The Complete Brand Experience
In today's hyper-connected world, the many ways of interacting with a brand has shifted traditional brand development towards a process where the brand image is created by a collection of brand influencers and is even shaped by the brand consumers themselves.
As a result, proper brand management is even more important as communication becomes fragmented and integrated channel management is increasingly more difficult to manage. Managing this entire brand experience is one of the most important and challenging tasks that companies face as they try to establish themselves at a time when the advertising and marketing noise is at historically unprecedented levels.
Brand Relevance & Engagement
Brand strategy and messaging still tends to be a top-down approach. If a brand aspires to be more relevant and wants to engage the audience, the brand positioning needs to facilitate conversation and interaction with the audience.
In order to implement and manage a relevant brand, companies need to embrace the bigger picture of all customer points of interaction. Effective brand management requires more than managing the primary brand elements of strategy, positioning, and identity. New social media strategies are developing a brand landscape that considers more than the traditional measurements of brand engagement and loyalty.
Executive Quick Hits
Key aspects of a successful Brand Experience:
- Brand strategy that considers the holistic view of the business
- Brand message that is consistent across all channels
- Tools that appropriately support brand management resources
- Communication methods that embrace emerging technologies
Brand management will achieve the following results:
- Consistency across all brand assets and messaging
- Transparency in communication that advocates proper brand positioning
- Increased speed to market as the implementation process is optimized
- Reduced costs for program development and maintenance
- Visibility across projects, resources, and brand activity
Components of Effective Brand Management
Brand includes more than just the logo and color palette. Products, communications, employees and public perception are a few of the many larger aspects of the overall brand. To successfully manage all of these brand aspects requires consideration of the bigger picture.
Transparency
The most important component of a successful brand management model is transparency. By allowing visibility to all brand activity, information is shared and distributed; and ultimately resources are more accountable for results.
Communication
How many times have you had a hallway conversation with "the expert" to resolve a problem? Sharing information and opening up the lines of communication is imperative to brand management success.
Community
Effective brand management requires collaboration. By allowing interaction between all the resources involved in a campaign or project, subject matter experts are able to add more value and provide the proper direction and influence.
Engagement
Managing a brand is a never-ending task that requires constant engagement. The speed at which new information is created and shared requires companies to be aware of what is being said about their brand at all times.
Consistency
There is always more than one resource or vendor tasked with creating and delivering brand assets for a campaign or project. Consistency across all these disparate activities is needed to effectively manage the brand.
Integration
Keeping track of the messaging taking place in the different marketing channels is one of the most difficult tasks in brand management. Channel integration is necessary to establish consistent brand positioning.
Brand Management Tools
Brand managers are typically responsible for implementing and maintaining brand strategies, but these resources are becoming more than brand implementers. These traditional brand roles are growing into more diverse roles as brand advocates, and these advocates will need the necessary tools to manage their brand more effectively and efficiently.
User Management
Manage both the users who need access to your brand community as well as their roles and security levels.
Single Sign-On
Provide a single location for your users to sign in to the brand community tools.
Authorization Portal
Determine the user role and permissions for each account type.
Profile Manager
Manage user profile information and determine their level of involvement in the community.
Communication
Provide your brand managers with the appropriate tools to communicate constantly and clearly with all users within the brand community.
Discussion Forum
Facilitate conversation around any aspect of brand assets or marketing campaigns.
Blog
Assign specific brand or product managers to blog about their latest developments.
News Feed
Provide the community with constant updates about URLs, products, campaigns, etc.
Workflow & Approvals
Ensure that your brand community is aware of all current activity by creating a web governance model that includes workflow and approvals.
URL Manager
Request vanity URLs, domains, and sub-domains through the proper approval channels.
Product Name Manager
Request a product name and manage the legal and marketing approvals from start to finish.
