The Brand Management Checklist – Advanced

Back in December we asked, “Are you a part of a brand building organization?”, and provided a checklist to help you assess your organization’s readiness to build brands. Today we’re taking our checklist a step further, hoping you and your organization can answer “Yes” to all of the questions in these brand management categories…

Brand Design

•Do you have profound insight into your consumer’s values and motivations?

•Do you fully understand the following for all the categories in which your brand operates: (a) the different market segments, (b) the competitive set, and (c) which consumer benefits are “cost-of-entry” versus “differentiating”?

•Do you fully understand the decision making process (rational or not) the consumer uses to purchase your brand?

•Have you defined the role, target consumer, essence, promise and personality for your brand?

•Do you have absolute clarity around what your brand stands for and how it is unique and compelling to consumers?

•Do you have criteria to help you decide when you can use an existing brand, when a completely new brand is needed when a sub-brand is the right choice?

Internal Organization and Support of Brand Management

•Do the CEO and other corporate officers embrace the brand as a key corporate asset that must be built and leveraged?

•Have you calculated the value of your brand as a financial asset?

•Can all employees accurately and consistently articulate your brand’s essence and promise?

•Is there a process by which all marketing elements are integrated to deliver against the brand promise and key brand priorities?

•Do your organization’s common measures include key brand measures?

•Are you redesigning your business processes and systems, networks of relationships and customer service functions to better align with and support your brand’s promise of differentiated consumer benefits?

•Does the corporate culture reinforce the brand promise?

Brand Identity Management

•Do you have comprehensive brand identity standards and systems that address all uses of your brand’s identity elements?

•Is your system effective in multimedia environments?

•Does it address co-branding, co-marketing, brand licensing and sponsorship situations?

•Are there simple and consistent ways in which sub-brands relate to corporate or parent brands?

•Do you confer with intellectual property lawyers when designing new products and brands to ensure what you’ve created has maximum protection under the law?

•Do you have an ongoing process set up to proactively protect your brand’s identity against dilution or confusion?

Brand Equity Building

•Do people in your organization understand that brand building is a long-term exercise with cumulative results?

•Do you know what drives brand preference and insistence within your categories?

•Have you established brand equity measures and targets?

•Is someone held accountable for managing the brand’s personality?

•Do you use in-depth, qualitative consumer research techniques (such as laddering, hidden-issue questioning and symbolic analysis) to better understand your consumer’s needs and motivations as they relate to your brand?

•Do you have a way of measuring return on marketing investment?

•Do you know if your brand keeps its promise at each point of contact it makes with consumers?

Brand Marketing

•Is marketing perceived to be an investment (versus a cost) at your company?

•Are there clear objectives and performance targets for each marketing program you initiate?

•Do you know who your best customers are? Do you know why they are your best customers? Have designed programs to retain those customers? Are you actively trying to increase share in your high profit, heavy user market segment?

•Is there agreement on what portion of your marketing resources will be spent on brand building versus product sales promotion?

•Are customer service departments and customer contacts always included in your marketing programs?

•Do you use proactive publicity to build the brand? (This can be one of the most powerful and cost effective marketing tools.)

•Have you considered creating consumer membership organizations to increase emotional connection and loyalty to the brand?

Brand Extension

•Have you identified what your brand owns in the consumer’s mind?

•Have you identified all areas in which the consumer gives your brand permission to operate?

•Have you identified all the ways your brand and others in its category have made compromises with the consumer? Have you found ways to redefine your business to break those compromises?

•Have you explored ways to make your brand more relevant to the next generation of consumers?

•Do you have a way to screen all new brand extension proposals for their congruence with the brand promise and impact on brand equity?

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