Earlier this year one of my clients was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month due to nothing other than a lack of brand management. His clients would purchase his product, and then do research regarding the product on the Internet after the sale. The problem that my client faced was that all the information on the Internet was bad press and negative remarks regarding his offering.

I think it goes without saying (although I will anyways) that no matter your business, you will always have dissatisfied clients. The more clients you have, the greater the number of dissatisfied clients you will accrue. It’s a simple matter of percentages. A certain percentage of those dissatisfied clients will want to broadcast their bad experience on the Internet. The process of mitigating the broadcasting of these bad experiences and instead creating a positive reflection of your brand is called “brand management“.

Brand management is not something that only large organizations need to be concerned with. Businesses of all sizes who wish to improve their percieved value should be actively engaged in brand management.

While many of the marketing activities an organization is already participating in will frequently overlap into the realm of brand management, they still need to pro-actively manage their position on the Internet. For my client, this was realized through blog posting, press releases, and podcasts. This was all it took to take his brand to a positive (well, at least non-negative) position. This took only about 2 months to achieve, and his losses due to negative press on the Internet was almost completely mitigated.

Instead of just averting the negative, we could also have continued work to bring his brand to the point where when customers and prospects researched his product on the Internet they were even more sold than before they had looked.

This is the ultimate goal of brand management; bring your brand to the point where when prospects look for information on your offering they are pre-sold at every point.

This is the ‘why’ of brand management. In future posts I’ll cover some of the ‘how’ of brand management. It’s more important than most would acknowledge, and should be a part of ever marketing plan.

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