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Brand management is heavily connected with brand equity, loyalty, and recognition. This complex endeavor is often spearheaded by a dedicated team within the marketing department. While the marketing team handles the foundational brand strategy, successful execution requires collaboration with other crucial departments.
Are you planning to launch your brand but have no idea where to start? Don’t worry, we’re here to guide you. Discover how it works and learn the strategies to ensure your brand’s consistent and authentic expression across all touchpoints.
Table of Contents
- What is Brand Management
- Elements of Brand Management
- Strategies for Effective Brand Management
- Partner with Penji for Consistent Branding Across All Channels
What is Brand Management
Brand management is a marketing function that encompasses activities and strategies to establish and nurture a brand’s identity, reputation, and equity.
Effective brand management requires awareness of the brand, its target audience, and its competitors. It’s also a continuing process that requires careful planning, execution, and monitoring so the brand remains competitive and resonates positively with customers.
It may take years to establish a brand, but when it finally happens, it has to be maintained through creativity and innovation. Some notable brands positioned as leaders over the years include Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Ford, and Disney.
Elements of Brand Management
As mentioned earlier, the critical elements of brand management are equity, recognition, and loyalty. While the benefits of each may be difficult to quantify, brand management directly influences all three aspects of a brand.
Brand Recognition
Brand management often kicks off with brand recognition. If a company can’t engender positive emotions in people when they see a brand, there may be no brand to manage. Likewise, brand recognition is about ensuring that recognition of a brand invokes a positive response instead of opposition.
Brand recognition is important when a new product is launched to the market. A company must invest in making the brand more recognizable. On the other hand, a more established brand can still allocate resources to strengthen its existing position.
Brand Equity
Brand equity is the commercial value linked to a product’s image. Though a company doesn’t directly receive the actual value from its products with high brand equity, brand equity translates to more sales. This is because consumers recognize a product with greater value. Moreover, brand equity is built over time through experiences and demonstrated value.
For example, Nike displays a billboard to advertise its latest athletic shoe product line. Due to Nike’s positive association, it may have more significant brand equity than other brands. As a company becomes more valuable over time, a brand’s value can increase, too.
Brand Loyalty
A customer may recognize a brand and even assess substantial positive value with it. But, if that customer is easily swayed to patronize a competing product, brand management has failed. Brand loyalty aims to invoke a strong connection between the consumer and the brand so the consumer can’t be easily swayed to switch brands.
Development of brand loyalty takes time and is earned in various ways. Companies must show that their products answer the needs of consumers. They must also ensure authentic customer service so that a customer experiences positive things throughout the product’s life cycle.
7 Strategies for Effective Brand Management
Brand management may seem complex, but there are several techniques to make the process work. Here are some strategies for effective brand management:
1. Establish Your Brand
The process often starts with establishing a strong mission and vision statement, logo, and target market. While the marketing team is responsible for these basic requirements during the early stage of the business, brand management can further refine and implement the branding efforts.
2. Create Compelling Stories
As consumers patronize a product, the brand management team must strengthen the relationship between the product and the consumer. This entails creating emotional stories by building human connections when using the products.
3. Leverage Software and Tools
Corporate branding must be consistent across all media platforms. Aside from a website and social media accounts, this includes television, radio, and print advertising. It is crucial to link your brand strategy cohesively to convey a consistent message.
4. Establish a Consistent Branding Language
Similarly, brand management must use consistent language and tone. This can be expressed more easily through printed advertisements. However, challenges may arise if different teams handle different marketing teams. That’s why the brand management team must ensure the wording and emotions behind marketing communications are consistent.
5. Establish Internal Rules
All the techniques above are useless if the internal branding and marketing teams are not aligned. So, it’s essential to establish rules and limitations on specific activities. For example, the team may restrict using particular color schemes, fonts, or images. Any discrepancy must be subject to approval through the brand management team.
6. Encourage Collaboration of Teams
Every department or team must work together to ensure successful brand management. Implementing a Knowledge Management System (KMS) can improve the flow of information between departments and ensure efficient day-to-day operations. The KMS must capture and store the knowledge of the company’s employees and make it accessible to those who need it. In addition, it also provides an opportunity for employees to contribute new knowledge to the system.
7. Remain Updated
Lastly, you must be aware of the latest trends in your industry. Fortunately, there are several tools available that can help you with this. This includes but is not limited to business intelligence tools like Tableau or Qlik and social media analytics like Sprout Social or Google Analytics.
Partner with Penji for Consistent Branding Across All Channels
One of the strengths of a solid brand management strategy is having a consistent and recognizable brand image. That said, creating clear and concise brand guidelines is essential. Use one brand style for all your content to maintain a consistent brand message. Also, keeping your assets in a single location ensures consistent branding and facilitates efficient document updates.
Still confused about how to create a consistent brand image? Watching this short demo video will help you learn how to get branding, marketing, and advertising needs from Penji.
About the author
Rowena Zaballa
With a background as a former government employee specializing in urban planning, Rowena transitioned into the world of blogging and SEO content writing. As a passionate storyteller, she uses her expertise to craft engaging and informative content for various audiences.
