Whether you’re a healthcare business, an apparel brand or a company that sells learning management systems, you need to distinguish yourself in the market to make your products/services viable.
Every brand has a distinct personality. It’s how you introduce yourself to new customers and how you develop a trustworthy relationship with them. So, consider your brand as a living entity and focus on nurturing and improving it.
This is what you call ‘brand management’.
How do you think the top brands all over the world manage their brands? Do they only spend tons of money on branding? Of course, not! These brands use strategic brand management to improve their brand.
In this article, you’ll learn what brand management is and how you can use it to make your brand stand apart from the competitors.
What’s Brand Management?
Brand management is the process of managing the reputation of your brand. Its main purpose is to improve the audience’s perception of your brand in a manner that increases brand awareness, equity, and fidelity.
People often confuse branding with brand management. Branding is the process of developing your brand, whereas brand management helps you in monitoring and sustaining it.
As a living entity, your brand is continuously altering. It’s also vulnerable to external elements such as news, trends, and current happenings. In the era of social media celebrities with millions of followers and micro-influencers that impact almost every narrative, brand management is how you can take the reins of your company’s story. It involves using your branding and brand assets to communicate value and construct trustworthy relations with your admirers, supporters, and consumers.
Principles of Effective Brand Management
Want to get started on developing and refining your brand? We’ve compiled 4 simple yet effective principles that’ll help you manage your brand.
1. Leverage Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Your USP is what differentiates you from your competitors. M&M’s “melts in your mouth, not in your hand” is a classic example of this. They turned their USP into a slogan that sets M&Ms apart from other candies.
So, how do YOU create a USP for your brand? The first step is to understand where your product/service and company fit into the market.
How is your product/service different from your competitors? Is it more economical or efficient? What makes your brand different? Is it more inventive or steady?
Whatever it is, describe it and note it down.
To better understand, let’s consider the example of an online learning software company that develops learning management systems. Their USP could be something like: “Our company offers the most economical eLearning solutions and our learning management software offers the most intuitive interface.”
You can leverage your USP to develop a mission statement for your business that can be used as the mainstay of your marketing undertakings.
2. Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is how acquainted the general masses and your target customers are with your company. It’s significant because customers can’t engage with or buy products/services from your business if they are not familiar with it.
Thus, one of the essentials of brand management is to make sure that your every marketing endeavor stimulates brand awareness across every channel. Market your brand by measuring the performance of these marketing endeavors. Choose the suitable channels and resources.
For example, if your brand is ground-breaking and novel, create awareness about it via content marketing. You can use social media, your website, blogs, and other mediums to promote it.
3. Focus On In-house Brand Development
For instance, your customer care team knows best what your consumers think about your product/service. Include their feedback to improve your offering and streamline the purchasing process.If you wish to create a business that’s sustainable and viable, focus on collaboratively ideating and evolving your brand internally. Take input from all internal divisions as well as outside stakeholders. It’ll help you integrate other opinions into your brand that you may have ignored.
Remember, your workforce is your brand ambassador. So, take input from all business units to communicate your brand. It’s vital for preserving brand consistency. Ensure every division epitomizes the brand in all interactions with consumers, partners, and dealers.
Receiving brand adoption internally is strengthened by robust brand asset management, which is the process of making and preserving tangible business elements along with keeping them consistent throughout your branding. So, offer your in-house brand associates a centralized location to download and share brand assets. It’ll make it easier for them to dispense and preserve brand assets within their own groups.
4. Use A Brand Management Software
Your old employees may leave, new people may join and your processes and products/services may alter. But, your brand is going to stay like a rock.
Gradual brand development is imperative, however, your core brand never changes. Using brand management software can facilitate your brand’s evolution by handling the visual components that signify your brand. For instance, you can store your color schemes and logos in the software to transmute your company’s brand.
Some of the most wide-ranging brand management solutions available commercially focus on digital asset management (DAM). DAM lets you effortlessly store digital assets such as visuals, presentations, logos, design files, brochures and other branding elements with rich metadata for superior search and share abilities.
Just like a learning management system offers a central repository for all your knowledge resources, a DAM provides a consolidated hub to painlessly and safely manage your business digital assets.
Wrap Up
Remember, your brand value influences your customers’ perspective and buying decisions in the existing digital market. Today, customers can access an extensive range of products/services, which has made brand management a top growth arena.
As auxiliary as it may sound, brand management does impact your bottom line. To develop a strong brand, marketing or product/service alone is not sufficient. You need to continuously recapitulate on your consumers’ brand experience.
It’s possible to overlook the influence of a steady, smart brand experience but brand management can help you offer it to your fans, consumers, and brand supporters. Just keep these 4 principles in mind to develop a solid brand management strategy for your business.
Whether you’re looking to implement or re-vamp your brand management strategy, a digital asset management system can help you immensely. To learn more about digital asset management and how to leverage the power of DAM to streamline workflows and improve brand consistency, click below!
About the Author:
Ehsan Memari is a blogger for SkyPrep, a provider of leading online training software for organizations to train employees’ partners and customers. Ehsan is a regular contributor to blog posts related to knowledge sharing, L&D, and eLearning. Find him on LinkedIn here.