If you are a marketer with sufficient experience in the industry then you must understand quite well how a positive brand image is directly proportional to a loyal customer base and the growth of a company.
Yet some surveys report that less than 10% of brands follow a consistent brand management strategy, and over 60% of businesses said that the marketing materials they produce don’t align with the brand management guidelines of their marketing departments.
That goes to show that although brand management is given its due attention, some strategic marketers fail to create a functional marketing strategy that all departments can get on board with and follow through with.
How Can You Incorporate Brand Management in Your Marketing Strategy?
The first thing to do is to understand what your brand vision and values are, what the company stands for and what the features of your products make them unique from the competition. Then plan a strategy to take those values and align them with what you do or sell and what your target consumers want. A company’s culture is built around its values, so creating a brand management strategy that is parallel to that vision makes it easier for everyone to adjust to it.
These are just the initial steps. Once you have a brand management strategy, your job as a strategic marketer is to get the executives, social media managers, creative designers and the entire workforce on the same page and in sync with your brand image.
That’s not all. A brand management strategy should be dynamic. In the face of a cultural, social or political event you have to respond in a way that supports your values. For example, your product packaging should be environmentally friendly if you claim to be a green company. Brand management is not just what you do while running a marketing campaign. Rather it is how you portray your business to your consumers every day. This is called managing the brand reputation, where you as a strategic marketer manage the image of your company. And you must maintain consistency in what you do externally and how your brand behaves internally.
In this era, customers have detailed knowledge of what a company does behind the scenes, how they treat the employees, how they manage complaints and racial issues etc. So your job as a strategic marketer is to show your customers the image of your brand which helps people to identify with you and support you. It is just as important as creating a website, placing ads and collecting market data.
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Conclusion
Brand management is imperative because it helps you stand out from your competitors and allows your customers to know who you are. Overall, almost 95% of marketers realise the importance of brand awareness and want it to be a priority, but practical marketing strategies fail to achieve that.
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