50 Things Successful Brand Managers Know

Companies often ask us to deliver brand management training to their marketing teams. As I am developing yet another comprehensive brand management and marketing training session for a company, I thought I would share what I believe needs to be included in that comprehensive training. Successful brand managers have a deep understanding of each of these:

1. Different approaches to market segmentation
2. What factors drive customers to insist upon certain brands
3. The primary drivers of human behavior
4. How to gain deep customer insight
5. The most useful brand, marketing and advertising research techniques
6. How to conduct qualitative research that uncovers customer attitudes, values, hopes, fears and desires
7. How to measure brand equity
8. The most important brand metrics
9. How to interpret and use retail sales performance data
10. How to recognize internal and external brand threats
11. When to position or re-position a brand
12. How to create and evaluate a brand positioning statement
13. The most successful brand positioning approaches
14. How to reframe product categories
15. How to create “category-of-one” brands
16. Strategies to differentiate commodities
17. How to craft compelling brand stories
18. How to evoke an emotional customer response to the brand
19. The key elements of a strong brand identity system
20. Brand naming strategies
21. How to write and or evaluate a compelling brand tagline
22. How to write and or evaluate a compelling brand “elevator speech”
23. How to create optimal brand architecture
24. The most powerful pricing strategies and tactics
25. The most powerful distribution strategies
26. How to establish the right marketing budget
27. How to defend your marketing budget
28. How to measure ROI for different types of marketing programs
29. What should be included in a comprehensive brand plan
30. How to select the best marketing agency partners
31. How to get the best work out of your marketing agencies
32. How to create and evaluate a strong creative brief
33. How to develop and evaluate an advertising campaign
34. The key elements of an integrated marketing plan
35. The strengths and weaknesses of each media type
36. How to build brands through word-of-mouth
37. How to build brands through proactive publicity
38. How to build brands online
39. How to merchandise and market brands at retail
40. How to anticipate and create strategies to address competitive response
41. How to align the organization in support of the brand
42. How to select and implement an effective customer relationship management (CRM) system
43. How to increase customer loyalty
44. How to transform loyal customers into brand champions
45. How to identify, screen and develop successful new products
46. What is required to launch a new brand
47. How to significantly increase the probability of success of a brand extension
48. Brand crisis response and management
49. How to manage brands across national borders
50. 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.