Corporate Brand Management: What Is It and How to Master It

If you manage your corporate brand successfully, this will significantly increase your company value and create customer loyalty. Today, we’ll be looking at the ins and outs of great brand management in a corporate setting. We’ll show you how corporate management differs from when you’re managing a brand in different settings. We’ll also share what we think are the three biggest risks in brand management for corporations, and how to turn those risks into a competitive advantage.

What You’ll Learn:

• The definition of corporate brand management
• Why brand management is important for corporations
• How managing a corporate brand differs from managing other companies

What Is Brand Management for Corporations?

Brand management for corporations is different from building a brand. If you want to check whether your corporate brand is successful, look at your stakeholders. It’s making sure that your brand is clear, that branded content follows your guidelines, and that there are no stretched logos or inappropriate imagery associated with your brand.

When we look for information on brand management for corporations, we usually get results on something else, like creating a brand strategy, crafting messaging for your brand, or establishing the right target audience. These types of activities are what we refer to as ‘building a brand’. Very important to tackle when you are starting a new brand or breathing life into an old one but nailing your brand early on doesn’t necessarily make it successful.

After building a brand comes managing a brand. The part that most branding and marketing pros consider the most challenging part of branding.

Why is Brand Management Important for Corporations?

The way you manage your brand forms a significant part of your company’s DNA. It’s your story, your product, and your people. It’s how your customers perceive you and why shareholders believe in you. Branding is not just one department that controls what your logo looks like. It should be the embodiment of why your company exists.

Branding has been democratized through digital transformation. It’s easy for everyone to share their stories and content about your brand. But corporations are struggling to harness this opportunity. They are experiencing more inconsistencies, pressure to scale on-brand content without scaling their costs, and difficulties in communicating their relevance to their target audience.

Top brands win over customers who make repeat purchases not because they have a superior product, but because they have a superior brand. They embody something that inspires advocacy and loyalty. And they do so all the time, everywhere. Not just in some regions or via some of their channels. In order to rise to this level, all your stakeholders need to become connected with your brand.

How Is Managing a Corporate Brand Different from Managing Other Companies?

Companies and brands of different sizes battle with very different issues. A small brand or a company that’s just starting out will focus their limited resources on creating trust and awareness. However, corporations have a stability-focus when it comes to brand management. Creating trust and awareness are important goals for all companies, and the bigger issues for corporate brands lie elsewhere. Here are the most pressing priorities that corporations face in brand management.

Managing Multiple Stakeholders

The obvious difference between corporations and other companies is the number of employees and other partners, distributors and agencies. There are thousands of them. The main goal of branding is to resonate with stakeholders, and ensure everyone is working towards the same goal. But the more people you have involved with your brand, the more complex and inconsistent the messaging gets.

Do your employees, advocates, and partners know your brand guidelines and how to use your tone of voice? These are just two of the many variables that are at the core of your brand’s communication. If your stakeholders aren’t using your brand like intended, there will be misunderstandings, lack of interest, and confusion. But is it really that important for all your people to portray your brand the same way? Turns out, it is. Your brand is why you attract customers.

A company’s product or service accounts for just 30-40% of a company’s total value, according to Millward Brown Optimor’s analysis. The rest is intangible value, with close to 30% of total business value being attributed to brands. If the brand’s essence is diluted, it will get less recognition, less customer loyalty, lower company value.

To sidestep the problem of too many cooks in the kitchen, corporations need to manage their stakeholders better. They need to minimize the opportunity for human errors when it comes to branding. Brand knowledge and communication needs to be made easier.

Reaching for Brand Consistency

This is a topic closely related to connecting all your stakeholders to your brand. Brand consistency means that all your ducks are in a row. Your images and videos are the same style and quality, and all departments represent the company in a way that evokes trust, continuity, and familiarity in your customers and target audience.

How to Maximize Efficiency

The third component that’s constantly under scrutiny by corporate brands is efficiency. Brand management involves great communication, checking for errors, and managing mishaps and PR blunders. It’s how you plan for product launches, answer questions, and train people. Big parts of these processes are far from efficient, and come with plenty of human error.

Final Thoughts

Corporate brand management shares many similarities with other types of brand management, and comes with a few key differences in scale and focus that, when planned for in advance and managed properly, will bring your brand to the forefront and ensure long-term, stable growth, smooth operations, and consistent messaging.

Lytho helps you streamline your entire workflow and harmonize all brand collateral under a single, uniform platform. Feel free to reach out to us by scheduling a demo and learning how our creative solutions can boost the effectiveness of your creative projects. We look forward to speaking with you!