Strategic brand management is the process of building, measuring, and managing brand equity, brand recognition, and presence to boost revenue and accomplish long-term business objectives.
Managing a brand strategically revolves around centralizing different traditional, digital, functional, and social media assets to ensure brand consistency across different touch-points that ultimately pave the part of strong brand presence, lead, generation, conversion, sales, loyalty, and sustainability.
Table of Contents
What is Strategic Brands Management?
Strategic Brand Management is the adept inclusion of techniques where a brand chooses and measures a suitable branding strategy to gain brand recognition, ensure brand identity and optimize brand success. Its primary objective is to promote a brand and to have the needed recognition to beat competitors and become successful.
This can help the company to achieve long-term business goals and boosting revenue. The term “strategic” represents the process of dealing with and managing the assets of a brand value and long-term plans. A branding strategy can add value to a company’s products and services.
However, brand management should not be confused with the term branding. Branding is building a brand, while brand management is a process of maintaining and monitoring the brand.
If a company adopts the proper strategy-driven brand management process, it can create a powerful familiarity with the customers. It can help the company to create better trust between customers and its brand. This will ultimately lead to brand loyalty and value perception.
Process of Strategic Brands Management & Equity
When a company wants to improve brand perception, recognition, retention, value, customer loyalty, it is necessary to have an exclusive brand management process to achieve the same. If a company follows the right brand management strategy, then a company can create a unique personality in the business world.
It plays a crucial role in differentiating a brand by indicating its uniqueness to the customers. It makes marketing communications to be more impactful, plus it shares guidelines for the employees to boost engagements and make the company less vulnerable.
It includes few distinguished aspects, which are:
1. Identification of the Planning process
In this step of brand management, a company needs to understand the values of strategic planning and ensure that it is adhered to by all the company departments. A company’s values should be aligned with the strategic planning process, and the focus should be on achieving the company’s vision and mission. The planning process should be effective to make the other steps effective in the strategic management process.
2. Brand Positioning
Brand Positioning is the act of designing a proposal for the company and analyzing the position in the market. In this step, a company tries to convince the consumers about the company’s advantage over the other brands available in the market. With brand positioning, a consumer also understands the various associations of the company that are linked to the brand.
3. Implementation of Brand Marketing
The marketing of the brand is essential for effective working in the market. In this step, a company must create a brand that is acceptable to consumers. It includes choosing and designing the elements of the brand. Elements of the brand include logo, symbol, images, and slogans. A marketer of the company will use these brand elements to promote the brand in the market. It also includes creating strong, unique, and favorable brand associations that can support the marketing programs and activities.
4. Measuring the Brand Performance
After the step of brand marketing, the next step is to measure the performance of the brand. Here, measuring means understanding the effects of marketing programs of the brand. With this step, a company can understand the value chain of the brand by analyzing the financial impact of brand marketing expenditures and investments.
5. Equity growth and sustainment of brand
In the last step, a company needs to define the brand strategy. A company can use techniques like brand-product matrix, brand hierarchy, and brand portfolio tools to define the same. Brand equity management ensures the success of the company’s future marketing programs. For measuring equity growth and brand sustainment, a market should consider international factors, market segments, and types of consumers. It can provide accurate and timely information for making better decisions in the short and long run.
Importance of Strategic Brands Management
When a company gets a strategy that is both agile and beneficial to its brand, then that strategy helps the company to add value to the brand’s overall perception. However, the importance of strategic brands management is reflected in the following points:
- Improvement in customer retention and establishing customer loyalty
- Better engagement of employees in achieving the company’s objective
- Employees feel more closed to the company
- Brand perception gets improved, and selling power strengthens up
- Allows the company to have an impactful marketing communication
- A company gets less vulnerable to the drastic changes in the industry market
- 7. Increase customer responses and trade cooperation
- 8. It promotes licensing opportunities
If a company does not adopt the brand strategic management process, then a company may face the problem of appealing to customers or providing any unique value proposition to enjoy a sustainable market presence and consistent growth. In the market, various brands and companies can deliver the same product as another company.
