What Is Brand Management and Why It Matters
Iconic brand designer Walter Landor once said, "Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind." This memorable phrase perfectly encapsulates the core value behind brand management and the impact it can have on your business.
Rooted in emotion and experience, branding goes way beyond the tangible products you’re selling. Each touchstone, from the way you create your own logo and your website to your interactions with customers, shapes the perception of your brand.
As you’ll see in this article, outlining a strategic plan that not only distinguishes your brand, but raises its brand equity, is the key to successful brand management. In a market flooded with choices, effective brand management will ensure that consumers will not only think of your product first, but prefer it to competitors, ultimately becoming your loyal customers.
What is brand management?
Creating a brand takes time, energy and a deep understanding of your target market. Brand management refers to the relationship with that target audience, and the efforts to nurture and maintain it.
Brand management involves an ongoing process of evaluating brand perception and understanding how to influence it. By increasing the perceived value of your product or service, this enables you to foster brand trust, gain loyal customers and enhance brand awareness.
While you can’t control the way people will react to your brand, you can anticipate it. Successful brand management requires strategy, research and analysis to not only cultivate positive brand equity, but sustain it. You can learn from the responses of audiences to improve your offering, stay ahead of potential issues, and improve your brand reputation in an honest and authentic way.
With this in mind, it is important to recognize the full scope of brand management and the role it plays in all of your marketing strategies. Anyone who comes into contact with your brand, be it customers, stakeholders, employees, social media followers and even competitors, will create their own associations based on how you manage it.
Why brand management matters
Think of your brand as a garden. You dig the earth, plant the seeds, water it and watch it grow. However, in order for your plants to flourish, you must give them adequate sunlight, constant care and attention. With nurturing and support, your garden will thrive and blossom. Just as you wouldn’t leave a seedling unattended and expect it to grow, you can’t expect a new brand to have instant followers and loyal customers without time and effort.
This is exactly what brand management represents and why it is so important. By putting in the work and managing your brand, there are endless opportunities and benefits such as:
Developing brand awareness
Building brand trust
Cultivating a loyal customer base
Positively impacting consumers purchasing decisions
Driving prices and boosting sales
Increasing brand equity
Great brands take years to not only grow but to become established in their industry. Take a look at some leading brands like Apple, Coca-Cola and Nike that have secured their brand identity through purposeful and authoritative efforts, and continuous brand management. It is because of this ingenuity, creativity and relevance that these brands have earned their place within their respective markets, but also in the hearts and minds of consumers.
Brand management basics
In order to successfully manage a brand, there are a few rudimentary principles that you must understand. Regardless of your industry, the marketing landscape is always changing and evolving. By mastering these core ideas and elements of brand management, your brand can withstand the changes and grow in stride.
Brand equity
Brand equity represents the value of a product in the minds of customers. It can be measured through awareness, and the way consumers perceive your brand. An increase in the perceived value of a product is a gain in brand equity. On the other hand, negative perception can have an adverse influence.
It all boils down to understanding the way in which the public sees your brand. And the way you want them to perceive your brand may not always be aligned with what they actually think. By receiving feedback, listening to opinions and collecting data, you will gain meaningful insights into how your brand is perceived, and discover if and how it can improve.
If two companies are both selling vegan sneakers, but one charges more for a similar product, we can assume that the more expensive brand has better brand equity than their competitor, which justifies the higher price. That’s because with positive sentiment, your brand becomes more valuable. This will drive the prices of your products and services, ultimately impacting the overall valuation of your brand within the market, and in the eyes of potential investors and stakeholders.
Brand recognition
You know how when you see certain logos, you instantly recognize the brands they represent? Even without seeing the name or brand colors—a logo on its own can trigger your memory and associations with a brand. That is an encounter known as brand recognition, and it’s a highly coveted aspect of brand management.
Brand recognition is what makes consumers choose one product over another, regardless of price or availability. One key to developing powerful and lucrative brand recognition is consistency. Having distinct visual and non-visual brand guidelines will create cohesiveness and ensure that your brand can be recognized from any platform or channel.
Brand loyalty
Loyalty in any scenario is all about fostering trust, and when it comes to branding, nothing could be truer. Customers who trust your brand and have positive experiences with it will develop powerful associations, which ultimately will make them loyal to your brand.
