50 Things Successful Brand Managers Know

Companies often ask The Blake Project to deliver brand management training to their marketing teams with learning objectives designed to help them achieve a higher level of success. As I am developing comprehensive brand management and marketing training sessions for a company, I thought I would share what I believe needs to be included in that comprehensive training. It’s clear to me that successful brand managers have a deep understanding of each of these:

  1. Different approaches to market segmentation
  2. What factors drive customers to insist upon certain brands
  3. The primary drivers of human behavior
  4. How to gain deep customer insight
  5. The most useful brand, marketing and advertising research techniques
  6. How to conduct qualitative research that uncovers customer attitudes, values, hopes, fears and desires
  7. How to measure brand equity
  8. The most important brand metrics
  9. How to interpret and use retail sales performance data
  10. How to recognize internal and external brand threats
  11. When to position or re-position a brand
  12. How to create and evaluate a brand positioning statement
  13. The most successful brand positioning approaches
  14. How to reframe product categories
  15. How to create “category-of-one” brands
  16. Strategies to differentiate commodities
  17. How to craft compelling brand stories
  18. How to evoke an emotional customer response to the brand
  19. The key elements of a strong brand identity system
  20. Brand naming strategies
  21. How to write and or evaluate a compelling brand tagline
  22. How to write and or evaluate a compelling brand “elevator speech”
  23. How to create optimal brand architecture
  24. The most powerful pricing strategies and tactics
  25. The most powerful distribution strategies
  26. How to establish the right marketing budget
  27. How to defend your marketing budget
  28. How to measure ROI for different types of marketing programs
  29. What should be included in a comprehensive brand plan
  30. How to select the best marketing agency partners
  31. How to get the best work out of your marketing agencies
  32. How to create and evaluate a strong creative brief
  33. How to develop and evaluate an advertising campaign
  34. The key elements of an integrated marketing plan
  35. The strengths and weaknesses of each media type
  36. How to build brands through word-of-mouth
  37. How to build brands through proactive publicity
  38. How to build brands online
  39. How to merchandise and market brands at retail
  40. How to anticipate and create strategies to address competitive response
  41. How to align the organization in support of the brand
  42. How to select and implement an effective customer relationship management (CRM) system
  43. How to increase customer loyalty
  44. How to transform loyal customers into brand champions
  45. How to identify, screen and develop successful new products
  46. What is required to launch a new brand
  47. How to significantly increase the probability of success of a brand extension
  48. Brand crisis response and management
  49. How to manage brands across national borders
  50. How to build global power brands

I hope this helps you to identify the gaps in your organization’s brand management and marketing competencies and training.

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Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

Brad VanAuken The Blake Project

One comment

  • Maciej @ 36creative

    January 22, 2014 at 11:08 am

    I like #18 the best. We had a client that was a t-shirt business. We focused on the packaging just as much as the product. People would tell us that they loved the package and the brand before they even got to the t-shirt inside. That is my idea of a nice emotional response.

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