Brand Management Requires Brand Strategy.

What is brand?

A brand is an intangible asset that brings premium and value to its owner. Its carrier is the name, terminology, symbol, symbol or design and its combination used to distinguish products or services from other competitors. The source of increment comes from the impression of carriers in the minds of consumers.

The definition of brand includes emphasis on its key benefits and characteristics to customers.

To do this, marketers must realize that brands not only include some tangible functional characteristics, but their intangible emotional benefits plus their "logo" are often the cornerstones of long-term competition differentiation and loyalty maintenance.

Marketers often rely too much on intuition, and building a strong brand is not getting easier.

The key to building a brand more scientifically is to combine forward-looking market segmentation with better understanding of customer and brand characteristics.

How to manage brand strategy?

Once the marketer finds the most promising future classification, the brand must be reconsidered.

Brand proliferation and rapid imitation have reduced the rewards of creative advertising and "breakthroughs". Today, cost-effective brand building is determined by accurate understanding of customer preferences and brand tailor-made.

Advanced new analysis methods can provide this accuracy, but the premise is consistent with the clear concept of initially defining a brand, and then through the so-called "contact points" of marketers for practical promotion, these "contact points" are places to interact with customers.

To make a brand stand out and not spend too much money, businesses must become smarter in brand management.

In 1990s, marketers invested unprecedented funds, but many later discovered that more does not mean better.

Some companies do promotional activities selectively, focusing these activities on brands that will not drive customers to buy patterns.

Others fail to notice the shifting of customer preferences and the growing market segmentation.

In short, marketers rely too much on intuition and not pay enough attention to the fact based understanding of the market.

A few enterprises are starting to build their own brands more scientifically and push the marketing to a new field.

The key is to combine forward-looking market segmentation with a more accurate understanding of customer needs and brand characteristics.

Research from loyalty programs to cheap Internet surveys shows that the emergence of large amounts of information about customers and purchase patterns and the emergence of more advanced and accessible statistical tools enable people to perform these tasks with unprecedented accuracy.

In other words, to achieve the new level, brand management strategy requires more stringent and data based advantages.

In fact, even the most advanced quantitative technology can not save the brand that is lagging behind competitors in value orientation.

The adoption of new methods is also challenging.

The rigorous analytical theory at the core of the new approach requires not only new skills in the marketing department, but also other parts of the organization -- from product development, operations to customer service departments -- the steps necessary to help brand promotion.

In addition, some marketers may worry that more quantitative technology will be at the expense of creativity.

In fact, more analysis of customer needs and brand identification helps to bring imagination into areas that can really affect.

It is valuable to avoid expensive tests and errors and to build more effective brands effectively, especially in challenging economic times.

Generally speaking, the primary business task of brand strategy is to carefully examine the long-term profit potential of each customer classification. Otherwise, marketers may waste enormous energy to define and promote classified brands that can not guarantee return on investment.

Although good brand managers will not overlook the obvious changes, marketers have always classified their plans based on the current situation, such as the size, income, age and race of different target groups, the prediction of their consumption and loyalty, and information about their address, lifestyle, demand and attitude.

Although traditional classification work can help, there are also risks that guide enterprises to pursue long-term potential customers.

Customer classification is only a starting point.

Marketers also need to use specific trajectories to predict.

Although this prediction is certainly uncertain, forecasting can help marketers to delineate potential impacts, decide which ones are worth responding to, and identify which ones are fleeting.

Once marketers find meaningful trends, the next challenge is to determine their possible impact on customer prospects and the possible profitability of customer segmentation.

The trend of rapid development is not necessarily the highest in the future. Therefore, it is essential to pform growth forecasts into money.

This understanding helps marketers to decide which categories should be targeted and how to pursue them.

In the case of potential growth but uncertain profitability, a sound approach is usually to limit negative risks, such as expanding existing brands to meet new needs.

To build brand is to manage brand strategy.

Marketers can promote many tangible and intangible brand characteristics, but the goal is to discover the relationship between characteristics and customers, and to help brands distinguish from competitors' brands.

The constant interdependence between the number of brand elements and tangible and intangible characteristics can make these assessments more complex.

Fortunately, statistical techniques can now increase the reliability of these assessments.

As this analysis usually shows, some characteristics can distinguish a brand from a competitor, but it has little meaning to customers.

These characteristics are nothing valuable in brand management.

However, some characteristics are very important, even if customers think they are any competitors.

Nevertheless, these basic brand benefits can not be ignored. Otherwise, the brand will soon be discredited.

The most successful brands attach importance to the distinction between customers and the brand of competitors.

We call these characteristics "brand driving force".

In addition, there is another key issue: how to promote it in a cost-effective way.

Brand is promoted at contact points, and trade-offs are possible.

The more durable brand promotion mechanism.