How Can Brand Management Strategies Impact a Business?

As companies’ volume competing to gain customer attention is increasing gradually, the brand management strategy has become a great market differentiator. So, there isn’t any specific time to build a brand strategy. The marketplace is flooded with various brands. And to qualify amongst the premium brands and stand out amongst the parallel brands, you need to build an engaging, effective brand and build positive relationships with the customers. If you are striving hard to win your audience’s attention or retain the existing ones, you need a fool-proof brand management strategies. If you need to stay competitive in the marketplace, you need a strong brand to identify. A strong brand identity influences the consumers to opt for your brand than that of the competitors.

Today the market is totally influenced by social media and promotions. Marketers these days will agree with the notion that they should concentrate on building a brand, long-term relationships, building loyalty, retention, etc. Brand management trumps customer management in most MNC’s, and the focus isn’t compatible with the growth.

What is Brand?

Your brand isn’t just a product or service your offer. It has a far-reaching impact than a tangible asset. Your brand reflects your organization’s core values and the relationships and interactions with the customers, suppliers, shareholders, and so on. To make it simple, brand image is something that a mark of distinction. Brand identity abets in enhancing your brand reputation and ensures that your customers experience your brand as the way intended.

Creating a brand is a thrilling and even challenging task. But building a brand isn’t just enough. As the business scales, brands grow and succeed in the market; the brand needs to follow the latest industrial trends. Let’s take an example of Old Spice, who enjoyed outstanding brand equity with the customers. But as the century wore on, the ones who loved the brand were getting downright old. So, the customer base gradually declined. The brand realized that if they want to continue holding a large market share, they need to target a younger audience. Gradually they understood, younger tended to see their brand as old-modeled. So, in 2010, 75 years old spice rebranded to a new light, a quirky and new personality. This evolved Old Spice more than just Deodorant, without changing their product.

What is Brand Management?

Brand management starts with acknowledging your brand. The process starts with establishing a brand, making goals, achieving it. Branding is nothing just the art of establishing a brand that sustains in the market. A strong brand value compels the customers to buy your products and services and even be committed to your business. A strong brand differentiates your product from that of competitors. And even gives a unique image and positioning in the market.

In business, brand management means managing both tangible and intangible assets. In the case of product, tangible assets include the product itself, pricing, packaging, etc. In the case of services, tangible characteristics include customer experience. The intangible characteristics include an emotional connection with the customers, product, service.

According to the business executives’ viewpoint, brand management is just about analyzing the target market for your product and service and generating awareness and confidence in the minds of the newer audience and prospective customers. The ultimate aim of brand management is you vividly convey your message to the audience, raise brand awareness, customer loyalty, and persuade the audience to buy your product who approaches your business. It even establishes an emotional connection. An effective brand management strategy builds positive customer perceptions about your product/service. In a nutshell, the brand management strategy aims to make the differentiation.

Brand Management Process

Brand management doesn’t just happen overnight. Instead, the creation of a brand isn’t an instance. The creation of a successful brand doesn’t happen by chance. It’s a continuous process. That includes a series of actions taken to cultivate the brand and steer and reinforce its identity over time. The business planner’s usual day includes planning and executing strategies that resonate with the brand and the audience’s needs and desires. Here are some principles which need to be followed to designs an exceptional brand management strategy.

Define Your Brand: Lets the audience know what your brand is about. It’s all begins with authenticity. Focus on what you can do best and communicate your core strengths.
Your Brand is Your Business Model: Build your brand; your brand signifies your business model.
Consistency, Consistency, Consistency: Consistency is pivotal to success. Be consistent in what you do. Obama only focused on a single message throughout his campaign in 2008 in his presidential campaign.
Start from Inside: Your employees are the core of your business. Start rebuilding your organization from inside. Your employees can tell you better what they think about your brand. That’s how online apparel store Zappos empowers his employers to bolster customers’ perception of the brand.
Connect with the Audience: Customers always prefer the brand which values and understands them. A brand isn’t just a logo, website, or Tv commercials. These are just tools, not brands. Try to offer an experience that just doesn’t satiate the customers’ needs but connects with them emotionally. Starbucks created an exclusive and desirable; the public prefers to stay back there longer, even paying for the over-priced coffee.
Flexible and Open for Adjustments: Do you remember the story of Old Spice you discussed above. A brand is successful when it’s open to adjustments. A successful brand won’t cling to traditional practices as it just delivers results only in the past. To dominate the market, it has to adapt to changing marketing conditions.
Measure on Effectiveness: Don’t just haphazardly implement strategies; always scale its effectiveness. Always focus on ROI (Return on Investment), which is the key indicator to measure the effectiveness of the strategies implemented.
Keep an eye on Competitors: It’s the competitors that can vanquish your market share. Even you have a unique product to offer, expect better competitors to enter the market with better value proportion. Nowadays, the market has intense competition, and it never discourages new players from entering the market and create competition. You will always find better players offering better, fast, and more unique service than you.
Create a Brand Community: A brand community is a platform where the brand can interact with the buyers and even create loyalty. Inactive communities, members can interact with each other and share experiences regardless of the brand’s consumption.
Creative Brand Management Strategy: The point signifies that not to settle with the alternative tactics available but to think out-of-box. It’s always effortless to imply the tactics that worked for the competitors instead of introducing the new ones because it has a low possibility of risk.

