Top
image credit: Pexels

Brand Management — The Key to Business Success

May 20, 2019

Category:

One of the strongest differentiators a company can have is its brand. However, a brand doesn’t automatically come with building a business—it takes focus and discipline to create one that attracts customers in a way your competitors don’t.

What Is Brand Management?

Brand management is an umbrella term that describes different facets of your business, including marketing, advertising, design, placement, and distribution. All of these contribute to recognizing and developing your brand personality.

It’s also an ongoing process that involves delivering on your company’s value and maintaining consistency around your brand in order to positively impact your audiences.

Brand management is a critical business practice if your company wants to stay relevant in the minds of today’s modern consumers. But if you want it, you have to work for it.

Brands can have a powerful influence on customer engagement, but trust plays a huge role in this. Without it, the brand promise is broken. For example, FedEx promises that Your package will get there overnight. Guaranteed. If the package wouldn’t arrive as promised, the trust would be broken.

Who Does Your Brand Impact?

Brand management represents a win-win for your entire organization. Here’s the impact that a well-thought-out brand strategy can have on your departments and audience:

  • Marketing: communicates the value of your products and services in a more efficient way.
  • Sales: better understands the value you want to provide.
  • Prospective customers: know exactly what to expect from your business.
  • Current customers: feel confident that they’ve made the right decision to become loyal to your business.
  • Prospective hires: will be drawn by the culture you’re building around your brand.

When a brand is strong, it reduces the perceived safety, monetary, and social risks that the customer is afraid of when buying a product or service. But a strong brand is only possible when a great brand management plan is in place.

The Key Principles of Brand Management

These 6 brand management principles can help you build a strong strategy to usher your business to success.

1. Align your tactics with your strategy
Invest your branding efforts in connecting with the right platforms to communicate your message to your target audience. The outcomes may not be so good from all of them but it’s good to spread the word through different mediums. For example, the television—although expensive—has a wide reach and can bring big, instant results. Social media might have a longer response time, but it’s cheaper.

2. Define your brand
Focus on your brand’s purpose, mission, vision, position, character, value, and how to communicate your strengths with consistency.

3. Stay flexible and relevant
Your brand should always remain open to adjustments. Branding is not an eventuality, but an ongoing process that requires constant tweaks to match your target audience and your brand image. By staying flexible, you can always reinvent your brand to make it even better than last time. Embrace change in a positive way.

4. Empower brand advocates
Involve your supporters who love your brand in the brand building process

5. Keep your enemies close
Any product or service market is never too small to intimidate new business people from entering it and creating competition. There might always be another competitor delivering faster, better, and cheaper products or services than yours. But don’t despair, a challenge can be good for you because it forces you to raise the bar and adjust your strategy to create and offer more value.

6. Measure the effectiveness of your efforts
Your return on investment (ROI) is a key indicator in measuring the results of your brand management strategies. Brand readjustments should lead to greater sales and profits, but don’t focus only on increasing sales. You should also look at achieving better margins by reducing your expenses and overheads.

What does all this lead to?

Developing a brand management strategy will make your products or services more meaningful and offer you the clarity to focus on creating and selling what people really care about.