Creating and maintaining an effective, attractive brand for your company and products is a number one concern for any new company. After all, how your brand is perceived can make or break your business, determining whether you bring in enough new customers, create a customer following, and maintain the system of beliefs that you’re selling by staying "on-brand."
But it’s tough for founders to be able handle all of this alone. Instead, consider hiring a brand manager or brand management agency like Herman-Scheer. But what exactly is brand management, and do you need a brand manager right away? Let’s explore this in detail.
What Does A Brand Manager Do?
In a nutshell, a company’s brand manager takes charge of the overall image for that brand’s products, people, services, or other major aspects. Think of them as the head of the brand marketing and creation team (if your company has such a team in the first place).
At Herman Scheer, we’ll lead handle everything from brand strategy and positioning to messaging for you. But then again, we’re more than your average branding agency. A (good) brand manager will also ensure that you’re reaching the people, rather than just the demographics that you’re looking for. It’s way more important to build a fanatical following, to get customers to adhere to a long-term set of beliefs from your company, than it is to look at short term metrics. After all, people are emotional, so you need to be looking at their emotions.
If you decide that your brand needs to be updated to better fit your belief system, a brand manager would be tasked with designing a new brand or altering existing brand identity, strategizing a brand reinvention push, and coming up with ways to use that brand in all aspects of the company.
What Are Their Job Responsibilities?
Since branding should be informing every decision that your company makes, it’s no surprise that brand managers often have a variety of responsibilities. These can include:
Developing marketing and advertising campaigns, strategies, and ideas
Crafting “big picture” brand imagery or theme
Determining whether new brand-related content adequately connects to existing content
Managing brand budget (i.e., the budget you have to alter or create your brand image)
Overseeing or manage brand promotional activities
Analyzing the effectiveness of new brand strategies
Periodically reevaluating how they can make their company’s brand even more successful
Doing lots of brand research, of course
Integrate different teams so that everyone is on the same page regarding brand identity, content, quirks, etc.
While brand as a concept can seem a bit abstract at times, it’s one of the most important factors that can determine overall business success. So it deserves someone’s full attention at all times.
Do All Brands Need A Brand Manager?
One of the best kinds of candidate for a brand agency like us are venture-backed start-ups that understand the market but may need a little help seeing their branding through all the way. It’s also ideal for existing companies that need a bit of a shift in their dynamic and are looking to see what exactly good design and use of brand can do for them.
What Benefits Do Brand Managers Provide?
If you do hire a brand manager, you’ll benefit from multiple advantages.
Better Responsibility Distribution
Even the most dedicated executive or CEO can eventually become overburdened with responsibilities and tasks. By hiring a brand manager, you’ll be able to distribute some of the most important tasks of your company to professionals who know exactly what they’re doing.
This also prevents executives from being spread too thin, as well as prevents professionals from jumping into the marketing department when they don’t know what they’re doing.
Easier Time Evolving Your Brand
Similarly, brand managers can make it easy to integrate new directions or orders into your existing brand identity. That’s because they can immediately start coming up with ideas for how to evolve your brand in any new direction you determine – it’s their specialty, after all.
They can then use copywriters, marketers, and other employees to start capitalizing on the new direction ASAP to make sure that it’s filtered through every part of your campaign.
Better Brand Analysis
Lastly, brand managers can give you more detailed and focused feedback about the results of your current brand strategy. It can be tough to know whether your brand is actually bringing you the returns you hoped for, but brand managers can dive deep into the data and figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
They can adjust the belief system that you’re selling until it hits the nail right on the head and converts interested customers into devotees.
What To Look For In A Brand Manager
Of course, it’s one thing to hire any brand manager and another thing to hire the perfect brand manager for your company. Let’s break down the things you should look for in a brand manager.
Education
The ideal brand manager should be educated, either academically or through real-world experience.
Applicable degrees for brand management include:
Business
Marketing
Advertising
Communications
English
However, you can also look for brand managers who have real-world education. Maybe they’ve managed brands before to great success even if they don't have a college degree. The key thing to look for is the certainty that they know what they’re doing and can grasp complex topics like brand identity, brand awareness, and brand position.
Understanding
You’ll want to make sure that your brand manager can fully understand your brand, mission statement, and target audience, as well as the emotions that sit behind these things. Mismanagement of your brand can result in serious losses, so any brand manager you rely on needs to be on the same page regarding what your company is about and what message you are trying to send.
For example, a company like Glossier is all about simplicity and empowerment when it comes to skincare and makeup, and they mostly target young people. If their brand manager suddenly began targeting older customers looking to conceal wrinkles, this might not work out so well for them.
Commitment
Any ideal brand manager should be fully committed to your mission and company. Brand manager positions should be filled with individuals looking to stick around for the long haul – these are far from temporary or seasonal workers. Branding is all about longevity, so find an agency who understands that.
Instead, find someone who is willing to stay aboard for at least a few years. The more someone works with your brand, the more proficient they will become at promoting it and improving upon it.
Communication/Relationships Management Skills
Lastly, a good brand manager must be an excellent communicator in every sense of the word. For starters, they’ll often need to communicate between various teams and order employees to perform various marketing or branding tasks. Good communicators make for good leaders, so look for this skill above many others.
However, communication skills in the abstract are also important. Effective brand managers know how marketing materials and brand efforts can communicate with your target audience. This, in turn, will make their management all the more profitable for your company.
But you should also make sure that they have good relationship management skills. Brand managers that don’t work well with their marketers or copywriters will often cause delays for your company or may not be able to adequately represent your brand.
Summary
Ultimately, your brand is one of the most important parts of any business. Even if your company is in the earliest stages of idea development, it’s a good idea to start thinking about its brand as early as possible, and this might involve coming to an agency like us at Herman-Scheer.
Your brand manager must be able to work toward your collective goals and accurately represent the big ideas about your brand in the small, practical extensions of that brand, be it in marketing campaigns, copywriting content, slogans, launch decisions, and more.
Be sure to contact branding agencies like us for additional assistance. They can help you promote your brand far more effectively than before and manage your brand to ensure long-term success.
Sources
https://www.mediabistro.com/climb-the-ladder/skills-expertise/what-does-a-brand-manager-do/
https://www.mediabistro.com/climb-the-ladder/skills-expertise/what-does-a-copywriter-do/
https://www.marketingcareeredu.org/brand-manager
