Hello,
everyone!
Welcome to my new
article.
So today we are
going to discuss about brand management. Brand management is essential to be
understood especially if you are working on company or creating the business. Brand
is something that describe your business or organizations. It is formed through
few words, symbols, design, or particular signs that represent the reputation
or identity of company and its product in the mind of target audience. The good
brand management will create good impact for company such as the improvement of
selling performance, quality, customer’s loyalty, good image, and so on.
As there are so many
good impact that may be achieved by developing good brand management, it is
reasonable to understand the overall concept of brand management both external
and internal process. Through this blog, I will explain the types of brand
management based on the academic research and hopefully will give benefits for
all of the readers here.
Brand management has
been studied for long times ago. However, the most update and relevant research
that I will take for this blog is coming from the research by Memon &
Kolachi (2012) about HR and Marketing. The research shows us the huge differences between two types of brand management. For many years ago,
companies were so obsessed to create the brand management process towards the
customers and external stakeholders in order to improve customer’s loyalty and
selling performance. Brand management has been well known as the company’s strategy
to create good image of company in customer’s mind which hopefully through this
strategy the company’s product will be the first product that come up to
customer’s thought when they want to buy their need.
However, lately brand
management is making the evolution as many company nowadays understand the
biggest impact to create good brand through internal company. it has been
acknowledged that the interaction between employees and customers are crucial
in building customer’s experience with product and also influencing customer
satisfaction and loyalty (Salem & Iglesias, 2016) especially
in service company (Sirianni, Bitner, Brown, & Mandel, 2013). Moreover,
the employee has been recognized as the main part to create good image or even
bad image for company. If the employee can be able to work as the brand
promise, their work will bring good reputation for the company, as well as the
opposite of it.
Therefore, to
understand the concept of brand management we need to know the 2 types of brand
management which is the internal brand management related to the employment
brand, and external brand management related to product brand.
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Product
Brand
As we mentioned
before, company’s brand can be delivered through their offering products. It is
generated by developing the brand on product’s design, fiture, quality and
performance, value, price, and prestige. Product brand is well known to be
conducted by marketing department, supply chain management, research and
development, or production department that has responsibility to deliver good
product of brand. 5 elements of product brand are explained below:
1. Product features
To gain customer’s attention,
company usually will develop the features of product that can fulfill customer’s
needs and wants of the product. Product features that match with customer’s
expectation will indirectly bring good image for brand and shows the success of
company’s brand management process towards its product
2. Innovation and
design
In the midst of huge competition of
industry, every company is forced to be more innovative in serving their
product due to rapid changes of customer’s behavior. The good example I think
to depict this concept is related to the technology innovation. As we are
currently living in technology era, more companies nowadays tend to make massive changes on their business process in order to catch up with the dynamic
movement of technology. It is actually happened caused more customers have
interest to reach their wants and needs using the technology as it is more
faster, simple, and efficient to do. As the result, lots of companies change
their distribution process in align with customer’s behavior. This situation is
the example of innovation and design process within the company to create fresh
and good image of their brand
3. Value and Price
It is inevitable
that customer wants to buy the thing by considering the benefits or values from
it and the price they need to pay. These two aspects are crucial for products
since they are directly pertinent to customer. If the product is fail to
fulfill the product’s value, customer
will feel dissapointed and there is possibility they do not want to buy that product
anymore. Also, if the offering price is too high and irrational for customer
and marketplace, then there is also possibility that product will loss its
market. If there is no market or demand for the product, then it will be easily
to say the company fails on their product brand management strategy. Therefore,
studying these two aspects deeply is very important to create good reputation
of brand
4. Quality and
Performance
These components are
similar with product features however they are mostly relevant with service
context. In service company, the quality and performance of their services are the perfect combination to create good brand. The company need to design what kind
of quality standard they want to achieve and how they will perform it to the
customer
5. Image and
Prestige
The last components
are relevant to create competitive advantage on products. Since there are lots
of competition of the product, image and prestige will bring the
differentiation of it such as the kind of packing used on the product will
bring the image to the customer by looking on it. The product that used high
quality of their packaging shows the dedication of company to bring the
prestige on its product
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Employment
Brand
In brand management,
employment brand means delivering good brand through the internal situation. The
employee who has bonding with company’s brand will be able to work as what the
brand promise is and create good brand through their work. Moreover, employee
branding may develop free marketing process because the successful impact of
this strategy naturally improve the employee’s loyalty towards the brand and
as the result they are willing to explore and promote brand on their own way. The
loyalty of employee can develop good brand too since the employee feel
comfortable to work on the company and enjoy to respond customer’s demands.
There are so many
example in nowadays when the employee of certain company do promotion of brand’s
company on their own social media without any instruction. They do it because
they love their company; as the result of good employment brand process. It has
similar goals with product brand actually. The difference is product brand has
customer as its target audience, while employment brand has employee. According
to (Memon & Kolachi, 2012) there are 5
elements to create employment brand which are:
1. Work life balance
In order to gain the heart of
employee towards the brand, company need to assure the quality of work life
balance. Since the employee has their own life outside of their work, company
need to create the balance between both of them. There are so many ways to do
it, such as the managing the working hours accurately, giving the tasks to
employee based on the agreed job description, not intervening employee’s
time during day off, and so on
2. Product and company
brand strength
One of the element of employment
brand which similar with product brand is the brand strength. The prestige and
strength of particular brand will bring the satisfaction not only for the
customers but also for the employee because they know they are the part of that
brand. Therefore, improving the brand strength whether to the product or brand
may bring the good impact on employment brand and as the result the employee
will work harder to achieve the brand values
3. Company culture
and environment
Other element of
employment brand is the culture. Good and comfort environment within company
will bring the impact of employment brand process such as the happiness to work
on the employee, good word of mouth served by the employee to external during
their time working on it, the strong bonding among employees to work together
in serving brand promise and so on. It is unquestionable that culture is
essential part considered by the employee while working on particular company.
assuring the culture and environment is the element to develop employment brand
strategy that can be adopted by many companies
4. Compensation and
benefit
We know that main
reason the employee choose to work on company is because they desire the
benefits offered based on their work, such as the wages, compensations, health
insurance, commissions, and so on. These are the important thing that must be
given by the company in order to appreciate the work of their employee. Not only
for that, compensation and benefit will also bring indirect impact on
employment brand because the employee will feel the company appreciate their
work and it can improve their work satisfaction.
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Therefore, based on the explanation above several points we can conclude about 2 types of brand management are following :
1. Brand management basically can be divided to two types : product brand and employment brand
2. Product brand is conducted on marketing department with customer as the target audience
3. Employment brand is managed on human resource department with employee as the target audience
4. Both of these types are important to create good brand either for company or product
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I hope this article may bring benefits to all my readers. Thank you to reading this article.
Stay safe and happy :)
_Author: Riska Dwinda Elsyah
References
Memon, M. A., & Kolachi, N. A. (2012).
Towards Employee Branding: a Nexus of Hr & Marketing. Interdisciplinary
Journal of Contemporary Research in Business, 46–61.
Salem, F., & Iglesias, O. (2016).
Article information :Mapping the domain of
the fragmented field of internal branding Introduction. Journal of Product
& Brand Management, 25(1).
Sirianni, N. J., Bitner, M. J., Brown, S.
W., & Mandel, N. (2013). Branded service encounters: Strategically aligning
employee behavior with the brand positioning. Journal of Marketing.
https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.11.0485
Elsyah, Riska Dwinda. (2020). Analisis
Strategi Employee-Brand Community Activity Terhadap Aktivitas Internal
Branding. Repository Bakrie University.
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