Brand management and asset management

Week 8

Brand management means; “capturing the target market for your product or service and generating a confidence in the minds of the present and prospective customers. The aim of branding is to vividly convey a message, raise customer loyalty, and persuade an individual to buy the product, thereby establishing an emotional connect with customers.”

A brand management system helps the company to be intact and unified, a good brand management system helps the brand to succeed. Brand management includes intangible and tangible characteristics of a brand.

1. Define your brand. It´s practically the brand manual, which includes at least the brands mission, vision, position and values.

2. The brand is your business model. By supporting and challenging your business you will maximize the potential of the business. It´s important that the brand keeps it´s promise.

3. Consistency. Own what you do and stand for what your doing, consistency will make you stand out.

4. Start inside. Those who work at your company can tell you what they think and feel, place that before your customers. I think this is true, if the employees don´t believe in you or your brand, they will not do their best. The customers react to how the employees approach them.

5. Connect at the emotional level. The brand is not only the logo, name, website, public relation experience or TV commercials. It´s also the service, the place, the people and the experience. I agree, it´s the whole feeling that the customer gets when using your service or product, you must gain the trust. Example, if you are selling jeans, and your brand is built up properly and gives the impression of high quality and environmental thinking but maybe not that highly priced, then when the customer buys your product and thinks all these great things about you and notice that the jeans feel cheap and doesn’t live up to their expectations, you fail.

6. Empower brand campions. Award those how truly loves your brand and helps you to spread the message. When they give you feedback, take it in and use it. This is todays influencers, they have a lot of followers so when their using your brand they reach out to a huge audience. I just want to note, that I don´t think influencers work super good for all kind of companies, and that the companies carefully should select their influencers. I have an experience, when a gym clothing brand reached out to me and wanted me to be their influencer, I had never even tried their clothes before, so I was super sceptic and I had low thoughts because why would they reach out to me, I don´t have that many followers or post pictures that often, and never from the gym. But they gave me a good sale code, so I ordered some clothes. And I like their company a lot and my trust in them has grown a bit. But the questions remain, why would they reach out to me?

7. Stay flexible and relevant.

A company shall never stop developing its image. The company shall remain open to adjustments and always tweak on the message it sending to its target audience. A brand must develop in the same speed as everything else. Branding is not a race, it´s a process.

8. Align your tactics with strategy.

Find the right platform for marketing. Nowadays, its super easy for the audience to skip the ad, switch channels or use an ad blocker. Witch platform is most relevant for the company, and how should it be used?

Tv-commercials are easy to skip, but reach out to the older generation, that prefers TV above Netflix, it has a wide range of viewers, but it’s also expensive.

Marketing on social media is cheaper than TV, its easier to target a specific group of people, but its also easier to scroll by, and has longer response time.

9. Measure the effectiveness.

Focus on the return form the investment (ROI). It´s more than just the number of sales, it also includes the brand value. There are several options to test various marketing tactics. From experience I can say, that many companies in the archipelago doesn’t think marketing as an investment, that’s probably because they have no clue on the ROI, or they don’t do marketing at all, also many of the companies in the archipelago are run by the older generation, and they are usually not that understand marketing as it is nowadays. I have noticed that even the younger generation don´t rely on marketing, they say that “people talk”, meaning they think mouth-to-mouth is enough.

10. Keep enemies closer

When your entering a market with your company, even if you’re the first one on the market with this product, there will always be competitors, or if it´s a new market, it will not take long before someone is doing it better, cheaper, faster than you. This shall encourage the company to raise your strategy and give more value. This is easy or at least easier if you have a strong brand!

11. Cultivate your community

Everyone wants to be an insider of something. The community is a powerful platform and many of the people in that community wants to reach out to each other. This is way companies uses famous persons in their advertising for example Zlatan when doing the commercial for Samsung Q-led TV, how wants to be like Zlatan or feel like they have something so high quality at home, that Zlatan uses the same? YEP. This is how we sell stuff, also the influencers nowadays, that’s the same thing. We´re selling more than a product, it´s the feeling of belonging somewhere, the community…I could go on for ever, lets take the next one.

12. Brand strategy thinking

It’s easier to execute tactics than presenting a new strategy, because with a new strategy comes with a bigger risk of failure. It´s also easier to do like the rest is doing, ex the competitors, than come up with something brand new, because of the risk it involves. But to be outstanding and be able to sell more and be more attractive, you must think outside the box. Branding is about creating the correct experience which involves all stakeholders to devise a better strategy.