What Is Strategic Brand Management?

By Author: Bouju Bouju
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Brand reputation is one of those confusing marketing terms, which many people do not fully understand, thinking that brand and reputation mean the same thing and that the words can be used interchangeably. The two terms are most definitely linked, but there is a subtle difference between the two words and companies of all sizes spend lots of time and effort on managing both aspects of their company.

Brand
Branding is a long-established marketing discipline and is all about how the company presents itself and its products to the general public. If you ask a regular person what branding is, the chances are they will talk about issues like packaging, logo and corporate colors, but branding goes deeper than that and also encompasses things like what sponsorship deals the company enters into, how they pitch themselves and their products on the marketplace and what their pricing strategy is. Marketing departments like to keep a tight control of their brand, knowing that huge damage can be done to brand reputation if a scandal breaks surrounding a certain product or the market is suddenly flooded by cheap imitation products ...
... made overseas.  It is almost impossible for brand to measure the impact of counterfeiters on their channel and create cohesive strategies to fight.   Bouju’s team has developed state-of-the art technology to rapidly discover, monitor, measure and remove counterfeiters online.

Branding vs. Brand Reputation
Branding is all about how a company presents the products to the outside world, but reputation is subtly different. Reputation is all about how the general public perceives the company and the products. For example, a company may try to brand itself as upmarket, exclusive, expensive and niche, but if they sell their items cheaply through mass-market retailers, the public perception will be that the brand is none of those things. Brand reputation can also be tied up with how much the public trusts the brand and believes the messages, which they are hearing through advertising and marketing. Reputation is very hard to measure, and companies can only get to the bottom of what their reputation actually is by conducting in depth focus groups with customers, and by continually monitoring what is being said on Internet forums and in the social media.  Bouju’s solutions empower brands to defend and protect their online commerce and reputation.  

Managing Brand Reputation
Often, brand reputation is only considered when something happens and the marketing department needs to react quickly. For example, a customer claims to have been injured by a poorly made product, or become ill after eating something a company has manufactured. A company’s public relations team will go into overdrive, managing the press reaction to the story and trying to minimize any damage to the brand reputation. Although these sorts of activities are necessary and important, it is also valuable to take a more long-term approach to managing a company’s brand reputation.   On Internet, Brands are under constant attack by counterfeiters that are targeting brand name, logo, and product descriptions to hijack consumer traffic to their website.  In many instances the official brand has one website to sell products while the counterfeiters creating thousands of counterfeit websites, auction names and channels to sell fake products.   Bouju’s solutions enable brands to rapidly discover counterfeiters online channels and fight them effectively. 

Strategic Brand Management
Looking after the company’s brand reputation should be a long-term strategy of any business, and not just considered in short term, firefighting measures. Brand management teams help manage public perceptions by looking at things such as counterfeiting activity and trying to stamp out copyright or trademark infringements before they start to do lasting damage to the brand. Brand reputation is all about looking at everything the company does and how it is reported in the media, and taking long-term strategy decisions to help improve the brand reputation in the eyes of the general public. It is not just a short-term measure, and building up a good brand reputation can take several years, or longer.