Nowadays, having a recognizable brand isn’t enough anymore. A brand should be built to resonate, thrive, and drive profits for your business. That’s where brand management comes in – the art of building powerful brand equity that fuels your business success.
Let’s define a brand and brand elements
Technically, according to the American Marketing Association (AMA), a brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competition.
Brand is a promise that shapes the audience’s expectations for the next time they see it. Brand differentiates yourself from other like-minded competitors which helps you build loyalty and trust.
Personally, a brand is a promise to the audience about what they can expect from interacting with it, a brand helps you differentiate yourself from other like-minded competitors (‘like-minded’ means serving a specific group of people by offering them closely similar products and values), which means you can build trust and loyalty with consumers only when you have a brand.
Read my previous blog on the importance of having a brand to understand what I mean.
Brand elements are what constitute a brand identity. They are tangible values represented to your consumers to communicate and bring the brand identity to life. They can be your brand name, logo, typography, packaging, tone of voice. In general, brand elements should be relevant to your target audience and they should work together to create a consistent image for the customers.
Why do you have to sustain the consistent incorporation of your brand elements? Do you think a restaurant that has the name of a typical French restaurant, the decoration of Chinese traditions, and the American customer service style is a good place to enjoy your meal? To me, inconsistent elements create a confusing experience, making it extremely difficult to remember what your brand is, and what they should expect the next time they see your brand. As a consequence, this reduces brand loyalty, and wastes budget, time, and effort for marketing activities.
The role of brand management: Build brand equity and sustain your business’s growth
1. Brand Management in a Nutshell
Brand management is an act of building and sustaining the congruence/fit between the brand identity and brand image. I’ll keep it simple here as I’ve written a blog about this.
Brand identity is what you want your brand to become. It can be a type of personality that your brand would have if it was a person. It represents your values, beliefs, mission, and vision, which should be noticed through your marketing activities.
Brand image is what people perceive you based on their experiences and interactions with the brand. In other words, brand image is a set of mental associations that pop up in customers’ minds when they see your products.
Thus, managing your brand means bridging the gap between who you want to be and how you’re seen and thought of.
2. Managing your brand to build its equity
Managing the fit between your brand identity and brand image reflects the strength of your brand equity. In short, brand equity is the added value that your brand brings to the products and services. Seth Godin has said it’s like the premium price a customer is willing to pay for the brand over its competitors.
Brand management: create a differential effect
Building and managing your brand can enhance the first element of brand equity, which is called the ‘differential effect’. Simply, when the brand is managed and built properly, it creates positive associations and an established reputation. This influences the consumers’ behaviors and emotional connections with the brand.
- Reduce price sensitivity: consumers are willing to pay a premium price for brands they have had positive connections and experiences. It reflects their trust in terms of quality, perceived risks, etc.
- Higher loyalty and advocacy: having a positive brand equity means you have a good relationship with your consumers. These people are more likely to be loyal by rebuying the products, listening to your communications, or even becoming your ambassadors.
For example, Apple enjoys a premium price point for its smartphones compared to competitors due to its strong brand image for innovation and design.
Brand Management: increase brand knowledge
As a brand manager, your top priorities should include how you raise people’s knowledge of your brand, which includes 2 indispensable dimensions: brand awareness and brand image.
Brand awareness refers to how familiar consumers are with the brand. There are 2 key components that you have to manage: recall and recognition. While brand recognition helps you guarantee that the target audience knows who you are (slogan, logo, tagline, etc), brand recall shows consumers’ ability to remember your brand when prompted with a category or a cue. Managing your brand awareness is to make your brand more salient and likely to pop up in consumers’ minds.
Meanwhile, brand image is people’s perception of your brand. Briefly, it represents a set of thoughts, feelings, and associations that consumers have about your brand. It’s the mental picture they create when they think of your brand name, logo, products, or services. The role of brand management is to shape people’s perception of the brand and manage the congruence between the brand’s identity, vision, mission and the feeling people have towards it.
Brand Management: Response to Marketing
The final aspect of a brand that you should manage is how people respond to the brand’s marketing activities. Again, if the brand is managed properly and consistently, it impacts positively the way consumers absorb your messages.
- Enhanced attention and processing: consumers with high brand knowledge are more likely to notice your marketing messages since they are familiar with it so it saves them time and effort to understand what you offer.
- Highly engaged and stronger advocacy: positive perceptions build excitement and motivate people to participate in your marketing activities. Satisfied consumers become your biggest ambassadors, they share their experiences with your brand, and they amplify your messages for the brand.
We’re living in a world where we are more likely to believe in what other people tell us (no matter what type of relationship we have with them), not what the brands provide. A study by Marketing Charts has shown that 93% of interviewees trust their family and friends for buying decisions.
