What is Brand Management and Why is It important?

Wilkepedia defines Brand Management as the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand. It seeks to increase the product's perceived value to the customer and thereby increase brand franchise and brand equity. Marketers see a brand as an implied promise that the level of quality people have come to expect from a brand will continue with future purchases of the same product.

How is brand measured, usually by comparing one brand to another. For example, Burger King vs. McDonald's. The whole point in a nutshell is what do people think of my product as compared to my competition. Are my products considered to be of higher quality or of lower quality or perhaps equal. The higher the perception of quality, usually the higher price that the brand is able to charge. The more value that your products provide to customers, the higher quality that your brand will be perceived to be. Business Week offers an annual guide of The World's Best Brands that list the 100 top companies in order of brand value. Next important question. Why do brands matter and to who? There are two groups of stakeholders, consumers and producers.

Consumers value brands because they offer:

• Identification of source product.
• Gives an assignment of responsibility to the product maker.
• Reduces dis-satisfaction risk.
• Search cost reducer.
• Establishes a bond with the product producer.
• Provides a sign of quality

Producers value brands because they offer:

• Offer a means of identification to simplify handling or tracking.
• Its a means of legally protecting unique features.
• Provides a quality level to satisfied customers.
• Source of competitive advantage.
• Source of financial returns.

Brands are considered tiny businesses within a company and the brand managers in charge of them have several duties to attend to:

• Monitoring the competitive landscape of the category in which your brand resides.
• Developing strategies to exploit market opportunities.
• Executing those strategies with the help of a cross-functional team.
• Delivering the sales volume, market share, and profit projections for the business.

Brand managers craft elegant business plans and submit them to senior management. They focus on the minutiae of a daily sales-volume report, and they dream big dreams when it’s time to update the vision for the brand.