Brands today are more complex than ever, which makes brand management all the more important. From your website to your social feeds to your customer experience, your brand exists across a variety of channels. Each of these touchpoints is an opportunity to boost brand awareness and built brand equity.
To capitalise on these opportunities, however, you need a consistent and reliable brand experience. That’s where brand management comes in.
What is brand management?
Brand management is the ongoing process of maintaining and improving a brand’s many interrelated components as the brand evolves in response to business growth and marketplace changes.
Effective brand management bolsters positive brand associations, fosters customer loyalty, and builds brand equity, resulting in a measurably positive impact on a business’ bottom line.
In order for your brand to remain relevant and impactful in the eyes of your customers, it must be continuously monitored for consistency and optimised for effectiveness. This is what brand management is all about.
Why is brand management?
In a world where customers make decisions based on emotion and backfill with logic, companies need to maintain every touchpoint where customers engage with their brand carefully.
When it comes to consumer brands, customers often care more about what a product says about them than what it actually does for their lives. For companies like these, brand makes up an overwhelming majority of their business’s overall value. Making brand management even more important than the actual products or services they sell.
Effective brand management ensures your brand remains relevant and impactful across its many touchpoints.
Brand management also:
- Enables marketing teams to build awareness and generate leads
- Helps sales teams communicate the value of products and services more clearly.
- Transforms current customers into enthusiastic brand evangelists
- Attracts top talent by aligning brand experience with company culture
What does a Brand Manager do?
So, who’s responsible for brand management? For most companies, it falls to an aptly named brand manager or a brand management team. Whether they are an in-house team member or a part of your branding agency team, your brand manager will play a similar role.
A brand manager oversees five key areas of brand building and maintenance:
1. Brand positioning
Effective brand positioning is the process of defining the unique place your brand occupies in customers’ minds, especially as it relates to other brands in the market. Your brand’s positioning should be relevant to your audience, differentiated from the competition, and believable based on what you can deliver.
2. Brand awareness
Brand awareness is the process of making your target audience familiar with the distinctive qualities of your brand. Brand awareness is where marketing teams are critical, utilising omnichannel programmes and initiatives to spread the word about the unique ways your brand meets the needs of its customers.
3. Brand loyalty
Brand loyalty is a measure of the affinity customers show for your brand. Cultivating brand loyalty requires consistently managing all aspects of your brand experience. Consistency leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to trust. Trust is why repeat customers become brand evangelists who will augment your marketing efforts.
4. Brand equity
Brand equity is a measurement of the value of a brand as determined by things like loyalty, awareness, associations, and perceived quality. One of the key responsibilities of a brand manager is to ensure these assets are trending upward and continually building brand equity.
5. Brand Measurement
A final component of brand management is the measurement of factors like brand usage, brand preference, and brand advocacy that impact brand health. By tracking these metrics over time and adjusting brand strategy accordingly, a brand manager can be sure a business is getting the most of its branding investment.
What is brand asset management?
A brand asset is any file or document that is used for branding or marketing purposes. This includes things like logos, core messages, marketing collateral, and digital media.
Brand asset management is the process of storing, organising, using, and sharing these assets while adhering to brand guidelines.
Brand assets include:
Visual identity
Your visual identity includes everything from your logo and colour scheme to your typography and photography. Its visual identity is the aesthetic system your brand is recognised for. That’s why it’s so important to make sure it is consistently executed across channels and touchpoints.
Marketing collateral
Your marketing collateral comprises all the brochures, programmes, flyers, and other collateral used to disseminate your brand’s messaging and information. Managing these assets ensures they are consistently created within your brand guidelines and work holistically as an integrated system.
Digital media
From your website to your social media accounts to your paid advertising campaigns, it’s essential that your brand is consistent and clear across digital channels. In today’s world, the majority of stakeholders will experience your brand digitally, which makes the management of digital media assets so critical.
Brand guidelines
Arguably, the most important asset for a brand manager is a robust set of clearly defined brand guidelines. These go-to document is designed to help internal employees and external agencies understand the proper way to execute your brand assets. Clearly defined brand guidelines ensure your brand is consistent and compelling, regardless of medium.
Last line
Many companies devote tremendous amounts of time and money to crafting the perfect brand, only to let it wither on the vine without effective brand management.
Branding experts know that launching a brand is just the first step. From there, it’s critical to implement ongoing brand management practices that monitor, maintain, and optimise each of your brand assets. Effective brand management ensures everyone from internal stakeholders to external audiences have a rock-solid understanding of what your brand offers, what it represents, and what it means to them.
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