Companies primarily use strategic brand management to promote their products and brands internationally. Strategic refers to a process that deals with a brand’s long-term goals and assets. This includes holistic and sustainable business practices that help an organization build, develop, and manage its brand. This article discusses the various branding strategies that are available as well as the part that strategic brand management plays in the development of a brand.
What Is Strategic Brand Management? (12 Process Elements)
Why is strategic brand management important?
A company may benefit from strategic brand management if it wants to expand in certain directions that will support it going forward. It might boost customer service standards, increase brand perception through trust, and keep and attract devoted customers. The use of strategic brand management can help you stand out from the competition or make your marketing materials more engaging or memorable. It can foster alignment between various departments or divisions of the same business and boost employee loyalty. Additionally, strategic brand management may speed up trade cooperation, minimize the effects of a significant market change, and increase licensing opportunities for your business.
What is strategic brand management?
The process of showing customers what makes your brand unique through words, images, and techniques is known as strategic brand management. In the financial industry, it promotes the company’s products and builds a brand. Strategic refers to a long-term process that incorporates every facet of the brand across all channels and is constantly reviewed and updated. Brand management creates an organization’s distinctive identity and influences factors like quality and customer interactions. Some businesses may use strategic brand management to enhance consumer perception of their goods and services or gain global recognition.
How to create a brand strategy
To learn how to develop a brand strategy, follow these steps:
1. Create a list of company values
Make a list of everything that is crucial to your business and brand. The manner in which you interact with customers, the traits you want your employees to exhibit, the types of raw materials you use, and the suppliers you work with are just a few examples. In a document or cloud-based system that is accessible to everyone in the organization, list all of your value propositions. You can use this guide to help you form your brand strategy.
2. Determine brand positioning
Analyze the market to see where your brand stands in relation to the competition. Knowing where your brand stands at the moment can help you spot areas for improvement since one aspect of brand strategy is understanding how your company or product is superior to or different from the competition. Examine whether your brand could fill a niche market that appeals to your target market.
3. Align brand positioning and values
To determine whether your own perception of your business and that of your target audience are in line, compare your values document to the findings of your brand positioning analysis. Discovering the most distinctive aspects of your brand and developing a broad, all-encompassing strategy may be made possible by knowing what points resonate with your customers and where you can make improvements.
4. Create marketing materials
Create or update brand elements like logos, images, slogans, and symbols to best reflect the values you want to communicate to your customers through promotions. Think about the words and phrases you use in your slogans, how you are represented in your pictures, and how you have used color in your symbols and logos. Each of these factors psychologically affects consumers’ perceptions of a brand or product. Making strong, distinctive, and positive brand associations through visual and auditory links is made possible by creating cohesion in your marketing materials.
5. Plan your marketing programs
Create advertising campaigns that prominently feature your marketing collateral, as well as your company’s values and brand positioning. Customers can form their attitudes and feelings about your brand by using the marketing materials and connecting them to your images or slogans. Think about campaigns that help your message reach customers, such as print advertising, film and television commercials or trailers, radio ads, social media strategies, or other approaches.
6. Monitor your brands reputation
Monitor social media and other customer interaction channels after implementing a new brand management strategy or launching a new marketing campaign to see how people respond to and engage with your brand. Recognize which digital channels are most used by your target audience and which new ones might help you reach a wider audience. Keep track of both positive and negative coverage to determine where you are successful and where changes can be made.
Your brand’s reputation can be shaped by the message you convey, but your target audience may also be influenced by other people’s opinions. Because of this, keeping an eye on your brand’s reputation and upholding a positive image may enable you to boost brand trust and exert more control over the brand’s influence in the public’s eyes.
7. Centralize your brand materials
Centralize your brand materials so that all company creatives can access them. One of the most crucial elements of a brand management strategy is creating an effective, high-quality brand management communication system because it makes sure that everyone is aware of the objectives of the campaign and can distribute them through all channels.
For each company, there may be a different way to centralize your brand definitions, assets, and essentials. Making a brand guidelines document, which is akin to a style guide, is a popular strategy. It should contain standardized marketing and communication materials, brand language to use or avoid, ways to interact with your target audience through specific channels, templates for emails or automatic replies, and other such information. Think about sending your document to every creative via email and making it accessible in a cloud-based system for reference.
8. Measure and analyze your brands performance
Continue to monitor the progress and success of your campaigns. Conduct a brand audit on a regular basis to determine how your brand is doing with your target market. Depending on the size of your business and your financial resources, you can either carry out this process internally or with an outside agency. Areas to evaluate include:
Make sure that your brand’s messaging is consistent across all of these elements, and that you project the same persona in person as you do online. Some of these factors, like the effectiveness of online advertising, are quantifiable. To gather more information, you can also interact with customers through surveys or focus groups. To ensure you’re meeting your expected goals, think about performing a brand audit frequently, even once every quarter.
Types of brand management strategies
Companies may employ various brand management techniques to influence consumer opinion, such as:
Brand name recognition
Businesses use brand recognition to entice consumers to recognize and buy their products based solely on name. The size of the brand, its product line, and its years of establishment may all have an impact on how well this strategy works. Older and larger businesses may initially succeed more with this tactic. Companies may advertise their goods and build brand recognition using slogans, logos, and even company colors.
Individual branding
When a company has a smaller product or brand operating under a bigger parent company, it will use individual branding. In order to avoid competition between similar subsidiaries of the same parent company and to create a distinctive identity for the new or focus product, marketers may use this tactic.
Attitude branding
Attitude branding places more of an emphasis on the overall brand personality and less on the marketing of a particular good or service. It entails appealing to specific emotions like calm, excitement, or other positive qualities that aren’t directly associated with the brand itself. By doing this, marketers may influence how audiences feel about their brand. Teams can use tools like slogans and taglines to enforce attitude branding.
Brand extension
The tactic of using the brand name to create new or altered products in order to broaden the appeal of an already established brand is known as brand extension. Creating a new flavor of potato chips for a company that sells them or that same company entering a new, untapped market, such as developing a line of protein snack trays, are examples of brand extension.
Private labels
In order to compete with the brands they carry, supermarkets and other retailers who sell a variety of products from various companies often use private labeling. Private labels may also be recognized as store brands or generic brands. This strategy produces identical but less expensive goods that compete with name brands and enables host stores to profit from the markets of goods they stock and sell on behalf of other businesses.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a brand management technique that enables a company’s target market to participate in its marketing initiatives. For instance, a company might run a competition to let people vote on a new soda flavor and submit names for the new product. This approach might enable greater brand promotion and attract new clients.
FAQ
What is a strategic brand?
Strategic brand management is intended to assist businesses in achieving long-term business objectives, increasing revenue, and gaining (or improving) brand recognition. Numerous factors, such as centralizing digital assets and maintaining brand consistency across various touchpoints, can (and should) be considered when managing a brand.
What are the four steps of strategic brand management process?
A strategic brand is one that is significant from an organizational standpoint. It drives sales, cash flow, loyalty, differentiation, and reputation. Finding your strategic brands will be a significant step toward preventing the improper allocation of resources for brand-building.
What is the first step in strategic brand management process?
- Identify and Establish Brand Positioning and Values.
- Designing and implementing brand marketing programs.
- Measuring and interpreting brand performance.
- Growing and sustaining brand equity.
