According to the Digital School of Marketing, brand management strategy definitely involves intuition. However, you can also use data to guide your direction. One way to gain an understanding of whether your brand is on the right track in terms of its brand management strategy is to think of it as a story you are telling.
A great story is not just something that you read on a page, it is an experience. In order for something to be an experience, it has to have a beginning, a middle as well as an end. At the end of the journey, there must be some sort of alteration from the beginning.
What causes a shift in a story? Tension. There must be tension between your antithesis as well as your thesis. From a marketing point of view, your ‘antithesis’ is your customer’s pain point while your ‘thesis’ is your solution to that problem. Thus the tension is the customer’s problem itself. This is the heart of your entire product-market fit, seen at a subatomic level. If you don’t have any tension (in other words problems to solve), then you don’t have a business. A brand management strategy comes down to one thing: storytelling. Your brand’s strategy is its story, its vision, its heart and soul.
Your brand is possibly your firm’s most valuable asset. Thus, developing a stronger brand management strategy is your most important task. When it comes to having a brand management strategy, it is not enough to simply have several bullet points of what you would like to accomplish. Today, brands need both a thorough understanding of why they choose certain strategies and a detailed outline of what their strategies will be.
A successful business cannot survive if it doesn’t have a strong brand management strategy. Without a unified identity, everything – from your content, to your culture and to your core business – can suffer. Building a strong brand management strategy takes time, effort and commitment. And that is where many people can get stuck.
A brand is best understood as your firm’s reputation as well as its visibility in the marketplace. The strength of your brand may be measured as Reputation X Visibility. There is another essential dimension of your brand as well: how relevant is it to your target client audience?
Brand management and development is the process of creating and strengthening your brand. This process can be divided into three phases.
- The first phase is getting your brand management strategy right and aligned with the objectives of your business.
- Second is developing all the tools that you will need to communicate the brand. For example, these tools are your logo, tagline as well as website.
- Finally, there is the phase of boosting your newly developed or updated brand.