Brand management is an area of marketing that focuses on the techniques necessary to to improve the perceived value perception of a brand over time. Effective brand management for your business can help build a more loyal customer base, increase retention, and even allow you to increase the price of your products and services.
If you think of your business as a person, then your brand would be considered its personality. Creating positive brand associations takes time and effort, but is worthwhile in the end; as brand awareness grows, so too does your business. But are you prioritizing your brand management efforts effectively? Here’s what you need to know:
Table of Contents
Brand Experience
Consumers aren’t just looking for products—they’re searching for experiences. Overall, the experience your brand evokes consists of the behavioral reaction someone has when interacting with your brand—their thoughts, feelings, and emotions. To create brand experiences, you need to understand your audience, its touch points, and what moves your customers.
In order for a brand experience to be logistically possible, you need to harness the power of your assets, technology, service, data, and storytelling to incite a feeling. Think about the experience that a brand like Starbucks offers. If a customer likes both Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks coffee equally, the experience is typically the clincher. Starbucks elicits a cozy, homey, fresh-brewed aesthetic, and this is what many of its consumers end up paying for.
Digital Asset Management
Digital asset management is the process of managing the tangible elements of your brand. It consists of all the components that your audience can see and remember, such as your logos, images, trademarks, color palette, typography, packaging, style guide, and much more. Managing these assets is so important because it helps ensure that you keep a consistent brand image throughout.
Over the lifetime of your business, you’ll refer back to your management platform again and again to instill this brand consistency throughout. Not only does this help your team stay organized, but it also serves as a template or set of instruction for your entire organization. This proves especially helpful for new employees who will appreciate having a resource center at their fingertips.
Impacting Your Bottom Line
You may not realize it, but brand management can directly impact your bottom line. As your business grows, it’s important for your brand to grow with it. Brand management isn’t just about marketing; it actually has a direct impact on your bottom line. Consider the benefits discussed early, such as the ability to improve customer loyalty and retention.
As a business owner, you might already understand that retaining customers is much easier than acquiring them. Studies have shown that acquiring a new customer is five times more costly than retaining an existing one. At the same time, brand building and brand management both play a role in your business’s ability to retain customers.
Ultimately, this is where value-based pricing comes in. Value-based pricing is the strategy of pricing a product or service based on its perceived value. For example, phenomenal packaging and a curated brand experience can increase the perceived value of a product (see Starbucks example). As you work on managing your brand, keep this term in mind.
Leveraging Public Relations
Brand management is all about the process of improving your brand reputation. Therefore, brand management and public relations are often linked together; it’s a PR person’s duty to help your business improve its public persona. Keep in mind that brand building differs from brand management—brand building is creating an image, while brand management is all about monitoring and maintaining that image. It’s about constantly having a stronghold on the story that your business portrays.
