The New Face of Brand Management

The total number of brand manager roles as well as the job descriptions for those roles has changed tremendously in the past 3.5 years. There are fewer roles available as companies amalgamate marketing positions, and the creative content in these roles has also decreased.

Marketing was almost always the first casualty during the recession with many Tier 1 companies deciding to manage their Canadian business through their U.S. offices, and smaller companies often deciding to directly tie all marketing dollars to retailer rebate programs in order to ensure spending was directly related with sales.

Unfortunately for true brand and creative concept thinkers and other right brain dominated people, the role of the brand manager has morphed into much more of an analytical role with an emphasis on the metrics of marketing. Continually monitoring sku performance, maximizing efficiencies, driving trade marketing initiatives as well as monitoring social media marketing programs are now crucial parts of the job and now require daily attention as oppose to periodic checks.

These trends are here to stay. Almost every position (not just marketing) for all companies are now closely monitored to ensure that they individually contribute to the bottom line of a company. The technology now exists to do this, and the days of people skating through their careers in a function which is not accountable are officially dead in the private sector.

If you want to excel today in the field of marketing you must stretch outside of the old focus of brand magement which had an emphasis on consumer research, creative concepts, project management and interacting closely with agencies. Successful brand managers must now ALSO excell in these three areas:

1. Category

Brand Managers need to manage category data more than once a quarter. The immediacy of result information allows savvy marketing managers to implement contingency plans much faster than in the past. With retailers more aggressive and private label products having their own R&D departments; the market is changing faster than ever.

2. Trade

Embrace Trade Marketing. It used to be that brand people would thumb their noses at trade marketing and declare it a sales function that was beneith their marketing responsabilites. The war is over between sales and marketing. Trade marketing is quantifiable to companies and they are choosing to spend less on TV, print and other traditional forms of advertising, and more into creative sales programs where they can better track results.

3. Social Media

Continue using social media and educating yourself further in this area outside of company time. Whether your company supports continued education in this area or not, social media courses should be continued. At the very least it makes a brand manager a more well rounded resourse to the company, adds some skill insurance during a future downsizing, and pads the resume so future employers will see you as someone who has the ability to learn new areas and expand professionally. I am always amazed when a brand manager tells me that they didn’t get involved in social media as they preferred to oversee someone responsible for that specific area. They do not even realize that I often interviewing people who currently do both of these functions within an organization while providing much better value to their companies and they are also more valuable on the open market.

Farewell,

Mike