What is Brand Management?
Strategic brand management is the well-oiled backbone of your marketing activities. Your brand is not simply just the product or visual logo, it extends to both the tangible and intangible components like your connection with clients. Successful implementation of brand management in your organization can provide added value and you can hope to gain increased profits, boost conversions, and achieve long-term competitive advantage like brand loyalty.
4 Strategic Steps of Brand Management
1. Establishing Brand Positioning and Values
The main objective of the first step is to have a clear understanding of what are your brand’s values and how you brand should be positioned in the market – creating your unique selling proposition. There are various tools that can help you differentiate from competitors and define value propositions that meet the needs of your clients. This helps you establish the right message that will maximize your competitive advantage and create value for your brand.
2. Implementing Brand Marketing Strategies
The marketing of the brand is essential for penetrating the market. This step includes the designing of the brand elements (logos, symbols, packaging, slogans) and using these elements to strategize your integrated marketing activities. These marketing activities facilitate the formation and communication of a strong, cohesive message to enhance brand awareness.
3. Measuring and Monitoring Performance
Next, you should take the steps to measure the performance of your marketing activities. This does not mean simply looking at the numbers but also understanding the effects of it – understanding the brand equity and value chain generated through the financial impact of investments in marketing. The importance of measuring the effects is to understand how the previous steps have influenced your brand results and how your strategy could be further optimized to retain client loyalty and generate new ones.
4. Sustaining the Brand
The final step of the brand management process involves strategies to grow and sustain the brand equity. A brand strategy system should be defined to ensure the success of future marketing activities. This can also include brand internalization which integrates the brand message internally. The goal of the system is to maintain the trust and brand equity established through the previous steps. It also provides a roadmap for new products and services created in the future.
The 6 Bs of Brand Management
• Brand Asset Management
Management of the tangible components of the brand management process, keeping these assets consistence throughout your strategies.
These assets are the tangible parts of your brand that the clients can see, experience, and remember.
• Brand Recognition
How well your brand can be identified and recognized without seeing the brand name through your brand elements such as logo, slogan, packaging, etc.
• Brand Loyalty
When a client consistently engages with and purchases from your brand. They can become brand advocates and do the marketing for you through word-of-mouth.
Brand Management Success Stories
Entering the Market
HowJobs is a job matching platform that helps to find great region-specific jobs in real time and is one of the first to utilize LINE as a registration pipeline. They aimed to create a complete and healthy working system that provides education, training courses, and job hunting services. Wanting to attract the right market and have a clear professional brand image, HowJobs sought out Geber to help plan its strategic brand management. Through Geber’s strategic planning, HowJobs was able to successfully build up the brand in a short period – changing from the original name of “NeedJobs” to “HowJobs”. This was an easier, more confident, and professional name allowing HowJobs to more easily approach potential clients.
HowJobs was able to successfully enter the market with these brand management strategies.
Re-Positioning
Here at Geber, we not only have successfully guided companies in entering the market but also have guided those that wished to re-position themselves to become a better brand. Spirit, the fitness brand from Dyaco, was an already well-established brand in the market but it lacked a strong brand identity that connected with its end users. Geber successfully re-positioned and re-aligned Spirit’s visual identity to one with a lifestyle that can now authenticity connect with its end user.
A Different Approach
Brand management is an important component during the hiring process. Having a well-established brand reputation will attract more potential candidates to apply. Wistron ITS is a leading provider of professional technical consulting, information services, and software outsourcing services in Asia. To fully demonstrate the brand value established through the brand management process, Geber produced a film for Wistron that relayed a strong message of “the partner you can trust”. The film was able to show Wistron ITS as hard workers in the field of information that is continuously innovating, meeting the needs of people, and striving to become the most reliable partner of clients, leading them to creating a new future.
Frequently Asked Questions of Brand Management
Why is brand management important?
The importance of brand management lies in the idea that it is the roadmap to your brand’s vision and future development. Brand management establishes meaningful and impactful relationships among anyone who interacts with your brand, from employees to clients. The system set in place through the process allows your brand to adapt to growth and continual reinvention. Through time, your company will become less vulnerable to drastic changes in the market, external and internal stakeholder will be able to experience your brand the way you intend.
What are the advantages and benefits of brand management?
- Strengthens brand associations and emphasizes the differentiating factors of your brand creating an immersive brand experience.
- Increases your brand’s perceived value resulting in cost leverage, increased client loyalty, and increased selling power.
- Provides employees a better guideline to achieving the company’s objectives and goals.
- Aligns the company’s objectives with the strategic planning process creating a cohesive message across all stakeholders.
How much time does the brand management process need?
Brand management is an on-going process that develops result-driven strategies. It requires constant assessment and monitoring. Once implemented successfully in a company’s structure, it will sustain and improve brand’s equity for the long-term.