What is brand management: the objectives, approach, tools, and techniques?
After you’ve developed your brand identity (vision, mission, values, personality, positioning, and promises) and created all your brand assets (logo, colors, typography, tagline, slogan, icons, etc.) and collaterals (printed materials, digital platforms, souvenirs, etc.), the next thing that you’ll need to start doing is brand management.
It’s not enough to have all of the things I mentioned above. You must be ready to manage them properly to achieve your business goals. So, when it comes to management, we’re talking about enforcing consistency and alignment, while taking active measures to minimize risks and mitigate threats to the brand.
This will always involve the consistent monitoring of your presence and reputation across all your platforms of engagement: social media, website, email list, physical store, online mentions and reviews, etc.
The main objective is to always check your actual reality against your desired reality. What does that mean? In simple terms, you’re checking to see if what people are saying about you and how they’re perceiving you are in sync with what you wrote down as your desired positioning, values, and brand promises. You keep checking for alignment or disparities. And as I said, the objective is to keep maintaining or restoring alignment, as the case may be.
Now, what are the metrics you check during brand management activities?
They include your current level of brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand equity (your perceived market value), brand performance in comparison with other competitors in your niche, etc. I’ve always said, “If there is nothing you’re measuring around your brand, then it’s safe to say you don’t have one.” This is valid because you can’t improve what you’re not measuring.
So, what are some of the quick tools and techniques you can always use?
There are several tools, frameworks, and techniques for brand management. Many of them are high-end tools and techniques that require real expertise to wield. However, there are a few cheap ones you can always use from time to time, and I’ll be sharing them here.
1) Internal Brand Audit:
You do this regularly to monitor your own activities and check how you have been positioning yourself so far, how well you’re owning your message and mission, how well you’re validating your brand promises, etc.
This should always start with your employees because they’re your first customers, and if you give them the freedom to tell you the unfiltered truth, you’ll be amazed at the rich insights you’ll draw. After you’ve done this, extend it to your current customer base.
A simple survey can help you achieve this. And your customer data (purchase history and reviews) can provide you with rich insights as well. Another thing you should always do is regularly check up on your clients and customers and subtly check their sentiments towards your brand.
2) SWOT Analysis:
This has to do with internal and external factors, in brief. You have strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The strengths and weaknesses are internal, while the opportunities and threats are external.
As simple and cliché as this analysis may sound, it is always a magic wand in the hands of those who know how to use it. Whether you like it or not, there will always be threats to your brand, and whether you like it or not, your brand is not Holy Spirit, so you have obvious weaknesses.
But while these things are there, there are also areas of strength that you can use to counter obvious threats. And there are opportunities that you can leverage to minimize the impact of your obvious weaknesses.
Your SWOT analysis helps you get real and see clearly what the field of play looks like for your brand. It is a terrible thing to be fighting in a combat and not know anything about the opponent. And it’s a dangerous thing to be fighting in a combat when you don’t know or have any competitive edge to leverage. These are the things a properly done SWOT analysis helps you uncover.
Again, this is just another form of survey where you sit down with your team, draw the quadrant, get real with yourselves, and begin to write down items that fall within each category of the quadrant to draw rich insights and action plans.
I will stop here because it’s beginning to get so long. There are many other surveys and analyses you can run that I won’t be able to delve into for now. We have the 3-Circle Analysis, PESTEL analysis, etc.
One thing you must understand about brand management is that it relies heavily on the quality of the questions you’re asking, how you’re sourcing the answers through qualitative and quantitative (primary and secondary) data, and how well you’re interpreting your realities and the realities you desire.
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I remain your BrandCore Strategist.