Ingredients of a Brand Manager

Through my several years of experience with MBA students, most of them who are attracted to marketing tell me that they want to pursue a career in branding and that they are seeking brand manager’s position. And they talk about their creative bent of mind in support of their candidature to brand manager’s position.

There is nothing wrong in seeking to be a brand manager and being creative. Yet the logic seem does not work. While being creative is useful in any job and every job, to think that some how brand managers are the one’s who create labels, advertisements, run campaigns does not fit well.

Let us say – National Institute of Design (NID) – produces every year the students who are the best in Designing products, product communications, portals designs, apparel designs etc. If a NID grad is creative enough and would create what a company wants, why would the company hire an MBA to do the same job?

Alternatively, let us think that a company wants to run a promotion event in a retail mall. Puma (the Shoe brand) did it in various retail malls during IPL cricket event. PUMA mobile stores were parked right at the main entrance of the malls with visibly attractive images painted on it. And PUMA will hire event managers to run these special campaigns ad not necessarily brand mangers!

The crux of the question is what does a brand manager do? At the highest level – a brand manager is a strategic partner and member of the team that makes most important decisions at the top. He or She will work with Sales Manager, Product Manager, and Channel manager on such issues as brand repositioning, brand extension and branding of new products and services. He or She holds the key to communication to the consumers and any thing goes wrong – he or she would be necessarily be letting down the efforts gone into creation or improvement of the product (by the product manager) and in achieving the targets (by the sales manager)

If we arrive at this conclusion (that the brand manager is in charge of communication), then the next question could be “how does on get the communication right?” Is it by creativity? Is it by designing events? Is it by launching the ad campaign? Is it by crating road show? Is it by celebrity endorsement? Is it by Public Relations management?

OR is it by gaining insights into the consumers’ mind on an ongoing basis to find out how various brands (yours as well as your competitors) play out on an ongoing basis? Is it by finding new associations in the consumers’ mind by understanding that very hidden language which we want to decipher and use in effective brand communication? Is it by trying to be a partner with the product/Sales managers to identify newer needs that reinforce your corporate brand of being “Innovative?”

Once you understand the core of Brand managers’ job is to be the student of consumer life long and to be master on consumer behavior – rest all falls in place. As a brand manager, you decide whether to hire an ad agency to create communications or to have an internal team to work on the concepts; whether to hire an external event management firm to do the campaign or to set up an internal team to run the events; whether to hire an external PR agency or set up an in-house PR team?

Once a budding brand manager sets this (of being a student of consumer’s mind)as his/her core career objective, the starting point could be any thing. You can study the consumer behavior in action when you start our career as a sales person or a sales manager. You can gain insights into consumer behavior by being a market research executive; you can understand consumers while being a retails ore manager and so on. Regardless of the starting point of your career, you must always be curious to understand why consumers buy what they buy and most importantly who or which category of consumers buy.