Speaker 1: So, how can you be more proactive and reactive in brand management? Find out inside the video. Hey guys, it's Jan from Brand24, and I guess it's kind of been a minute, right? Well, I really hope that everybody is healthy and safe and just in a good place right now, wherever you are. So yes, life has been pretty insane, but it is time to get back to it, and we are going to start with brand management. So this is a process that begins by examining how a brand is perceived by the public, and then it takes all of this insight, that intelligence, and uses this to build a good brand reputation within the target market. And it's actually really important to your sales too, because when a brand is very well managed, the brand equity increases, which means that your brand loyalty also increases. And a strong brand can even carry your product. So for example, take the famous Pepsi challenge. Over the last decade, Coca-Cola's market share has risen from 17.3% to 17.8%, while Pepsi's market share has dropped from 10.3% to 8.4%. However, in a series of blind taste tests conducted by Pepsi, the results suggested that consumers actually prefer the taste of Pepsi, even though most of them were still buying Coke. So this is why brand management is so important, because having a strong brand is something that can definitely influence purchasing decisions and increase your sales in the long run. So, how do you do brand management, or what is a good brand management strategy? So, you know, I don't want to get too far off track, but I do have a story. So I recently went on this podcast, hosted by a couple of guys who work in tech and e-commerce – that's Jonathan Dillon from Welcome to Growth – and we were talking about, of all things, brand management. So, of course, the question, Sochia, how do you approach brand management comes up. I have this totally smart explanation in here, but for the life of me, I could barely get anything coherent to just come out here, and it was pure audio stage fright. These guys are really nice, I think I've just forgotten how to interact with people on any level after these past few months. Sorry guys. So I'm going to take this chance to try to redeem myself by examining what a brand management strategy looks like here. So, because you want to start by examining public perception of your brand, this makes awareness a key part of brand management. Not to be confused with brand awareness, which is generally about how well people can recognize and recall your brand. Here, I mean your awareness about how the public sees your brand. And this all starts with collecting data. So for brand management, this means that you want to collect all kinds of feedback and opinions that people are expressing about your brand. Again, unlike brand awareness, which is focused on the number of those opinions, brand management looks at context, because this is exactly what shows you how a brand is perceived. Looking at context is something you should be doing anyway, because it answers a ton of questions. It shows you where your brand is doing a really good job at eliciting positive feelings and positive sentiment from the public, and it shows you where it might be rubbing people the wrong way and causing them to develop some negative sentiment toward it. So that's why this part of brand management, just gathering all the data and then looking at the context around it, is really essential to your strategy. Without all these insights, it's hard to know where you need to make improvements. So now, considering the fact that you can't really control how people will ultimately react to your brand, you can only do your best to plan out and implement a good branding strategy, this makes monitoring various sources of media the most proactive action that you can take in terms of brand management, because it shows you how people are responding to those strategies, which lets you stay ahead of any potential issues before they can damage your reputation. We actually have a free class on media monitoring for reputation management that goes a little more into detail on that topic, and I'm going to put a link to that in the video description section below. So that generally sums up the first part of brand management, just getting the lay of the land, and because the landscape is something that can change and shift depending on factors like the content you put out, your advertising or any changes to your product, this all makes the data something that you want to monitor on a regular basis. So now let's say that you've done some analysis, and you find that there's a really big gap between the way that you want people to see your brand versus how they actually perceive it, and then it's the brand manager's job to react and try to fix that. So that is the reactive part of brand management, and every solution is going to be a little bit different because every problem and every brand is different. It really depends on the data. If the feedback shows that there's an aspect of your branding that really doesn't resonate well with your audience, then you might need to just rethink your entire branding strategy altogether. Or if the feedback reveals that certain aspects of your product is not meeting customer expectations, then you'd want to talk to your product or service team to see how you could improve the user experience. And the data could also point to a number of other things too, like controversial influencers that you're working with, or PR issues related to politics, health, or religion. The actions that your brand manager takes to try to steer the brand back on track, it depends entirely on the data. All right, so I think that is all I have for today. So it feels like a lot, but I probably forgot something, probably, but that is what next week is for. All right, thank you guys. It's really good to be back, and I will see you later. Bye. All right, so if you have any questions or comments, just let me know in the comment section below. And if you feel like you learned anything helpful in this video, feel free to like, share, and subscribe to our channel. All right, that's it for today, guys. Thank you so much for watching all the way to the end. All right, so I'll see you next time. Thanks again. Bye.