Branding is not some age-old concept that is losing its importance in today’s business growth-hacking culture. Sure, there are many short-term tricks that can create instant success and unexpected traction.
Social media has made some startups famous. But relying on viral marketing to do business is like using gunpowder to try to keep a car running — explosive at first, but unsustainable and certainly damaging as soon as the last spark is put out.
Branding, on the other hand, can be a far more sustainable marketing effort. It takes some time each day to manage and improve how your current and future customers perceive your business, and indeed it is a constant work that never ends.
Brand management responsibilities
There are a few actions that branding executives like to take along the process of brand management:
Brand management responsibilities
There are a few actions that branding executives like to take along the process of brand management:
Monitoring competitor branding activity
Monitoring trends, fads, and customer sentiments
Analyzing sales data and customer base data
Planning and executing marketing campaigns
Surveying customer attitudes towards the business
These actions aren’t exactly steps that you must take in a particular order, but it is essential to perform all these tasks properly. Recognizing that brand management is never-ending, and not a linear process, you may wonder which actions to take first.
Well, truthfully, you can start anywhere, but we can discuss them in the order as mentioned above. In this article, we’ll assume that you have established a brand and a product, and you would like to improve or even expand your business.
Monitoring competitor branding activity
Our goal here isn’t to become a copy-cat, but to simply become aware of what your competitors know that your internal team may have missed. This is closely related to monitoring customer sentiments. It simply happens — we are not always able to pick up a trend because we haven’t recognized it as a trend, until the leader does.
If your business is not leading in a market category, it’s wise to be humble and learn from the leaders. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should directly copy their branding message, design, or even the brand entirely. Your brand is uniquely yours, and with the intelligence that you’ve gained from your competitors, you should be able to come up with your own campaign plans that align with your own brand.
Monitoring trends, fads, and customer sentiments
If you have a product that solves your target market’s problems well, you have a product-market fit. It might have taken effortful experimentation to get to the elusive product-market fit requirement, but that doesn’t mean you should lower your guard. Customer sentiments — their attitudes, enthusiasm, and worries — are dynamic and can directly or indirectly affect your sales.
The way to minimize the impact of the everchanging sentiments is to constantly stay up to date with news, not just news relevant to your industry, but also try to read up on what your customers usually like to read. Don’t immediately throw away your hard work of building your product. You can add tiny features of the product or service which give signals to your customers that your brand stays current and is still relevant to their lives.
Analyze sales and customer data
In Obviously Awesome, brand positioning expert April Dunford talks about ‘positioning baggage’. When you fall in love with your product and assign a clear and specific brand positioning to it, it may not necessarily translate the same way to your customer’s minds. Initial positioning ideas only become baggage when you insist that your product is one thing even though your customers think it is something else (or is best sold to an unexpected market).
For instance, if you targeted millennials, but found that your product is best sold to generation Z teenagers, nothing went wrong — the product simply spoke to Gen Zs and it sells itself to the unexpected market. When this happens, the best action would be to rebrand or modify the product to fit the market even further.
Plan and execute marketing campaigns
In the classic but timeless 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Al Ries and Laura Ries write that branding is born from publicity (it is what initiates brand awareness), but that brand must be maintained with at least one form of advertising. This is a contrarian thought, because most schools of thought refer to advertising as a way to increase brand awareness, while organic content marketing is used to increase authority, credibility, and to pave the brand’s way into market leadership.
At Island Media Management, our approach to brand management is to do both organic and paid (advertising) campaigns. This balanced approach ensures that your brand is strong and sustainable at any period of time, no matter the marketing budget. As with any completed or on-going campaigns, we review and analyze their effectiveness to constantly improve upon your marketing efforts.
Survey customer attitudes towards the business
In any relationship, trust and communication is key, and that isn’t limited to personal relationships. When businesses make it easier for customers to openly communicate with them via social media or website contact forms or in-window chat, businesses can gain greater insight in to how customers feel about the product that they’ve purchased or the business in general.
Responding to messages, replying to comments on blogs or social platforms, and even as simple as asking for feedback will work for you twofold — it lets your customers know that you care about their happiness, and it also lets you obtain detailed information about their complaints and/or praises.
Transform your brand from Good to Awesome
Around us, we face brands that are good enough to earn our respect and admiration. But good brands do not outcompete one another — awesome brands do. Transform your brand into an awesome one by working together with our business enthusiasts at Island Media Management.
Contact us, and ask anything.
