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It's time to change brand management
At a recent conference on new product development for consumer packaged goods companies, over 200 middle and senior management executives were asked: "How many of you feel secure about where your brands will be three to five years from now, in terms of market share, competitive differentiation, expected returns, higher value and better performance?" Barely a dozen people raised their hands.
This sobering answer has many implications for where the "health" of managing the brand is today. Yes, shareholder pressures to show results now, coupled with cost-cutting measures, the increasingly complex state of the consumer and the proliferation of new products, have turned this once straightforward message into one of the more challenging landscapes management faces today.
The purpose of this article is to illustrate the importance of managing the brand in the future, much like you would your other assets within the company (i.e. people, capital and machinery). This requires taking a different management discipline than has been used in the past and requires longer-term perspectives by management.
An asset, simply stated, is a property, with an assumed value that should be consistently maximized by an organization. A brand is a perceived image residing in the mind of consumers. To date, these two definitions have never been married together. A longer-term, strategic look at the brand has generally not been taken.
This article discusses the rationale behind adopting a brand asset management approach to help companies maximize the long-term value of their brands from two perspectives: demanding consumers are forcing companies to spend more dollars to earn greater returns; and companies, in general, admit to not having strategies in place to maximize their chances for getting those dollars from consumers.
This article will provide highlights from a recent study completed on the state of brand management ("Brand Asset Management for the 1990s") by Kuczmarski & Associates. Our study findings point to the serious mismanagement of the brand and short-term focus on the brand. Additionally, the study will show that there are several aspects to this myopia that need to be overcome. It will also show that management wants to change its ways and start managing its brands much more like assets - increasing their value over time.
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