With loyalty comes an emotional connection that drives consumers decision-making and leads them to repeat their purchases, regardless of competitors, even ones that offer similar products at lower prices. Brand loyalty is incredibly influential, and is supported by word-of-mouth marketing (WOM), where customers genuinely share their experiences and refer prospective consumers to your brand.
Furthermore, brand loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing can lead to social media attention, trends, user-generated content and online reviews, all of which support your branding efforts without spending extra money. This builds a sense of community and inclusivity, leading you and consumers to commit to a long-term relationship together.
Brand reputation
“You can’t buy a good reputation: you must earn it,” says author and businessman Harvey Mackay. In fact, some argue that your reputation is everything—even more important and valuable than the brand itself. Oftentimes, your reputation precedes your products, where potential customers hear about your brand before using it. Again, word-of-mouth marketing plays a huge role here.
Whether it’s a personal brand or service brand, your reputation is important regardless of which type of branding you are working with. Brand reputation comes from each and every aspect of your business, from the products themselves to the packaging, the price, and the customer’s experience of using them.
To uphold a good brand reputation, it’s important to look at the big picture, and the impact of each of your branding decisions. This is particularly relevant for any contributor—whether it is your brand manager, graphic designer or sales representative—they all must be able to holistically represent your brand.
Brand management strategies
Manage your brand assets
From your website and brand colors, to your customer service, each of your branding assets are intertwined while playing their own unique role. One of the keys to great brand management is understanding the nuances of these and the interplay between them. Some examples include:
Website
Brand Name
Logo
Brand Colors
Typography
Slogan or catchphrase
Business cards
Packaging
Successful brand management requires the creation and maintenance of these specific assets, and ensuring that every member of your team understands your brand’s visual language, voice and personality. By creating clear and well-defined brand assets, you enable and encourage your entire team to support your brand management efforts.
Develop strong brand strategy
Having a clearly defined brand strategy will not only map out your goals, but lead you to reach them. A brand strategy is like a roadmap that guides the branding process and sets the course for each element along the way. This includes setting your purpose, defining your core values, and outlining your vision and mission statements. Your brand strategy trickles down to each touchstone of your business and connects them in a cohesive and meaningful way, making it easier to manage as it grows.
Maintain brand consistency
As we’ve already mentioned, consistency is key. And in regard to brand management, making sure that all your brand assets are aligned will ensure that your brand identity is clear to anyone who interacts with your brand. Whether somebody walks into your storefront, purchases a product online, interacts with your customer service or follows your Twitter account, they should always sense that these experiences are consistently “on-brand”.
Find brand extension opportunities
As your brand grows and gains momentum within your respective market, you may find opportunities to stretch your offering. Known as brand extension, this refers to brands using their established name, reputation and clout to develop new products. These products might fall into a similar category, or at other times be vastly different from one another. Regardless, keep in mind that strong brand equity is an essential prerequisite for brand extensions, as it helps gain credibility based on existing trust.
Establish an authentic brand culture
Brand culture is like the unwritten rule book that governs a brand, and it’s values. The culture of a brand is, of course, rooted in its brand identity, but reveals itself through every experience and interaction it produces. It is like the soul of the brand, and can be felt throughout every touch point.
A great brand culture encourages prospective employees to join you, and gives current employees a sense of pride and belonging. If your brand culture is purposefully integrated and aligned with your brand identity, it will encourage your employees to act unquestionably in a way that supports its values and promises to customers.
Measure brand perception
How do you know if your brand is succeeding? Is it possible to grasp if your brand’s messaging resonates with your target audience in the right tone of voice? Do your employees recommend your products or services? Monitoring, analyzing, questioning and learning are all vital components of strong brand management.
If your brand’s core values are not properly conveyed, or if its visual assets miss the mark, then identifying these issues is just as important. That’s a good reason why continuously changing your brand identity to stay “on-trend” can work against you.
The best recommendation is to measure your brand perception every six months to a year to understand if people perceive it the way you intend. This way, you can be sure that as your business evolves, it will remain in tune with your brand promise, and overall goals.
By Kylie Goldstein
Branding Expert and Marketing Blogger
