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:
- Different approaches to market segmentation
- What factors drive customers to insist upon certain brands
- The primary drivers of human behavior
- How to gain deep customer insight
- The most useful brand, marketing and advertising research techniques
- How to conduct qualitative research that uncovers customer attitudes, values, hopes, fears and desires
- How to measure brand equity
- The most important brand metrics
- How to interpret and use retail sales performance data
- How to recognize internal and external brand threats
- When to position or re-position a brand
- How to create and evaluate a brand positioning statement
- The most successful brand positioning approaches
- How to reframe product categories
- How to create “category-of-one” brands
- Strategies to differentiate commodities
- How to craft compelling brand stories
- How to evoke an emotional customer response to the brand
- The key elements of a strong brand identity system
- Brand naming strategies
- How to write and or evaluate a compelling brand tagline
- How to write and or evaluate a compelling brand “elevator speech”
- How to create optimal brand architecture
- The most powerful pricing strategies and tactics
- The most powerful distribution strategies
- How to establish the right marketing budget
- How to defend your marketing budget
- How to measure ROI for different types of marketing programs
- What should be included in a comprehensive brand plan
- How to select the best marketing agency partners
- How to get the best work out of your marketing agencies
- How to create and evaluate a strong creative brief
- How to develop and evaluate an advertising campaign
- The key elements of an integrated marketing plan
- The strengths and weaknesses of each media type
- How to build brands through word-of-mouth
- How to build brands through proactive publicity
- How to build brands online
- How to merchandise and market brands at retail
- How to anticipate and create strategies to address competitive response
- How to align the organization in support of the brand
- How to select and implement an effective customer relationship management (CRM) system
- How to increase customer loyalty
- How to transform loyal customers into brand champions
- How to identify, screen and develop successful new products
- What is required to launch a new brand
- How to significantly increase the probability of success of a brand extension
- Brand crisis response and management
- How to manage brands across national borders
- 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.
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
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.
Comments are closed.