Brand Management – too important to be left only to the marketing department!
It is becoming common knowledge that strong, well leveraged brands add significant value to an organisation and produce higher returns for shareholders. Given this, the question begs, how much focus and what resources are organisations throwing at brand management and is it being taken as seriously as other business practises?
If your brand directly impacts on your shareholder value, then one could argue that branding and brand management are in fact a CEO responsibility. Why is it then that the responsibility of ‘brand’ so often lies within the discipline of ‘marketing’, who are considered the primary custodians?
Without doubt, marketing plays a role in brand management, however, if you examine those organisations who list highly on the world’s most valuable brands listing, you will see that ‘brand management’ is an organisation-wide responsibility and clearly on the CEO agenda.
The discipline we now know as brand management had its inception in 1931, as the result of a now famous internal memo by Neil H. McElroy at Procter & Gamble plc. McElroy argued that more concentrated attention should be paid to a brand and that there should be a substantial team devoted to thinking about every aspect of it.
Brand management as a business practise has evolved since 1931, however, there are still many organisations whose approach that would render them still stuck in the 1930’s. Do any of these statements sound familiar:
§ “We have a style guide and use that to manage our brand”
§ “Our marketing department manage our brand”
To be competitive and build strong brand equity, organisations need to get savvy and view brand management as a strategic initiative. Building and implementing a brand management framework that is organisationally pervasive is the key. The ‘devoted team’ that McElroy spoke of should now be thought of as the ‘entire organisation’- who think about all aspects of a brand.
Here are a few tips for successful brand management:
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Do |
Don’t |
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Obtain CEO buy-in and understanding of the importance of brand to the business. This is critical. |
Rely on your style guide for brand management – brand management is much more than managing your visual representation. |
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Ensure senior executives visibly support and understand the strategic significance of the brand to the business and demonstrate strong brand leadership and advocacy. |
Assign total responsibility for your brand to just your marketing department. |
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Ensure cross-functional buy-in for successful brand management i.e. every department is responsible for brand. |
Pay lip service to your brand management i.e. talk the talk but fail to walk the talk. |
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Develop a strong brand-building organisational culture – structures, systems, processes all aligned to the brand promise. |
Expect your employees to understand what your brand stands for and take responsibility for your brand without first communicating key brand information |
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Understand, monitor and manage all of the brand ‘touchpoints’ within your business. |
Rely on only measuring external brand KPIs – internal brand KPIs are important too |
If your organisational brand is underperforming, then take action and start building an organisationally pervasive approach to brand management. After all, brand management is too important to be left only to the marketing department.