Marketing Management For Non-Marketing Managers

3BRAND MANAGEMENT FUNDAMENTALS

One of the most important ways executives improve profitability and corporate value is by effectively managing their company’s brand. A strong brand can increase the value of a company by more than 40% relative to a competitor with the same assets and customer base.¹ Even more importantly, a strong brand can dramatically reduce the cost of generating new business. Market leaders intuitively know this, and they carefully manage their brand in the market.

By contrast, the executives of many average performing companies, particularly small and mid-sized organisations, fail to proactively and effectively manage their brand reputation. There are four common reasons this happens. The first is that they do not understand what ‘brand’ is and, as a result, delegate ‘brand management’ to their marketing or creative teams instead of proactively managing it at the executive level. The second is that they aren’t familiar with the building blocks of a strong brand, so they don’t effectively align all of their activities with their desired brand reputation. Third, they don’t understand the impact a strong corporate brand has on revenues, expenses and corporate valuation. Finally, they simply don’t understand the fundamentals of brand management, including the tools and best practices used by market leaders to manage their brand. This chapter examines each of these in turn.

THE DEFINITION OF BRAND

Part of the reason brand is neglected by many companies is that the ...