Due to this reason, the competition of customers is increasing daily. To have better customer loyalty and trust, there should be a system that can promote the values of the brand.
How to Manage a Brands Strategically?
It is essential to follow the process of Strategic brands management to effectively managing a brand strategically. Understanding the values of a brand in the planning stage and then moving towards the brand’s positioning are the primary steps that are used to manage a brand strategically.
After which marketing of brand should be effective, and your brand elements should be in such a manner that it can create a lasting impact on consumer’s mind. This process of brand management ends at monitoring and measuring the performance of the brand.
But is it easy to manage a brand’s strategy, and how can a company do so?
Managing a brand strategically is not easy. It needs a creative and practical mindset of the marketer and the team members that work together. Every department of the company must work together to achieve the brand’s objective.
Some of the famous brands have done this in real life. It includes big names like Starbuck, Ford Motors, Honda, Tesla, Google, and many more.
Examples
Let us have a look at the examples of strategic management of Tesla and Google to understand the concept more comprehensively-
1. Tesla
One example is Tesla. In the initial years of Tesla, it fails to meet its production target and fails to grab the attention of the consumers. It was criticized for its electric vehicle. But with the efforts of the founder of Tesla, it started performing well in the market.
The brand strategy of Tesla heavily relied upon providing the best customer experience. This brand focuses on its brand reputation, and even its founder was responding to the tweets of the consumers. This is how it made a good brand reputation and manages the brand strategically.
2. Google And Their Strategies
Another example of strategic brands management is Google. The mission of this tech giant was to make individuals feel more informed and connected. Rather than focusing on the technical part of its product, the marketing team of Google emphasized the ways in which Google is enriching the lives of individuals.
This humanized strategy of Google made it a verb for doing online search queries. Here, Google uses the brand’s positioning strategy effectively, and it helps it to become the leader of the search engine.
This is how a brand is managed strategically. A company needs to have a focus on all the aspects of strategic management, be it positioning or brand reputation management, or any other aspect. A strategic brands management process should be implemented effectively.
Advantages of Strategic Brands Management
A strategic brand management system can be very advantageous for a company. The work that is done through a strategic brands management system cannot be replicated manually.
The features of this system make this tool effective for those companies who are serious about their branding strategy. Even it is evident that a strategic management system can increase the ROI of a brand. Following are the features and advantages of a strategy-driven brand management system:
1. Ensures Consistency
In the brand management system, a company can create on-brand assets on a large scale. This system tremendously simplifies the brand management process of the company with the help of this feature. With this feature, a company needs to just organize the brand assets in unique folders.
A company can decide on the uniqueness of the folders. It can be based on different marketing campaigns of the brand or any other uniqueness which a company may want. For easy filtering, a company can tag these folders and get them searched easily.
2. Offers an immersive brand experience
With brand management, a company will have complete control over the brand ecosystem. This control gives a high degree of creative freedom to the company.
A company can manage the accessibility of the folders and can create a streamlined workflow that can keep all the team members updated with the changes in the plan.
3. Brand information storage in a secured and synchronized manner
The brand management system ensures that the visual identity of the brand is handled with security. Other than this, a company can also change the access of the folder.
A company can provide access to a folder to only those team members who are responsible for that brand activity. This ensures secure and centralized brand information.
In Conclusion!
By managing a business strategically, owners can directly impact their profitability and develop results-driven marketing and advertising campaigns. It empowers brands to iterate on the favorable brand experiences of the customers.
In contemporary times, incorporating a relevant strategic management system is inevitable for a business to optimize presence and boost conversions.
What factors do you consider relevant for strategically managing a business? Share your opinion with us in the comment section below.
Liked this post? Check out the complete series on Branding
what is marketing and how we can easily marketed our product to customer.
Dear Alikhan, That is a big big question and will take days to answer :) In fact, thats all marketing91 is about. In general, you can check my article on What is marketing and at the same time, there is a guide on marketing strategy models which can tell you a bit about marketing your products to customers, analysing the market and also analysing the customers.
Well written article. Branding is really a key point where the people already set their mind to go with them for trustworthiness.
Yo yo