4 Steps in a Strategic Brand Management Process
In this section, I will introduce a framework released by Keller and Swaminathan in their book “Strategic brand management: building, measuring, and managing brand equity”. The framework includes 4 essential steps in building a brand management strategy.
Step 1: Identify and Develop your brand plans
This stage is all about figuring out what your brand stands for and how it compares to your competitors. From this perspective, you should define the brand’s USP (Unique Selling Point), as well as the points of parity in the industry. While USP differentiates your brand from other competitors, having important points of parity helps you align your business to the standards of the market.
Besides, an investigation into the current emotional connections with your customers is also very critical since it reflects brand loyalty, trust, and mental associations.
Step 2: Design and Implement Marketing programs to build Brand Equity
Now it’s time to translate your brand strategy into action through marketing campaigns and programs. During this stage, you have to make critical decisions for 3 following components:
1. Brand elements: these are building blocks of your brand identity, including your logo, name, packaging, or even mascot.
2. Integrated Marketing Strategies: these include your 4Ps Marketing program: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.
3. Marketing Tactics: these are specific activities you do to reach your target audience and communicate your brand message. Each activity should align with your overall brand strategy and resonate with your target audience.
Step 3: Measure and Control Your Brand Performance
After performing your marketing strategies for a while, you have to conduct regular assessments of your brand’s health (brand audits). They will help you estimate the current brand awareness, perception, and competitive positioning, identifying areas for improvement.
Step 4: Grow and Sustain Brand Equity
During this stage, you have to determine how your brand elements apply across different products and services (I call it ‘brand architecture’). Depending on the current brand extensions your company is pursuing, you might use a house of brands strategy with distinct brands for each product, or a monolithic brand strategy where one brand encompasses everything.
Remember, building a strong brand requires a long-term perspective, being proactive in maintaining brand relevance by adapting to market trends and responding to competitor threats.
Examples of a Successful Brand Management Strategy
Undoubtedly, Apple is renowned for its successful brand management strategies, making its brand the most valuable in the Top 100 of Interbrand. Since the company focuses on cutting-edge and innovative technology, it has successfully built a premium brand experience and crafted compelling narratives around its products and values to resonate with its target audience on a deeper level. This leads to positive brand equity, giving Apple a price advantage when it can command higher prices and foster a perception of exclusivity and premium.
Another brand I will mention in this blog is Nike. The iconic ‘Just do it’ slogan has inspired and motivated several generations of consumers, connecting the brand with personal achievements. To build up this identity, Nike collaborates with world-famous athletes, serves a variety of sports and outdoor activities, and actively engages in social and environmental initiatives. This has created a strong sense of determination and hard work for the brand’s consumers.
3 Essential Rules of Brand Management
Talking about the law of branding, it would be my big mistake if I didn’t refer to the “22 Immutable Laws of Branding” by Al Ries and Laura Ries. The book outlines 22 fundamental principles that the authors believe are essential for building and maintaining strong, successful brands. However, as we’re focusing on the art of brand management, I just pick out the 6 most important rules that your brand management strategy should follow.
Rule 1: Your brand should represent one specific word in consumers’ mind
Having adapted from the law of the word, this is my rule 1. Your brand should aim to take a word in consumers’ mind. This single-word association becomes shorthand for the brand and its values. Consumers don’t need to think twice when they need what your brand offers, they simply think of the associated word. This’s like we think of ‘innovation’, ‘creative’, and ‘user-friendly’ when we see Apple or ‘happiness’ when we see Coca-Cola. These brands go to great lengths to secure a single-word association in our mind.
Rule 2: Be consistent
This refers to the importance of maintaining a consistent brand image across all touchpoints. It’s important to ensure every interaction a customer has with your brand, from marketing activities to customer service, reinforces the same core message and feeling.
Rule 3: Focus on what you’re best at
This rule is related to the law of category, which means you’d better narrow down your focus to avoid diluting your brand image and its core values. That’s the reason why Tesla focuses on electric vehicles and equipment, pioneering the category of sustainable transportation. I don’t mean that you should not extend your brand because it’s dangerous to your company’s growth. What I mean here is to try to win one specific market and one single-word association in consumers’ mind first before thinking about spreading your identity.
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Academic sources for this blog:
Keller, K.L., Swaminathan, V. (2020) Strategic brand management: building, measuring, and managing brand equity. 5th edition, Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited.
Lalaounis, S.T. (2021) Strategic Brand Management and Development : Creating and Marketing Successful Brands. London: Routledge.
Sy Chu
As an analytical and creative marketing enthusiast skilled in customer analysis, content research and brand management, my passion is help businesses gain insights into their brand and marketing strategies to drive impactful outcome to their success.