4-step strategic brand management process
While it may be tempting to simply decide on your brand and let your audience discover it on their own, effective brand management is an ongoing process. Public perceptions can quickly take a turn for the worse if you’re not on top of guiding them in the right direction.
Here are the four steps of the strategic brand management process that you can follow to grow your business.
1. Cultivate brand awareness
The first step to creating an effective brand is building brand recognition in the first place. For consumers to even consider buying from you, they need to know who you are and what you sell. As brand awareness develops, they’ll be able to recall this basic information when presented with the visual elements of your brand, such as your logo and brand colors.
In this step, consumers don’t know the entire story of your brand, but they do know that you exist so your business makes their shortlist when they’re weighing options of where to spend money.
When you want to increase recognition for your company’s brand, the key is to present it consistently in all of your marketing materials. With only a quarter of organizations having formal brand guidelines, creating a style guide that defines your brand personality and image can boost consistency and increase your revenue by 23%.
2. Build your brand reputation
Once brand awareness has been developed, it’s time for brand association. Building a great brand reputation is all about linking those visual elements of your brand to the positive values and feelings you want to express. In this step, you’re introducing your target audience to the brand beneath the surface—the part of your business that creates and enforces emotional connections.
To distinguish yourself from other brands, you need to demonstrate the values you uphold. For example, if you want your brand name to be known for sustainability, you’ll have to focus your marketing on your environmentally friendly practices. A part of building your brand reputation may also involve some public relations work, as you’ll benefit from news stories about how your brand is contributing to the greater community.
During this step, it’s also important to monitor how your audience is reacting to your brand. You can use a tool like Podium Feedback to collect insight from customers at any checkpoint, which can help you figure out if your brand message is well-received or if adjustments need to be made.
3. Increase brand equity
When consumers begin to form an opinion on your brand, this directly affects your brand equity. This is essentially your brand value or how much your branding alone is worth. With successful brand management, your target audience will be willing to pay more for your product compared with the generic version that competes on price alone.
Your perceived brand equity starts with what consumers know about your brand, including what they associate with it, what your marketing says, and what their peers tell them. However, it’s a brand experience that increases (or decreases) your value. If you show that you can back up your brand promise — for example, BMW’s old tagline that promised “the ultimate driving machine” — your value goes up.
While you certainly can let your marketing do the work, many companies may offer free samples or free trials of their products as part of their community outreach to encourage consumers to experience the brand for the first time. Other times, they may aim to increase their equity by encouraging already loyal customers to provide testimonials or reviews that affect perceptions. If you choose to take the latter route, be sure to accelerate your efforts by sending automatic review invites to every customer.
4. Develop brand loyalty
The final step of the brand management process requires you to reinforce your brand with your internal team. While your marketing team can push your brand to your target audience to complete the other steps of this process, brand loyalty can only be accomplished when you can be trusted to deliver the same customer experience each time.
Your team members should be trained to embody your values and strive to accomplish your mission and vision. When a customer comes back for their second brand experience and their third, your team should be able to fulfill the same brand promise again and again—and perhaps do so even better each time.
Over time, increasing brand loyalty will turn your customers into brand ambassadors who not only return but also talk about the value and excellence of your company with their peers or on social media.