Brand Essence

Brand essence is the most compelling factor that differentiates your brand from that of the other competitors. It serves as a metric scale to evaluate the effectiveness of od seller’s marketing strategies. Here are some of the brand essence elements discussed below:

Authenticity: Authenticity assures that your brand is trustworthy and authentic to invest. If a brand makes a promise but fails to keep it, it gets rejected. Customers expect the brand to be genuine and trustworthy.
Consistency: A brand loses its creditability when it fails to provide when it promised to the customers. A brand should consistently use its logo over time.
Durability: Brand essence remains the same all the time. Even if your logo and packaging changes, brand essence remains the same.
Experience: A positive experience is what allures the customers and fascinates them to purchase over again.
Uniqueness: It’s the factor that entices your customers to purchase from you. Uniqueness is how your brand is different from that of competitors.
Relevance: Relevancy is how convenient your customers are to connect with your brand and purchase your products and services.

Elements of Brand

Several factors contribute to developing an outstanding brand. Let’s discuss some of the crucial brand elements:

Brand Name: This is what customers get to see everywhere. It’s by which customers recognize your brand. It should be simple, easy to recognize, and also easy to pronounce.
Logo: It could be anything from a simple design to, piece of text. But should relate to what business you do.
Tone: It’s the pitch or flow in which a business communicates with its customers. It can be formal, friendly, professional. It builds business perception about the brand.
Jingle: Like movies have songs; brands have jingles. Jingles should be pleasing to hear and hum and should even relate to what you do. It should be easy to remember by all age groups.
Slogan: Their slogans or tags recognize most brands. Like Red bull’s most popular slogan, “Gives you Wings,” Britannia’s is “Eat Healthy,” “think better.”
Packaging: I bet you might have got enticed by seeing the colorful and attractive packaging of noodles in shopping malls and might surely have bought it. Your packaging should be attractive and should instantly strike the eye-balls of the individuals.
URL: In today’s digitally advanced world. Businesses should have an online presence as it enhances the brand’s authenticity. Now any seller can register for a domain just by paying a few dollars.
Special Characters/Mascots: It’s a special character, animations, or any human being because of which brand came into a trend like Vodafone has Zoo Zoos. Zoo characters are played in various functions by humans wearing white suits.

Brand Management Vs. Product Management

Oftentimes individuals misinterpret brand management Vs. Product management. So, let’s gets deeper into the nitty-gritty of what differentiates it.

Brand management associates with pricing, sales, promotions, and advertisements of multiple products in the business, whereas product management associates with promoting a specific product. Its packings, advertisements, and tactics to increase product sales.
The goals of brand management are to maintain brand quality, whereas product management aims to enhance its sales.
Brand management comprises the overall management of the business. It includes interactions with manufacturers, suppliers, sales executives, marketing professionals. Hence, all business processes are synchronized, whereas product management includes sales and marketing of a particular product and positive after-sales service.

Principles of Brand Management

When you Google it about “what is brand management?”, you will surely get bemused with the search results available. The definitions over the web complicate the term. In the Simplest way, brand management is the oversight and maintenance of a product and a service’s collective impression. Associated with every facet of the business. Brand management comprises of both tangible and intangible components. The intangible components comprise the tools that abet you in measuring the brand management strategies’ effectiveness and enable you to achieve the success indicators. Let’s discuss some of the brand management principles:

Brand Awareness: Brand Awareness is about how much your brand is recognizable. You’re the general public and the target audience. Brand awareness is crucial for your brand to succeed because customers won’t buy from you if they aren’t aware of your brand.
Brand Equity: Brand equity is calculated based on the experience, perceptions of the customers. Higher the Brand equity, the more valuable your brand is. You can support higher prices, increase your merit amongst the shareholders, investors, etc.
Brand Loyalty: Brand loyalty is how consistently your customers or followers engage with your brand or purchase from you. Your sales and marketing don’t influence it, but your customer service department can do it.
Brand Recognition: Brand recognition is how much your target audience can recognize your brands through logo, slogans, jingles, etc.
Brand Reputation: Brand reputation is how your audience or target audience perceives your brand quality, characteristics, and status of your brand. Both the factors internal and external can influence your brand reputation. Internal factors include product quality, supply, customer service, and external factors includes customer reviews, news, etc.

Brand management, as auxiliary as it seems, but so affect the bottom line. A strong brand isn’t built overnight, but it requires seamless efforts and upshots of all the strategies discussed above. A successful brand management strategy enables you to stay competitive, gain more customer base, etc.