A well-established brand must constantly maintain its brand image through brand management. Effective brand management raises brand awareness, measures and manages brand equity, drives efforts that support a consistent brand message, identifies and accommodates new brand products, and places the brand effectively in the market. In this article, we’ll give a detailed guide on brand management, including the job description and salary of the brand manager.
What is Brand Management?
Brand management is a marketing function that employs tactics to raise the perceived value of a product brand over time. Effective brand management allows product prices to rise while also building loyal customers through favorable brand associations and imagery or a strong brand awareness.
Brands have a significant impact on customer engagement, market competition, and corporate management. A strong brand presence in the market distinguishes a company’s products from those of its competitors. It also fosters brand affinity for the company’s products or services.
Steps For Effective Brand Management
#1. Knowledge.
Your brand vision is your company’s story, outlining where you’ve been from and where you want to go. It entails asking the following questions: What is the nature of your business; how do you assist people; what goals are you attempting to reach, and how will you achieve them?
Your niche is the market you service within your specialty field, as well as what distinguishes your company and brand from others. Gaining a thorough understanding of this is critical in order to identify, follow, analyze, and track your significant competitors.
#2. Gaining Clarity.
Business strategy and brand strategy must function in tandem. Gaining a knowledge of your business plan is thus an important component of the brand management proces. This is because it is required to maintain clear alignment between the brand and business strategy. This alignment positions your brand for success by providing greater clarity and distinctiveness in order to establish a roadmap that is targeted to your brand’s short- and long-term growth.
Customers define your brand since it is the experience that they identify with your product, service, or organization. To stay current and relevant, you must maintain a clear understanding of your customers’ evolving needs. Just as you must understand and define your own brand, you must know all the details you can about your competitors in order to position your brand in preparation for strategic and tactical marketing activities.
The next step is to define and comprehend your brand’s genuine meaning and purpose. This is accomplished by combining the knowledge and insight gathered during the discovery phase, with a special emphasis on your brand’s goal, niche, consumer profile, and competitors. Here you will provide the groundwork for your brand’s foundations, pillars, and key differentiators, which will contribute to its distinctiveness and allow you to finalize your positioning statement.
#3. Conduct an Analysis.
For existing and established brands, it is critical to analyze the brand’s performance, both past and present, for brand management objectives such as brand development, repositioning, and new brand development. It also has an impact on campaign strategies and tactical marketing activities that may be useful in the future.
The brand awareness statistic measures name recognition or brand visibility, most of which may take place in real time using the internet and various tools. You can use many KPIs for this. One of such is search volume, which tracks your brand by name. Another is site traffic, which measures the level of interest in your brand. The next one is social noise, which analyzes your social media presence. We still have organic reach, which counts the number of unique accounts that have seen a post or a specific piece of content.
#4. Define
For a new brand or startup, values constitute the foundation of your culture, service, product, and communications. These values must be created concurrently with the development of your business, product, or service. Brand values are the unwavering truths and guiding principles that explain what you stand for, and they are the key driving force behind your brand, business, behaviors, and decisions.
Brand pillars The identification of the fundamental company product and service pillars that form the foundation of your brand is the first step in developing a good brand strategy. These pillars become non-debatable, non-subjective core facts that will endure throughout the life of your brand. They will enhance your brand’s visual image by reflecting its mission and generating clarity by focusing on fundamental elements that, when combined, create something appealing, distinctive, and relevant.
#5. Get ready.
Developing your brand qualities will allow you to depict your company’s brand characteristics. These characteristics must be gathered to aid in the development and building of your brand identity. They will combine to form a set of qualities that highlight the physical and personality components of your brand as represented by images, actions, or assumptions. Relevance, consistency, credibility, inspiration, and attraction are examples of attributes.
Your brand essence is the heart and soul of your company. It can be an intangible quality, a mantra, or a few well-articulated words that become a brand’s slogan. Developing a brand essence will be a critical component of branding success. This is irrespective of whether you have an established brand or are creating a new one. It will assist you in defining your brand, giving it purpose and added value, and distinguishing it from the competitors.
The brand personality you create for your product or service will become the human traits you give to your identification and the driving force behind the total brand experience. Establishing a brand personality is an important part of the brand management process since it is a distinct element that will bring your brand to life. Thus, resulting in genuine interactions and relationships rather than just transactional activities.
#6. Create
Choosing a brand name can be tough, and having a clearly defined story can help you get it right. This necessitates thorough planning, and the steps for doing so are outlined in this brand management approach. When you have completed the discovery and positioning phase, including the many pieces required to develop a new brand, as well as your brand values and pillars, you are ready to begin the naming process. There are a few steps to take to guarantee you get it right. But in essence, your brand name is your story in its simplest form. It must stand for something, be able to capture people’s attention, be ageless, unending, simple to speak and remember, and allow for brand extensions, taglines, and slogans.
