, you must have all of your assets in one location. Putting all of your assets in one location will also make updates easy.
#7. Promote Departmental Cooperation
A company’s success is determined by its ability to effectively use the knowledge and talents of each department. The basic purpose of knowledge management is to facilitate the flow of information between departments so that the firm may run more successfully.
A Knowledge Management System (KMS) is a tool for managing information flow. For a KMS to be effective, it must be able to capture and store the knowledge of the company’s employees, make it accessible to those who need it, and provide a way for people to contribute new knowledge to the system.
#8. Be Current on Trends to Stay Relevant
Because the world of content marketing is constantly changing and evolving, it is critical to stay current on the latest trends and strategies. To remain relevant as a content marketer, you must be abreast of industry advancements. Numerous tools, such as social media analytics, can assist you with this.
Trends are vital for the development of a business since they help us stay relevant and provide us an advantage over our competition. Several trends, such as personal brand building and storytelling, have gained popularity in recent years. But there is always a new trend emerging to take its place.
Conclusion
Brand management is a broad strategy for influencing how the public perceives a good, product, service, or corporation. Building brand equity, loyalty, and recognition is a key component of brand management. It is also developed by a dedicated team, usually after the marketing team has developed an initial marketing plan. A corporation may achieve more short- and long-term financial success by effectively developing a brand management strategy.
- BRANDING STRATEGY: Meaning, Examples, Marketing Strategies, and Consultant
- BRAND STRATEGY: Definition, Examples & Components of Branding
- WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA BRANDING: Meaning, Importance, Strategies & Guidelines
- BRAND EQUITY: How To Build a Brand Equity (With Examples)
- SOCIAL MEDIA BRANDING: Meaning, Examples, Strategy & Guidelines
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