Guide
What is brand management?
Definition, importance, benefits, and how it works
Brand management refers to the strategic and tactical process of nurturing a brand. How you manage your brand directly influences your brand equity, brand value, and brand reputation.
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What is brand management?
Brand management is the practice of shaping and overseeing a brand to enhance its value and foster brand loyalty. It involves marketing and branding activities to develop and maintain a strong brand presence in your customers’ minds.
Why is brand management important?
Brand management can directly influence brand equity—the overall value and strength of your brand based on customer perceptions. If done successfully, brand management can help elevate your brand, making it more widely known to larger audiences.
What are the benefits of brand management?
Effective brand management adds value to your business in several ways, including fostering brand trust, creating meaningful brand experiences, and encouraging customer engagement. If you're looking to increase brand recognition and awareness, there are many ways to do so through brand management.
- It fosters brand trust by creating a positive perception and adding credibility to your business and brand name.
- It helps you build a strong brand that delivers meaningful and impactful brand experiences.
- It encourages customer engagement and advocacy, leading to positive word-of-mouth marketing.
- It can help you drive additional sales and conversions from loyal customers.
What are the key principles of brand management?
Brand management principles are fundamental concepts that guide the development and strategic management of a brand. They can vary depending on your business priorities, but here’s a breakdown of the most important elements from brand positioning to brand protection.
1. Brand positioning and differentiation
Crafting a unique and compelling value proposition can help set your brand apart and appeal to your key audiences.
2. Brand consistency and recognition
Maintaining a cohesive brand image can ensure that brand experiences are consistent across all customer touchpoints. Brand consistency makes it easier for customers to recognize and remember your brand over time.
With brand management, your brand remains prominent in the minds of customers. Social media and awareness campaigns play a crucial role in achieving this goal.
4. Brand loyalty and customer engagement
In brand management, the focus is on placing customers at the center of every interaction with your brand. This approach reinforces brand loyalty and customer engagement over time, allowing you to build strong relationships with your customers.
5. Brand equity and brand value
Deliver on brand promises and implement strategies that help enhance brand awareness, positive brand associations, and customer loyalty to increase the perceived and actual value of your brand.
Brand building is an essential aspect of brand management that focuses on shaping and strengthening your brand’s image, perception, and reputation. Brand-building activities often include efforts to increase brand awareness.
7. Brand reputation and brand protection
Safeguard your brand’s integrity, reputation, and intellectual property against unauthorized use or misuse.
How does brand management work?
Brand management is a holistic process that involves overseeing and guiding multiple aspects of your brand to ensure its success. It begins and ends with designing a focused brand strategy, which can include these steps:
- A clear definition of your brand mission, brand values, key audiences, brand positioning, and objectives, which are elements that will act as your road map to develop your brand
- A unique brand identity, including visual and content assets such as the brand name, logo, tagline, and visual design
- Crafting engaging brand messages and utilizing brand advertising that amplifies your brand’s unique value proposition, which includes both offline and online advertising channels, such as social media, digital advertising solutions, and marketing events
- Creating a positive brand experience at every touchpoint, ensuring that customers have enjoyable interactions with your brand, such as customer service and user experience that center your customers
- Ongoing brand monitoring and analysis of brand performance and customer feedback, such as tracking brand metrics, conducting market research, and utilizing social listening tools to understand brand perception
Brand management vs. marketing and branding
Brand management integrates elements of marketing and branding to create and deliver captivating customer experiences.
Brand management and marketing
Brand management employs marketing tools and marketing strategies to strengthen brand value and customer loyalty.
Brand management and branding
Brand management leverages branding—the sum of brand assets, such as logos and visuals, that help build a distinct brand identity—to deliver consistent messages and create emotional connections with customers.
What is a brand manager’s role?
A brand manager leads the brand strategy, tracks relevant digital analytics, and serves as the guardian of the brand. A brand manager will help your brand develop and stay relevant while upholding its core values.
Top tips to manage your brand effectively
Effectively managing a brand requires is crucial for long-term success. From regularly assessing key performance indicators to developing clear brand guidelines, brand management involves a carefully considering how all elements of your brand resonate with your target audience.
To effectively manage your brand, you should consider the following tips:
- Regularly assess digital analytics, business trends, and customer reviews to adapt your brand strategy and brand positioning as necessary.
- Develop clear brand guidelines that outline your brand’s visual identity and tone of voice. By having a set of rules in place, you can maintain consistency across all communications and protect your brand’s reputation.
- Regularly conduct a brand audit. Your brand is a living organism and should evolve over time to stay relevant and current. Auditing visual elements, brand messaging, and customer perceptions at least once every quarter can help surface areas of improvement.
- Create a digital library for all your brand assets that will help you stay organized. As your brand grows, it will be easier for you to manage and repurpose marketing and branding materials.
Examples of successful brand management strategies
Case Studies
Learn how foodspring, a German sports nutrition brand, used unique features from Amazon Ads to help connect with international shoppers and build a global brand.
Case Studies
NF Import launched sponsored ads in 2015. Learn how they enjoy Sponsored Brands as a brand amplifier and how they champion ads best practices.
5 ways Amazon Ads can help you successfully manage your brand
Amazon Ads offers cost-effective advertising solutions to businesses of all sizes, helping capture the hearts and minds of current and future customers. Here are a few ways Amazon Ads can help you implement key principles of brand management while driving brand growth.
- Take control of your brand’s reputation by actively managing customer reviews and ratings. We’ve found that 88% of people consider online reviews an important part of the buying decision.1 Also, newly launched ASINs reach 15 customer reviews 29% quicker on average when added to a Sponsored Products 2 campaign compared to when not.3
- Create memorable brand moments with innovative ad formats. Advertisers who used all Sponsored Brands ad formats saw on average 79% of their sales from new-to-brand (NTB) customers.4
- Reach relevant audiences throughout their shopping journey and help make your brand easy to discover with a Sponsored Display audiences campaign. Advertisers who use Sponsored Display audiences are seeing up to 74% of their ad attributed sales driven by NTB customers.5
- Harness the power of brand metrics and campaign reporting to uncover insights that will help optimize your brand’s performance.
- Learn all you need to know to become a successful advertiser and amplify your brand’s voice with free courses, certifications, learning boot camps, and on-demand webinars, available in the learning console.
What to do next
Growing and managing your brand can be daunting at times, but you don’t have to do it alone. Amazon Ads specialists provide guidance and free tailored support to help you on your journey with Amazon Ads and achieve your goals faster.
1 Lyfe Marketing, “The Importance of Digital Marketing: Top 10 Reasons You Need It,” 2022
2 Sponsored Brands is only available to sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry
3 Amazon internal data, US, Sep 2020–Aug 2022, based on campaigns run within 90 days post-product launch
4 Amazon internal data, WW, May 2021–Apr 2022
5 Amazon internal data, WW, 2022