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

Brand management is one of the most important challenges facing businesses and marketers across every industry sector, so with this in mind, I’ve outlined some tips to help business owners, marketers, and brand managers to de-risk their marketing investment, and to provide a greater likelihood of success in 2023.

Create mental and physical availability for your brand.

You must consider how you can achieve greater brand penetration because of increased mental and physical availability for consumers i.e., mental availability is when your brand more easily comes to mind during purchasing decisions or occasions, and physical availability is simply about making your brand easier to find, and to purchase from, through specific channels.

Keep your brand in tune with market orientation.

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you’re not measuring, so you should be conducting periodic qualitative then quantitative research (using category prospects, customers, and brand loyalists) to inform a brand tracking survey - essential if you’re serious about building your brand, mitigating investment risk, and staying relevant.

Define your brand’s purchase funnel.

Conducting a good brand diagnosis will help you discover and better define, the individual steps and actual conversion rates 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 accordingly.

Plan for the long and short (aka) sophisticated mass marketing and lead generation.

Most of any category is NOT ‘in market’ ready to buy a product or service, so it is bewildering as to why so many marketers invest their entire budget on the short, performance marketing activities. The smart brand managers understand that most of their category are not ready to buy today, tomorrow, or even next week, so they invest in long, year-round brand building to reach the entire category, mass marketing to grow salience to influence future buying situations.

Think brand distinctiveness before brand 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.  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.

Brands who invest during a recession, profit during the recovery.

Empirical evidence demonstrates that when brands cut marketing spend in a downturn, they perform worse coming out of a recession. Whereas brands that increase marketing spend in a downturn, grow market share in a recovery. I recommend maintaining your marketing spend as a minimum, but diverting more spend into longer term brand building, and less into short term lead generation campaigns, reinforcing your brand positioning and growing category salience.

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 online.