Excerpt of further issues topics: Brand Equity and Brand Strategy, Brand Equity and Brand Diffusion, Brand Equity and Company Success, Brand Equity and Sales and Acquisition of Brands or Companies, Brand Equity and Marketing Investment

Considerations about Brand Leadership

The long-term success of brands is based substantially on a holistically oriented brand leadership, encompassing the guidance of origin, values, perception and personality of a brand. What sounds relatively simple is often difficult to implement in practice. Many of those responsible for brands, especially in middle-class and family-led businesses, depend on their long-term professional experience and their sense of the brand, when it comes to conception of brand strategy and brand leadership.

Even where brand management is conducted professionally, it’s often noticeable that those responsible for product development, marketing and distribution do not agree in pivotal questions. That they work in an isolated fashion or that strategic considerations in regard to market leadership are buried under day-to-day business. Furthermore, many businesses recognize increasingly that brands constitute assets which need to earn a return-on-investment, just as other corporate assets. Consequently, brand leadership oriented on the development and expansion of monetary brand equity, is gaining in importance. This is a new challenge for brand leadership.

Without doubt there have been a series of organizational systems in brand leadership in the past few years which accommodate the rising significance of a brand for the corporate success and corporate assets. However, they are often not sustainable, last but not least because in times of this heightened competition, benchmarking and the inclination toward orienting one’s business decisions on those of the competition, those responsible for companies and brands are “forced” to think in quarterly yield. Leadership geared towards the long-term is getting increasingly under pressure. Financial pressure, relocation of distribution channels and missing customer oriented brand development based on data, extract additional funds and influence from brand leadership.

Brand leadership today generally works with a small number of employees and they are often in charge of actions for safeguarding a uniform brand appearance, for coordination of sub-brands for different product lines and for efficiency and uniformity of public relations.

Subsequently brand competency and brand profile are lost and those responsible for brand are looking for new ways and possibilities to create a organizational general requirement for the optimal development and evolvement of values.

Spinning off brands from corporate assets, their transfer into a brand company and the further utilization of the brand through sale & lease back, form a conceptual framework in order to optimize the brand establishment and development process. They create the basis for a value-oriented, effective and efficient brand leadership, because the only and significant task of the brand company lies within the establishment and maintenance of the brand equity and brand leadership.