Brand Management – Tips on how to manage your brand and business reputation

Author Max Freer, Founder, OOK Agency
 

Brand management refers to all activities and strategies you use to build and maintain a positive reputation with customers, employees and wider stakeholders.

Let us help you discover tips from the master’s in marketing and brand strategy with trusted know-how tips to retain a positive brand reputation.

Tip Takeaways

• Brand management involves maintaining and enhancing a brand’s value by ensuring consistent messaging and positive customer experiences, leading to strong brand associations and long-term success.
  Summary. Brand has a bottom-line value, damage the integrity and trust of your brand with your audience and the impact will be felt on the bottom-line.
• Effective brand management ensures consistent branding across all platforms, improves internal team efficiency, and drives customer engagement, ultimately boosting loyalty and long-term business growth.
  Summary. Always put quality messaging ahead of quantity. Less is more. Repetition builds reputation. Your message must be consistent.

Marketing and branding are the engine drivers of your business, they work with your business strategy to help an organisation reach its goals. Never view marketing as a cost, it’s an investment to get your business to where you want it to be.

What is brand management?

Brand management is the process of maintaining and improving the perceived value of a brand over time. By aligning all brand-related elements, brand management builds customer loyalty, can justify higher pricing, and is a reason for customers to choose and believe in a brand.
 
Effective brand management ensures that every interaction reinforces the brand’s identity, creating positive associations and long-term success.
 
A brand consists of many elements; marketing and advertising messaging, customer service policies, product quality, public perceptions, and employee interactions such as an EVP (Employee Value Proposition).
 
Managing all these elements to create a consistent image with your customers, employees and stakeholders takes a coordinated effort from your entire organisation.
 
We work with clients to build company culture and brand guidance to help organisations harmonise the needs of managing their brand integrity both internally with employees and externally with customers and extended stakeholders.
 
Over time, successful brand management helps an organisation create positive brand associations, with your people and customers and which extends to the brand’s products and services.

Why is brand management important?

Brand Management and Business Strategy are two halves working as one whole in the best interest of the organisation. Brand management supports long-term business growth by establishing a consistent image that makes the brand easier to recognise including helping your team work more efficiently, boosting brand awareness, and driving customer loyalty.

Establishes and maintain consistent branding

Brand Management and Business Strategy are two halves working as one whole in the best interest of the organisation. Brand management supports long-term business growth by establishing a consistent image that makes the brand easier to recognise including helping your team work more efficiently, boosting brand awareness, and driving customer loyalty.

Establishes and Maintain Consistent Branding
Repetition builds reputation. Consistent branding makes it easier for consumers to identify brands when they encounter them in their day-to-day lives, whether that’s in an Instagram post, in a magazine advert, or on a product on the shelf at a local shop. Consumers are more likely to buy from brands they recognise and understand because they have a better idea of what to expect compared to choosing an unknown competitor.
 
We create a one-page brand summary for clients as a short-cut with the essential core elements, the vision, mission, purpose, values, personality etc. and we build the larger, tailored toolkit to support the brand strategy and brand management.

Brand management includes

• Brand guidelines that document who a brand is and serve as a roadmap for how team members establish and maintain its identity.
• Supports internal -team collaboration and keeps everyone on the same page, so that even large teams can use one unified brand voice.
• Establishes review processes for marketing and advertising efforts to ensure messaging and imaging remain on-brand.

Managing brand voice and messaging is critical

While this might not seem like a big deal, inconsistent messaging is a pain-point that means even a small issue like using the wrong tone in a social media post can damage or hurt the brand.

Brand improves internal team efficiency

A resource repository is a key element of effective brand management and gives everyone in an organisation access to the assets they need to represent the brand. And, because everything is housed efficiently in one location, it saves time by making it much easier to find the necessary files.

Who needs to be part of brand management

• Marketing:Marketers need access to a variety of assets to connect with audiences across communication platforms. This includes formatted logos for social media platforms and content calendars that guide campaigns including a tone of voice guide.
• Design: Designers create new templates and visuals for web pages and ads. In order to maintain consistency with older designs, the team needs a wide variety of resources, including previous templates for comparison, codes for branded colour palettes, and font and style preferences.
• Sales: Sales and Business Development are the front face of the business and the drivers of the income. They interact directly with customers at a personal level, which means they need to know how to talk about the brand and what language to use when talking about products, all of which they can find in the brand’s resource repository.

Conclusion

Discover your brand identity

Evaluate the brand’s current position to ensure any future branding efforts build on the success of the existing brand. Start by conducting a brand audit and doing a competitor analysis. This will give you a better understanding of what customers like about your brand and what they’d like to see in the future.

Create a brand management strategy

Define your brand goals, align these with your business goals and organisational purpose. Then, you’ll need to identify the tactics to reach your goals. The more specific you are throughout this process, the better prepared you’ll be to make decisions about the brand in the future.

Define brand guidelines

 
Traditionally, brand guidelines were a single document containing details on how to size the company logo, what tone of voice to use, and when and how to use stock photography. The most successful brands nowadays rely on the ‘cloud’ to create a digital hub that gives teammates access to the same basic guidelines and resources.
 
We work across a variety of brand management projects and can support you with whatever your needs are.
 
Max Freer is a Creative Brand Strategist based in Northeast England. She is founder of OOK Agency a UK based purpose-driven freelance brand agency where her work focuses on brand, marketing and campaign management. Max has 30 years industry expertise working with recognised UK Media organisations, national and international brands.