by Genevieve Smith

Welcome to my world. This could be a really complex discussion or a really simple one; I’m going to go with simple. Here’s the bottom line: Influential and effective managers generally manage business units or support groups that generate profit or cut expenses in a way that is material to a company’s bottom line. They’re hired because they have the necessary skills and knowledge to generate results and they can be held accountable for profits.

Managing these relationships is where brand management becomes an art much more than a science. Yes, you could create enterprise metrics and measures that demonstrate the brand effect to the bottom line—and you should do this no matter what, as we’ve discussed. The challenge for brand management in this situation is to demonstrate how the brand creates relevance and value for the influential manager and his or her business unit and bottom line.

The first thing you have to do is work with the manager to define “brand”—meaning brand as a core operation, not graphics, logos, or marketing—so you know you’re talking about the same thing. If, even after this discussion, the manager fails to get on board, a somewhat naughty but effective response is to ask that the dissenting manager rebrand his or her business unit and stop doing business under your brand if he or she doesn’t want to pay for the privilege (if you allocate brand expense) or doesn’t believe in the brand’s effectiveness. If this person really believes the brand has no value to his or her group, then he or she should be up for the challenge—but chances are he or she will see the light.

Both! The market is constantly changing. So this question is a bit “chicken or egg.” A brand must stay true to its vision no matter what, while constantly evolving and taking risks to put new things on the market. Sometimes the brand will change the market; sometimes the market will change the brand.

On the one hand, people don’t stand still, and as a result, the culture and, by extension, the market don’t either. Consumers are constantly listening to each other and to buzz generated online and elsewhere more than ever before. And they’re fickle. They will change on a dime. On the other hand, brands often look inside to see if they can anticipate and launch a disruptive new product or enhancement before consumers even know they want it. The goal is to stand out, to be unique, to capture consumers’ attention, and drive their purchase behavior.

Of course, even as they seek to launch the next disruptive product, brands use research to track consumer trends and measure the impact of those trends on their position or products. As we’ve discussed, putting a great, new, innovative product on the market is not necessarily a shot in the dark, but rather involves both the art and the science of marketing.

This represents yet another opportunity to reinforce how important it is to actively manage your brand. Your customer expects new things from you; at the same time, you must constantly be focused on attracting new customers. While managing this can be tricky, you don’t want the brand to become irrelevant or stale.

Someone with the right education, capabilities, and experience can follow a fairly standard roadmap to be a successful brand manager because there is a lot of science to the discipline. The mistakes, or derailers, are not so easily categorized, and they’re much more subtle than a capability to use research, develop visuals, or perform analytical assessments. So let’s talk about some mistakes that go beyond managing the fundamentals, which, quite frankly are simply the “price of entry” for being a brand manager.

I’ve said a brand manager has to “show the love” for the brand, which means they must be passionate about the brand and nurture it along the development journey. There is a fine line, however, between doing what is right for the brand and awarding oneself the title of Ultimate Brand Arbiter and Grand Poobah of All Things Brand, because unless you own the company, you do not have that discretion. Specifically I have seen brand managers go to battle on business fundamentals, arguing along the vein of “This brand would never do/sell/act that way”—to the point that business ownership began to reject the brand tenets as not being flexible enough to support their growth objectives.

This is exactly the opposite outcome you want in the role of brand manager; it shows the brand manager is either myopic, unable or unwilling to collaborate with those accountable for profit to provide the brand with enough flex to support changing business objectives, or rigid and holding on too tightly to the brand promise by not allowing a dialogue about how a given business need can be accommodated.

I’ve also had experience with brand managers who literally terrorized others with the threat of reporting non-compliance with the brand. Instead of listening, reasoning, and influencing, they would simply push the “brand button” anytime someone issued an opinion that diverged from the one they had formed about implementation. At first, when that happened, I couldn’t understand why the brand-management group seemed increasingly at odds not only with the operating units, but also with marketing and our creative agencies; once I was able to see that the brand manager was using the brand as a weapon, it was possible to repair those relationships. The lesson: You can be the dogmatic and heavy-handed brand police if you want to, but sooner or later it will come back to bite you in the ass.

There are a few other areas where a brand manager can fail, these being:

• Too heavy on creative (focused purely on how things look)
• Too analytical (buried in the data)
• Locked into how things are today (can’t lead the brand evolution)
• Lacks implementation skills (roadmap looks good on paper, but nothing is ever accomplished)

To close this discussion, my opinion is that brand manager is a key leadership role, and the ideal manager will know how to deliver in both the art and the science of brand-building.