Strategic Brand Management

Brief Description

This unit addresses issues that relate to the importance of brands, what they represent to consumers and alternative strategies that can be implemented by companies to manage them properly. Although brands may represent invaluable intangible assets, creating and nurturing a strong brand poses considerable challenges. The concept of brand equity can provide students a valuable perspective and a common denominator to interpret the potential effects and tradeoffs of various strategies and tactics for their brands. Strategic brand management involves the design and implementation of marketing programs and activities to build measure and manage brand equity. The three major questions addressed in this unit are: How can brand equity be created? How can brand equity be measured? How can brand equity be used to expand business opportunities?

Topics Addressed

• Building world class brands.
• Growing and sustaining brand equity.
• Branding strategy.
• Building powerful brands online.
• Latest trends in digital and mobile marketing.
• What makes content go viral online?
• Saving your brand in the face of crisis.
• Measuring and interpreting brand performance.
• Using market research insight to inform brand strategy.

Expected outcomes

• Evaluate the role of brands, the concept of brand equity and advantages of creating strong brands.
• Appraise the different approaches to measure brand equity and how to implement a brand equity measurement system.
• Evaluate alternative branding strategies as well as devise brand hierarchies and brand portfolios.
• Evaluate the role of corporate brands, family brands, individual brands and brand modifiers, and how they can be combined into sub-brands.
• Manage brand equity, taking a broader “multiple product, multiple brand”, on-line and off line perspective as well as a longer term multiple market perspective to brands.
• Assess the implications and applications of the customer based brand equity framework.