Know-How Exchange : Branding

You're confusing two concepts here. Branding and branding strategies are different than "brand management."

Of course managing your brand is important for all businesses, regardless of size. Brand management is, after all, management of the consumer mindset. If you don't manage it, the consumer will "make it up" and it will be managed for you. Brand is name, taglines, colors and fonts you use, packaging, quality levels, appearance and attitude, how you answer the phone, and everything in between. It's how you want to be perceived.

Now "brand management" might have a different connotation than branding and "managing your brand." Brand management is usually taken to mean how you manage many different product families for a firm that sells lots of kinds of products/services. Like P&G has hand soap, paper towels, laundry soap, etc. They all have their own brands and are managed like little companies in themselves. For a small company, this usually doesn't make sense. The cost of promoting all the brands costs too much. And for a small company, trying to be in every business at once causes a detrimental lose of focus. So brand management in this sense is a very bad strategy for small business. It's better to manage one well focused brand, make it successful, and then expand. With this strategy, by the time a question arises as how to manage multiple brands, the company isn't a small company any more.

Wayde

Thanks for sharing knowledge.

'Wayde' I want to say that Branding and strategic brand management are same things having same meanings. Both trems are used interchangeably.

So is this necessary for small companies to track their brand/coupple of brands' worth on continual basis?

Branding and strategic brand management can be used interchangeable - but probably incorrectly. In large companies like P&G, the "brand manager" is a person who manages the marketing aspects and maybe the P&L of one brand - say, Tide. Branding in itself can have several meetings if used incorrectly. Branding can mean the action of developing the brand - the image stuff that you do to occupy the consumer's mind in the way you want (this is probably the correct use of the term). OR it can be used to define the act of buying someone else's product, relabeling it and selling it under your own name. More correctly, this would be called "Brand labeling." The problem is with many people in marketing - and possibly you are exemplifying it here - is they are are not precise enough in their use of the terms. Brand Strategy means something VERY different from Branding and Branding Strategy. You started your question off right by asking if small companies should worry about branding and branding strategies. And then you muddied it up by including brand management strategies. This could have been a typo on your part, or maybe you just didn't understand the distinction. I would have just assumes you really meant to say BRANDING management strategies, but, I am precise in my craft of marketing and don't like to assume anything in a question so I have ALREADY answered both questions - branding and brand management for small companies, YES. Brand management for small companies - NO. See my above answer for the reasoning and rationale.

Wayde

Absolutely agree with Wayde. Also, 'don't confuse having a brand and branding... one can have a brand and never have branded their business'. Branding, brand strategy, and brand management are different things as Wayde has explained.