A Conceptual Framework for Creating Brand Management Strategies

Abstract

Branding has become a business priority over the past few decades due to the growing awareness that brands are one of the companies’ most valuable intangible assets. Academics and practitioners have proposed models of components to simplify brands into a small number of parts, or dimensions. Nonetheless, there is a lack of specific approaches to brand management models that fit specific business scenarios. The objective of this study was to propose a general framework to create custom brand management strategies that fit specific business scenarios through a set of independent brand dimensions. The framework was applied to the specific case of SME alliance in a B2B export environment as an example of use. This study reviews the most cited brand management models in literature and classified them into 12 independent brand dimensions. The results suggest that regardless of the brand management model, all of them converge on the fact that creating a high-quality brand relationship with the customer is crucial for the branding process. Findings suggest non-evident relationships between dimensions. The findings also suggest that brand dimensions’ and brand dimension relationships’ importance in specific business scenarios shape brand management models in unique ways.

A Sectorial Validation and Application of a Conceptual Framework for Creating a Brand Management Strategy

“…Exploring additional business scenarios can help to understand the development of other niches within the same market. The decomposition in single-sided business scenarios was explored in [9]. This approach provides an accurate description of the functions and relationships among brand dimensions for each business scenario, proposing different alternatives for nurturing the brand management strategy.…”

“…All interviewees declared the will to keep working with customers that valued their relationship and even to avoid problematic cus-Figure 2. Result of the application of the framework for creating brand management strategies to the triangulated data between the interview process and literature analysis in construction [9].…”

“…to a subject (customer, company, institution, etc.) [5,9]. It is important to understand that a brand is not a trademark, which is defined as "any word, name, symbol or device that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others" [10].…”

“…As various branding approaches exist, myriad brand management models or frameworks are currently available to shape the strategy of brands [1,[11][12][13]. Nonetheless, there is a limited number of models or frameworks that are consistently considered in the literature [9]. Additionally, most of these models or frameworks are based on general approaches (usually for corporate size) [5,[14][15][16][17] or single-sided business scenarios [18][19][20][21].…”

“…A conceptual framework was developed to propose an analytical brand management strategy that considers the specific business scenario it will face (Figure 1) [9]. The aim of this study is to cross-validate this conceptual framework through theoretical and practical application and triangulation in a specific business scenario.…”