What you say and how you say it is possibly the most essential thing after identifying your personality as a brand. As a result, messaging must be at the heart of everything you do, both verbally and in writing. The constant underlying value proposition that underpins all of your communications, both internally and internationally, is your brand’s messaging. It is what connects people to your brand.
#7. Design
Your logo design is the foundation of your brand identification. And so, it must remain true to the company’s values and concepts while being created. It should be straightforward, one-of-a-kind, and instantly recognizable in the minds of your target audience. Your tagline is a representation of your brand; it should be catchy and meaningful. And, it should underlie your company’s broader positioning in a way that shows life and character. Unlike a company slogan, your tagline should be consistent and become synonymous with your brand over time.
The graphic design of your brand is how it is visually represented and must be carefully considered. To obtain the right appearance and feel for your brand identity, your brand logo and graphic style should be developed in tandem. To build a graphic style that would resonate with the intended audience, brand qualities should be analyzed. This will feature crucial elements such as typography, photography, graphic imagery, icons, and illustrations. All these combined will visually convey the essence, values, and personality of the brand.
#8. Produce
Marketing promotion is a crucial and all-encompassing strategy for bringing your brand and its key values into the public eye. It concentrates on the broader aspect of promotion, encompassing the four components of your company’s marketing mix. These promotional operations are generally targeted at raising client awareness. They might include commercials, news releases, websites, and personal sales efforts,
Brand marketing campaigns are well-planned, strategic, and highly targeted activities to promote a certain aim, such as increasing awareness of a new product or gathering customer feedback. They often try to reach consumers using a range of platforms, including email, pay-per-click, advertising, and social media. Slogans are used in campaigns to give them a specific and consistent theme in order to emphasize their essential message. A campaign should run for six weeks to maximize impact and no more than eight weeks to avoid becoming too familiar with its target demographic.
#9. Implementation.
When it comes to raising awareness, brand advertising will encapsulate your brand’s essence, values, and personality. It will be used to develop a connection and bond with its intended audience over time. Direct response advertising is intended to elicit an immediate response from prospects, forcing them to take action. Including press in the mix may be a powerful and cost-effective technique for brand creation. And for smaller businesses, it can be a cost-effective option for brand promotion.
Your website is a shop window that conveys everything about your business and beliefs in a single glance. And, in order to be successful online, your brand must be easily identifiable, engaging, and totally honest. To do this, your website or online e-commerce business must include the vital ingredients for success in order to provide a distinctive user experience. This should feature clear calls to action, a streamlined user experience, highly impactful, relevant, and engaging messaging and resources, and a completely optimized and integrated SEO structure.
#10. Mentoring
Associations are specific thoughts and perceptions generated by a brand. Brand attitude and distinctiveness can be used to analyze the influence of brand association.
The key to good brand management is to create a positive and memorable brand experience for your customers through the various touchpoints you and your brand have with them. Its effectiveness is measured through an examination of social media, subscriptions, database volume, and sales.
Your sales funnel, which is how you recruit, convert, close, and keep customers, is one of the most significant business indicators that demand thorough research. Regardless of how your sales funnel is structured, analytics near the conclusion of the purchasing journey monitor conversion rates and prices and reveal a lot about your clients’ purchasing habits.
Read Also: BRAND BUILDING: A Comprehensive Guide
Job Description for a Brand Manager in Brand Management
Because each firm arranges its marketing department differently, the responsibilities of a brand manager may differ from one organization to the next.
Brand managers are in charge of determining what motivates our target audience and implementing marketing campaigns that position our brand in response to those motivators. These marketing activities will not only increase client involvement but will also help to further define our brand’s reputation and image in the industry.
Brand Management: The Salary of the Brand Manager
Brand managers often earn between $60,000 and $80,000 per year, depending on the employer, industry, and years of expertise.
The average income for a brand manager in the United States is $75,258 per year, according to Indeed.
In Conclusion,
Brand management includes not just building a brand but also determining which items fall under a company’s brand. When developing new goods to carry the company’s brand or working with analysts to identify which companies to combine with or purchase, a brand manager must always keep its target market in mind.
Brand Management FAQs
What are the functions of brand management?
One function of brand management is to raise the brand’s total perceived value and establish a loyal consumer base through favorable brand associations.
What is strategic brand management?
Strategic brand management is intended to assist businesses in gaining (or improving) brand recognition, increasing revenue, and meeting long-term business objectives.
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