The Complete Guide to Brand Management
Brand management cultivates a brand’s customer-facing presence through marketing and public relations. Its goal is to strengthen consumer-brand relationships and set the stage for revenue generation.
Brand management is essential to success in today’s competitive market. Today, we’ll explore its role in marketing and answer questions such as:
-
What is brand management?
-
How does a brand build its identity?
-
How do brands measure the success of management strategies?
The Fundamentals of Brand Management
Establishing a Clear Brand Identity
A brand’s identity defines the qualities that distinguish it from its competition through its mission and values. A mission describes what an organization wants to accomplish in its industry. Values are the core principles that support the mission and drive the organization forward.
Crafting a Unique Brand Proposition
A brand proposition is an organization’s promise to its customers. Creating a simple proposition statement ? no more than a few sentences ? establishes a foundation from which brand development can happen.
Understanding Your Target Audience
A target audience includes the consumers a brand is best positioned to serve. Brands must understand as much as possible about their audiences, from their core demographics to what defines their buying behaviors. This understanding drives the tone of brand messaging.
Market Research and Customer Profiling
Market research shows a brand its highest-potential customers and defines their shared qualities. Using a quality market research management tool, brands can create customer personas of target buyers and build highly personalized messaging.
Customer personas function like character sketches, defining what a target group has in common and what they need. Creating one for each segment lets a brand craft more personalized messages.
Building and Maintaining Consistency
Visual Branding and Design
A brand’s visual elements establish its identity, just as a person’s outfits and behaviors show who they are.
Logo, Color Schemes, and Typography
A logo condenses a brand’s aesthetic and personality into an easily consumable graphic image. Consumers should be able to look at a logo and understand how the brand wants to present itself. Logos typically feature a brand’s color scheme, such as Coca-Cola’s red or Starbucks’s deep forest green.
Typography links visual design to the brand’s written content, establishing the brand’s go-to text styles and fonts.
Creating Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines standardize an organization’s design and communication choices, so all messages look and sound consistent. All creative and marketing teams should have access to guidelines and associated brand assets.
Messaging and Communication
Audiences expect a brand to “sound like itself” across topics and platforms. While a brand may use a slightly different tone of voice to suit varied messages, there should be a consistent thread of personality and style. Core values must also be constant across messages.
Branding Across Channels
Today’s consumers expect a consistent omnichannel experience. Brand management provides that experience by defining online and offline messaging.
Online Presence
Digital marketing, through a brand’s website, social media, and online advertising, provides limitless possibilities. But it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. Management keeps a brand focused and emphasizes its unique qualities.
A website should incorporate brand colors, graphics, and typography to create a sense of personality. Content should be valuable and audience-oriented while maintaining brand voice.
On the other hand, social media allows brands to reach new buyers and stay in touch with existing followers. Awareness of target audiences will help brands choose the right platforms and gear paid ads to the highest-potential users.
Offline Presence
Branding elements should carry over from digital into offline materials, including print materials and packaging, and a brand’s physical locations. Providing materials that are consistent in aesthetics and tone at face-to-face events reinforces a brand’s connection with buyers.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Brand Management
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs provide objective benchmarks for branding and marketing performance. The more specific these benchmarks are, the better.
Brand Awareness and Recognition Metrics
Brand awareness and recognition show how well the brand has established itself in the minds of its target audiences. The most effective way to track progress is by measuring online mentions and discussions. Effective KPIs include:
-
Branded search volume: How many times consumers search for a brand by name
-
Brand impressions: How many consumers view your marketing content on a select platform
Customer Loyalty and Engagement Metrics
Engagement and loyalty represent the next steps of brand connection. An engaged customer actively communicates with the brand, while a loyal customer chooses that brand regardless of competition. Common ways to measure these qualities include:
-
Net promoter score: How likely customers are to recommend the brand
-
Customer lifetime value: How much a customer spends with a brand overall
Brands should research and track the KPIs that best meet their goals.
Tracking and Continuous Improvement
Brands should not confuse consistency with uniformity. While identity stays the same over time, brands must adjust messaging and approach as marketing performance indicates. When test results reflect changing audience needs, brands need to evolve. If an older approach no longer works, creative teams may need to discuss rebranding.
