Last Updated: March 13, 2019
Written by Maria Jollie
What is Brand Management?
Brand management encompasses the way consumers perceive brands based on visual elements, price, experience, and emotional connection. These perceptions shape how consumers become aware of and associate with a brand.
- Visual Elements. Visual elements are things like your logo, brand colors, font, collateral, signage, packaging, and other elements that consumers see on a regular basis. Visual elements should be pleasing to the eye and consistent with every piece of content. The visual effects of an element can be a differentiator for brands if they can capture a signature look that evokes the right sentiment from the people who see it.
- Pricing. The price of your product or service influences brand management. Items with a high price should have the perception of being a high quality or a luxury item. This is especially important if there are other companies in the industry who have similar products or services with different price points.
- Experience. Experience is how a customer or potential customer encounters interactions with your brand, whether it is a conversation on social media or the way a product is displayed in a store. Consumers are more likely to have positive brand awareness if you use a pleasant tone of voice for your brand, your products or services are easy to use, and the ambiance of your physical locations is favorable.
- Emotional Connection. The messaging and imagery of your brand should produce an emotional connection. The feeling that a consumer experiences when interacting with your brand is the emotion that they will associate with the brand.
These factors contribute toward how your brand is recognized by consumers and distinguished from other brands. Brand management is influenced by the actions that your company takes to shape the way your brand is perceived by consumers.
What is a brand?
Why is Brand Management Important
If your company does a good job of managing your brand, it can result in increased sales and business growth because it influences the customer journey and motivates a purchase. Brand management allows you to deliver value, build brand loyalty, and ultimately increase sales and growth.
- Deliver Value. As you establish trust, customers understand what kind of service and/or product they can expect from your brand. If you can meet their expectations, they will choose your brand over others because they know the value you provide to them, regardless of other factors like price, location, etc.
- Build Brand Loyalty. With good brand management, customers see the value in choosing your brand over others and they start to act as brand ambassadors that promote your brand organically.
- Increase Sales and Growth. Brand management is important because it shapes the way your brand is seen, allowing price points to be improved because the perceived value of the superior product/service is higher.
The goal is to associate the brand with positive feelings so that consumers buy from your brand out of instinct. Brand management is a way to build brand equity by improving price points. Once a brand has been established, it still needs to be maintained and adjusted accordingly. Companies often have a brand manager or brand team who focus on influencing a favorable brand image.
How to Be a Good Brand Manager
First, you need to understand who you are trying to reach and how you want them to associate your brand.
Identify the experiences that are unique to your brand and keep them top of mind as you develop a brand management strategy.
A good brand manager’s initiatives should always support the goals of the organization. As you manage your brand, make sure you are constantly working to understand the customer, maintain credibility, and focus on consistency.
- Understand the Customer. To be an effective brand manager, you need to understand the consumer’s point of view. Make sure you are constantly gathering information from current and potential customers to understand the true perception of your brand. When you understand customers and how they view your brand, you can work to strengthen or change your image based on the goals of your company.
- Maintain Credibility. To help customers associate your brand name with the qualities you strive for, create and reinforce your brand credibility. Manage your reputation by monitoring online reviews and having a presence at relevant events. Train your teams so they are able to act as an extension of your brand and be a credible resource for consumers. You can also host webinars, write papers, and talk at events to position your brand as a thought leader in the industry.
- Focus on Consistency. To make a strong impression, consumers should experience consistency every time they encounter your brand. Your brand should resonate in the same way across digital and physical channels to help strengthen the impact of the audience who views your content.
The way you portray your brand image should be influenced by established by brand guidelines to help with consistency. Another way to help with brand consistency is with a digital asset management (DAM) system.
A DAM is a single source to store all your digital assets with the ability to search and find the image you need when you need it. A DAM is also an essential part of digital maturity, which is the way a digital ecosystem works together to benefit a company.
How is Brand Management Affected by Digital Maturity?
Brand management is easier to control in a company that has a mature digital ecosystem because their systems work together to make information and assets readily available and easier to deploy. This helps support brand consistency because it provides the capability to control content and be reactive to consumers across physical and digital channels.
The digital maturity model explains the different levels of maturity and the typical business problems and competencies for companies in each level.
- Reactive. Manual, offline tasks and processes are triggered by external pressures.
- Organized. Tasks are triggered for established stakeholders by defined processes, timelines, and physical quality measures using basic computerized tools.
- Digitized. New projects, tasks, and processes are completed and measure digitally using hardware and software.
- Connected. Software and hardware is continuously integrated with the other business processes and systems of record.
- Intelligent. An integrated ecosystem of complete information and imagery automatically improves and synchronizes across internal and external interfaces.
Download the Digital Maturity White Paper
The more that your company progresses through organized, digitized, connected, and intelligent, the easier it is to control your digital asset life cycle and for strong and consistent content that supports brand management.
DAM can help with this by simplifying the process when internal and external teams promote your brand so that they have the right logos, product information, lifestyle images, and more. DAM allows you to store, manage, and distribute your assets with visibility into where and how they are used.
Brand management can have big implications for the overall company, so make sure to give it the attention it deserves. To learn more about the digital maturity model and how to identify your position, download the white paper.
Brand Management Best Practices
Learn more about brand management and digital asset management best practices on these pages:
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