Mastering the Art of Brand Management: From Obscurity to Iconicity
Blog Post: Sociology of Media and Consumer Culture
Image Credit: Photography by Ivan Farias
Brand management is the process of managing your brand reputation and improving your audience’s perception of your brand in a way that builds brand awareness, equity, and loyalty. While branding is the process of building your brand, brand management is the whole other ball game process of monitoring and maintaining it. In this blog post, let’s endeavour to understand how brands are living, breathing things, which means they exist in a constant state of change. Brands are also very susceptible to external factors like the news, the latest trends, and current local and world events. In a world where journalists, influencers, and social media users influence virtually every narrative, brand management is how you can take control of your business’s story - perhaps at times even through the mediums I just mentioned. Brand management is the way you market using your brand assets to communicate value and build loyal relationships with your consumer.
A good brand manager is able to paint you a picture, they can build a fantasy by forcing you to imagine what it would be like to possess something. “Contemporary capitalism therefore depends on the intensification of desire, not its realisation” (Campbell 2005). It may not be the thing itself that brand management focuses on but rather revelling in the consumption of said thing or product, and therefore the media is arguably instrumental in shaping this. We now find ourselves in a world that has shrunk and is interconnected through media - a global ad campaign can be all it takes to announce and launch a new product today, popping up on everybody’s TikTok feed or television screen.
Thus, brand managers are essential because they will carefully massage their relationships and global perception. Most of the time a sports company will be more interested in celebrity sponsorships or trying to appear within a certain aesthetic lifestyle, rather than focus solely or too much on their individual products. And I’d argue this is evident with brands like Nike, seemingly more invested in their brand than their production output, their brand is carefully managed which means they can avoid backlash for their unethical production in sweatshops. Most recently, Billie Eilish and the infamous Michael Jordan celebrity collaborations. We exist within a global community in which we live through brands, the brand is the source of value. Say you’ve just walked past somebody in a mall donning a Louis Vuitton handbag, did they buy the bag for its quality? It is more likely they are attempting to exist within the fantasy of the brand and all that owning the handbag communicates.
Brand management can be centred around public relations, it is all about the perception people have of your brand. And it is worth noting that consumer culture is ambiguous, there are so many historical and cultural forces at play, it can be easy to think of today’s marketing and consumerism as “Americanised” yet there has probably never been a society or culture that hasn’t been based on consumerism, Justin St P. Walsh discusses how objects take on different meanings in new contexts, the linkages between the consumption of goods and identity construction, and the utility of objects for signalling positive information about their owners to their community in his book “Consumerism in the Ancient World: Imports and Identity Construction”.
Critics of consumerism may also say the world is becoming too westernised but I believe it is more ambiguous than this, marketing and media are believed to make it impossible to develop authentic relations with goods and therefore “any sense of joy must be artificial”... right? Consider the “Thing theory”: we look through objects but we only catch a glimpse of things. We are “caught up in things… The body is a thing among things” (2001: 4) (Brown 2001).
Objects, products and media are the backdrop that discloses things to provide partial understandings of history, culture, nature. When you’re on a first date, you’re going to be asking your date what kinds of movies they like, what music they listen to, perhaps sports or fashion interests… you are asking them what they consume. You are gauging your perception of this person and probably trying to see if you have anything in common… if your date sits across from you and says “oh I don’t listen to music, I don’t watch films or television, I don’t follow any sport, I don’t read much, I don’t really care for fashion, etcetera…” Do you think you’ll be going on a second date with them? And this brings us to the question of what objects “give us”. Exchange creates value and value is embedded in commodities that are exchanged. Understanding this leads to a need to focus on things that are exchanged, and not simply their form or function. Materiality and perception matters, we as humans have a biography and an expiry. We will decompose, our iPhone however may outlast us.
Image: Scott Bedbury, Nike's advertising director from 1987 to 1994
Copywriter Janet Champ and creative director Charlotte Moore are credited with some of the most memorable ads in the 30 years of Portland-based advertising agency Wieden Kennedy.
Brand management is crucial for business as it serves as the foundation upon which customer loyalty, trust and identity are built. A strong brand communicates a company's values, mission, and identity, distinguishing it from competitors in the market. Effective brand management ensures consistency in messaging and visual elements, creating a coherent and memorable brand image. A well-managed brand fosters customer recognition and emotional connection, leading to increased sales and customer loyalty. How does the brand of clothing you are wearing right now make you feel?
REFERENCES:
Belk, R. W., & Costa, J. A. (2020). Consumer Research Insights on Brands and Branding: A JCR Curation. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 711-727.
Fournier, S., & Alvarez, C. (2018). Consumer brand relationships: A research landscape. Journal of Business Research, 89, 330-341.
Homburg, C., & Pflesser, C. (2000). A multiple-layer model of market-oriented organisational culture: Measurement issues and performance outcomes. Journal of Marketing Research, 37(4), 449-462.
Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualising, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1-22.
Liu, M., & Koehn, N. F. (2019). The impact of corporate social responsibility on consumer-brand relationships: A dyadic analysis. Journal of Business Research, 98, 365-376.
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