Oshin Kamble
With digital marketing becoming an influential approach for most brands, the importance of brand management is often underrated. Simply put, brand management is the science of creating a positive relationship with the target market. However, it also entails the various facets of the customer’s association with the brand and even the relation to the purchasing process. There are five effective principles of brand management which are important for most brands to effectively manage their target market and garner a positive response from the consumers:
Each brand has a unique selling point. This USP sets your brand apart from your competitors. For instance, Idea’ “India ho Gaya hai 3G me busy” ensured that they came up as the leading telephonic brand for the 3G technology. Similarly, the affordable rates offered by JIO for 4G technology set the approach as a brand differentiation key. In order to create it, the product’s position needs to be fit properly in the market. Here, the demographics of the consumer base will play a huge role in understanding what kind of branding will intrigue them.
Very few people understand the difference between marketing messaging and effective marketing communication. All the communication that goes out through your brand should include your USP and be associated with the brand awareness that you are trying to create. Do not target just traction from your branding approach, instead, include targeted consumer traction for your brand. This will ensure that your brand does not fall prey to false growth but instead sees the qualitative approach.
The main idea behind conquering the right market is that you would need to keep evolving with times. Everybody involved in brand development should learn to collaboratively ideate and keep introducing changes from the very inside. One way to do is to get buy-ins from the other departments which co-create the core of your brand. You can also get a buy-in from the external stakeholders. Learn to incorporate different views into your brand which you may have ignored initially. Also, always include the R&D department. Your research and development team can tell you what is being appreciated in the market and how changes can be incorporated to align your brand with the same.
Word of mouth is a strategy that never loses. With our entire world revolving around following the right influencers and following targeted propagators- approaching a strategy that includes influential marketers would be very helpful. There is such a thing called a third-person effect. Just ensure it does not look like an obvious product plugin. Have a subtle influential marketing strategy where the influencers you choose do not look sold and your brand management is done subtly.
One important pointer to remember is that even though a brand may evolve, the core of it never changes. Simple elements like color, messaging, the shape of the logo stay in the minds of the consumers. So, they start to resonate with them. With brand management software, you can adopt evolution while keeping the core principals the same.
While brand management has a lot of facets, the simplest of principles can give you the much-needed headstart. This simple approach would surely help you in making an effective and influential brand management strategy. While most of these are already adopted, but there are a lot of simple mistakes pertaining to these principles that we make on a regular basis.
