Why Brand Management Is Important for Growth
Without effective brand management, a business may not experience any meaningful growth. In addition to helping your company resonate with existing and potential customers on an emotional level, brand management also helps keep you in the minds of your target audience. Even if prospective customers don’t need your offerings immediately, a strong brand can ensure they think of you first when they require your products and services.
6 Benefits of Brand Management
When executed successfully, brand management delivers numerous advantages beyond helping you maintain a good brand name. Some key benefits of effective brand marketing management include:
Differentiation
With heightened competition, companies need a clear brand to stand out. Crafting a distinct corporate identity helps you grow brand awareness, ultimately contributing to brand recognition. Management techniques ensure you consistently deliver a unique brand image that sets you apart from competitors.
More Value for the Customer
CLV stands for customer lifetime value. It represents the faith customers have in your company. If a buyer finds your product or service beneficial on the first purchase, it shows there’s value in buying again. This translates into loyalty, which helps you develop lasting relationships with customers.
Sales Growth
A robust brand management strategy often leads to a rise in sales. By increasing customer loyalty and positive associations with your brand, you encourage more consumers to choose you over a competitor when searching for your products and services.
Higher Product Pricing
As customers become more aware of your company, your brand reputation may enable you to sell products and services at higher prices. This is especially true if your brand develops a strong emotional connection with customers.
Employee Engagement
Brand management also has implications for your employees. Brand identity guides team members, giving them a clear vision of the company’s mission, values, and goals. Seeing the bigger picture in their daily work can boost morale and productivity. Since corporate identity also influences culture, brand management can make it easier to acquire and retain talent, as well.
Pillars of Brand Management
Brand management comprises tangible and intangible elements. The tangible aspects are the characteristics of products and services, such as appearance, price, packaging, and features. The intangible qualities are the principles of brand management that ensure your corporate identity enables you to provide value to customers continually. These principles include:
Recognition
Just as it sounds, brand recognition refers to how well customers recognize your brand when they see it. Think of the most iconic brands, such as Apple and Coca-Cola. Brand recognition is often considered the beginning of brand management because consumers need to identify your brand before you analyze their response and hone your management approach.
Loyalty
Brand recognition is important, but you want to push customers further to the point of loyalty. This means your brand personality and message produce such positive associations among your target audience that customers rely on you for products and services every time. Customer loyalty also tends to increase word-of-mouth advertising, which augments your reputation.
Equity
Brand equity doesn’t translate into monetary value for your company, but it does impact brand image. It’s the collection of brand assets that reveal visibility, reputation, customer loyalty, and similar concerns. In short, brand equity is the overall value of your business. Depending on how you approach brand management, these aspects can contribute to or take away from brand equity.
Compliance
Compliance ensures your brand assets accurately reflect your company’s products and services. If brand assets stray too far from your corporate identity, they can create inconsistency that diminishes customer loyalty. An effective method for ensuring compliance is to develop brand guidelines and confirm each new branding element adheres to these standards.
Stewardship
Brand stewardship takes a bird’s-eye view of your brand, developing strategies to help it grow and protect it from issues like reputational damage. It considers the various components that affect the brand, from the business name to packaging, to ensure your organization maintains creative control of this identity.
System
A brand system ties everything together with an organized set of messages and visual elements that showcase the company’s identity. Logos, imagery, color schemes, language, and typography (fonts) are major components that make up your brand system.
Pro Tips for Effective Brand Management Strategies
In today’s digital marketing landscape, a company’s brand must be unique to stand out, relevant to compete in target markets, and consistent across online and offline marketing vehicles. This is a tall order, but the right techniques can guide you through the brand management process. Consider the following tactics with your own brand:
Develop Knowledge of the Basics
As with any other strategy, it’s important to start with the basics of brand management. These elements are typically established when a company starts or introduces a new product, and they include:
- Strong mission statement
- Visual aspects (logo)
- Target audience
Prioritize Your Customers
A successful brand makes delivering an exceptional customer experience a top priority. By indicating the value of your products and services to your target market, you can increase your loyal customers and achieve growth.
Create Internal Brand Guidelines
Rules or guidelines for your brand management strategy ensure all efforts remain on brand. They prevent marketing campaigns, sales initiatives, and other tasks from moving away from the established brand image and potentially reducing visibility or customer loyalty.
Organize Brand Assets
Brand guidelines aren’t just helpful for compliance. They also help you maintain a single, coherent brandy style, from written messaging to design elements. This step is also beneficial for promoting brand consistency.
Transform Employees into Brand Ambassadors
Your internal teams are one of your most powerful brand assets. While the priority with brand management is customers, your employees need to be brand ambassadors. To accomplish this task, employees should feel connected to the corporate identity and understand their role in brand management, from executive teams to customer service representatives.
Use Brand Management Software
While brand management often begins with your website and social media presence, it will extend out to all digital and traditional forms of marketing, including print advertising. With these many marketing channels, brand management becomes more complex, and maintaining a consistent brand message gets complicated.
Boost Positive Brand Association with MarcomCentral
Technology has simplified the process through brand management software. These platforms provide organizations with a central digital location for conducting key tasks, including developing, managing, promoting, and monitoring your brand.
No two brand management strategies are the same in terms of resources and execution, but the goal is always to build a distinct and profitable brand. Marcom offers a brand management portal that helps deliver consistent messaging across every marketing channel to ensure brand association among your customers matches how you wished to be perceived.
Our product also helps you with digital asset management, compliance, and collateral distribution. It also provides metrics for analytics and insights. We emphasize the customer experience, giving our clients a more modern and efficient tool for brand management and other marketing tasks. Contact us today for more on brand management, or view our case studies to see the benefits of using our platform.
