From providing resilience during a recession to enhancing recruitment efforts, reducing price sensitivity to building brand equity, well managed brands deliver value far beyond growing market sales revenues.

Brand management is one of the most important processes facing businesses today, but unfortunately, it’s also one of the most misunderstood processes, usually resulting in missed opportunities for growing sales, profitability, and market share.

I’ve outlined below some key brand management tasks for business owners, marketers, and brand managers to incorporate, which will provide the greatest likelihood of success in 2023 and beyond.

1.    Brands must stay market orientated. Market orientation takes a 180-degree look at how customers see you, not how you see them. To keep in tune with your market, you need to get out of the office and start talking to customers. You’ll need to have curiosity and a willingness to learn, warts and all, discovering negative brand associations to competitor preferences, purchase barriers to decision hierarchies, and more.

2.    Brands must build mental availability. To achieve greater brand penetration, you must build memory structures (mental availability) across your entire category, ensuring your brand more easily comes to mind during specific purchasing decisions, events, or occasions. Don’t forget to also think about making your brand easier to find, and easier to purchase from, through specific channels.

3.    Brands must define a custom purchase funnel. Conducting a good brand diagnosis will help you discover and better define, the individual steps and actual conversion performances within your custom purchase funnel. Your funnel should provide the evidence which pinpoints where your conversion rate issues sit, enabling you to set strategic objectives and to align your budgets based on the remedial action required.

4.    Brands must grow their distinctiveness before differentiation. Too many marketers are pre-occupied with trying to find points of difference, instead of first considering how to utilise distinctive brand assets as a more effective way of keeping front of mind and achieving brand salience during buying decisions. Distinctive assets can be leveraged when brands create unique or unmistakable identities which ensure they are easily recognisable and memorable e.g., patterns, shapes, colours, slogans, characters, jingles and more.

5.    Brands must plan to go short and long with campaigns. Only 5% of a category is likely to be ‘in market’ ready to buy a product or service, so it is bewildering as to why so many marketers invest their entire budget on short lead generation activities. The smart brand managers understand that most of their category are not ready to buy today, next week, or even next month, so they invest in long, year-round brand building to reach the entire category, building memory structures and growing salience to influence future buying.

Marketing Lab is a brand management and marketing consultancy working with regional, national, and international businesses to mitigate marketing investment risk, ensuring more informed decisions are made with a view to improving sales and profitability, growing market share, and building brand equity. Request a FREE 30-minute brand management consultation.