Brand managers are concerned with adapting the brand’s strategy to the target market and creating a lasting impression among consumers in order to improve the product or service sales and market share. Here are the top five skills that every successful brand manager needs to possess.
Process Design
Process design is creating branding workflows along with step-by-step guides on branding elements such as brand colors, logo sizing, brand’s message, fonts, and any other elements to teach everyone in the organization how and where to use the brand’s assets. The branding strategist is responsible for designing branding processes that are in favor of the brand’s consistency. To make sure that both the employees and the external contributors understand and follow the brand’s standards it’s best to keep the brand guide in a public place where everyone can access it at any time.
Strategic Creativity
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There is no doubt that creativity stands behind the best brands out there, but that is not the only thing that matters when creating a brand. To build a successful brand, brand managers need to connect their creative forces with strategic business targets, which is quite challenging because it might limit the creative power of their teams.
Brand managers need to find the perfect balance between following the strategy and relying on creativity as well as lead the teams in the right direction without limiting their inventiveness. When creating a new brand asset, brand managers need to explain their expectations and keep all of the existing and new assets in an accessible written form, so the team can refer to them when needed.
Understand the Market
Brand managers must monitor and understand the market in which they are operating and determine which advertising channels and methods are the most effective for promoting their products or services and keeping the consumers engaged. Unlike in the past, there are many different media channels available for advertising among which the most effective are those powered by technology.
On the other hand, the competition is bigger than ever which means that brand managers must possess the right skills and knowledge to come up with new ways to reach the customers using engaging communication techniques that support the brand, along with some that are less frequent but equally important such as crisis management and defense methods against fake branding. For this reason, getting proper, globally oriented educational background is of paramount importance. ‘One of the principal goals of RM’s new master in advertising,’ explains the Director of RM Istituto Pasquale Volpe, ‘is to inspire international talents to expand their education horizons with a progressive program in the cosmopolitan city of Milan, properly preparing them for successful careers in this dynamic field.’
Digital Asset Management
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Digital asset management includes organizing and storing rich media, digital rights, and permissions. Brand strategists need to create an easy-to-use centralized digital library and give controlled access to employees, clients, and other key brand contributors to use the brand’s assets that could be in the form of images, photos, videos, audio, presentations, creative files, documents and more. However, everyone in the company should be aware of the importance of the brand’s digital assets and should know how to properly use them. Effective digital asset management ensures that everyone in the company is on the same page and prevents the creation of branding content that doesn’t adhere to the brand’s standards.
Quantitative Reasoning
Quantitative reasoning is one of the most important skills that every successful brand manager needs to adopt in order to gain legitimacy within the company especially among the higher levels of management. Although the branding outcomes are usually measured qualitatively, translating them in numbers allows the brand strategist to support his ideas and efforts with relevant data.
Some aspects of the branding strategy like brand perception are hard to measure, but the brand manager should try to find ways to express them numerically. Another important thing is a proper and engaging presentation of the gathered data where the brand managers should use both quantitative reasoning and real-world examples.
In today’s highly competitive market, customers change their opinions quickly which makes brand management a very dynamic and demanding process. The future brand strategists should invest in their education and learn by doing elbow-to-elbow with established professionals in the industry in order to develop the mentioned skills and many others that are crucial for successful brand management.
