Strategic Brand Management

About this course

Successful brands are built on the foundation of a meaningful brand strategy that provides the framework for what a brand stands for and how it will be communicated to the marketplace. Branding has three main purposes: product identification, repeat sales, and new-product sales. Branding allows marketers to distinguish their products from all others.
Absolutely anything can be branded, from something as mundane as salt to something as large as a country. Strategic brand management involves the design and implementation of marketing programmes and activities to build, measure and manage brand equity. It also builds brand Identity which represents how the brand wants to be perceived.

Brand management in highly competitive and dynamic markets, will only be effective if the brand itself stays close to its core values and uniqueness. It must focus on specific market segments and capture a competitive positioning in the mind of the customer.

Brand positioning describes how a brand can effectively compete against a specified set of competitors in a particular market. Brands span multiple product categories and therefore can have multiple distinct, yet related, positioning statements. To bind them together, marketers develop what is called a brand mantra which reflects the ‘heart and soul’ of the brand or product category.

As a marketer or brand manager, you need to choose a number of brand elements to facilitate the process of consumer brain mapping. These elements also play a key role in positioning your brand and building brand equity. Once brand elements have been established, marketers need to develop brand touchpoints to facilitate interaction or communication between the brand and its customers.

All brand elements, touchpoints, positioning and mantras must also be communicated internally. This is known as internal marketing. Employees need to hear the same messages that you send out to the marketplace.

The world has become smaller with the rapid growth of e-commerce, and more and more consumers are buying products from outside their countries. We therefore look at managing brand equity in different types of market segments with great emphasis on international issues and global brand strategies.
To build global customer-based brand equity, marketers must develop a brand strategy. The strategy should aim to establish the breadth and depth of brand awareness, create Points of Parity and Points of Difference for the brand, elicit positive and accessible brand responses and finally forge intense, active brand relationships. Achieving these four steps, in turn, requires establishing six core brand building blocks: salience, performance, imagery, judgments, feelings and resonance.

There have been various changes in marketing in recent years. The customer has changed drastically and the benefits they derive from the products sold by companies have changed. Modern marketing has had to adapt to the digitalisation of the world.

The shift to digital has decreased the extent of control that a brand manager has over brand meaning. With today’s many-to-many communications model the growth and proliferation of large social media platforms, has ushered in an era in which dynamic and real-time conversations are taking place among consumers on a massive scale, making the control businesses have over brand message and co-creation of brand meaning limited.

As a digital age marketer or brand manager, you must consider online branding in your strategy and how you can use online channels to support your brand. We therefore end this course with an overview of the world’s top social media channels; Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok and the many branding opportunities available with each.