Brand management is an interesting area within corporate life, as it is not like finance or supply chain where one can easily identify the major goals of the work. Before working in the field, one might think that brand management main goals are understanding how the brand or product is perceived in the market, how to enhance and change that image, and the strategy to achieve that (whether that’s through product design and innovation, advertising, or brand guideline optimization). At larger corporations with huge internal marketing teams, those concepts could be all you focus on. However, majority of the time, those who pursue a career in brand management will be what a former boss of mine called “the hub of the wheel.” This means that a person in this role will be the decision maker for a brand’s financial health, product assortment, product development and life-cycle management, and promotional efforts with inputs from your cross functional partners.
Here is a secret of brand management that you don’t really get to know until you are in it. Most of your time will not be spent coming up with the new breakthrough innovation that will rock the industry, but rather you will spend your time (especially early in your career) ensuring that the brand stays profitable, that your sales team has the materials they need for buyer meetings, and making sure that you have the right product assortment. Below I will spell out what that might look like for you using examples from my own experiences:
· Profitability of Product Line
While working at Henkel in their laundry and dish detergent in their private label division, the name of the game was “P&L management.” In private label brands, products are low cost and low margin. That meant that findings ways to even decrease costs a couple pennies or increase costs to our retail partners could be the difference between hitting margin goals or having to discontinue a product. I‘ve spent many days in our finance manager’s office with our product development team sweating over overhead costs, packaging costs, and even if we could lessen our product by 2 oz without changing price. The ultimate choice on these decisions came down to my team based on if we thought we could increase our bottom line without hurting top line sales.
· Partnership with Sales Team
As the brand manager of SABRE (the world’s largest pepper spray company), one main task, was ensuring the sales teams were prepared for every meeting. In the world of CPG brand management, when most of your sales are B2C vs DTC (selling in store vs selling mainly online from your own website), these line reviews (when buyers decide what they will sell in their assigned part of the store) are make a break for your business. Many times, your sales team goes into meetings with buyers from places like Walmart, Walgreens, and Wegmans trying to either save the shelf (keep the number of SKUs sold in store) or expand the shelf (get more items in store). Oftentimes, the store isn’t expanding the number of items they will sell in store, so you are looking to generally compete with other companies in your categories for the same number of hooks.
The role entailed creation of sales decks for every major line review focusing on product and brand attributes, company information, and advertising or in-store campaigns that would benefit the retailer. As a brand manager, the person in the role would work with sales to give them a timeline of new products to excite the buyer as well as inputting costs, price, and margins. Without these things, sales cannot do their job. Brand managers also provide guidance for the stores E-commerce strategy for the products you manage and what materials (video, imagery, content) you can provide. One of the biggest tips for any line review is making everything turnkey for the buyer since they typically have a lot on their plate and anything to minimize time they need to work on your product’s success in their store once the deals are agreed upon will help you win the business.
· Proper Product Assortment
My favorite thing in brand management may be SKU rationalization (or SKU-RAT for you cool kids). This is when you check the brand’s total SKUs (which can be in the thousands sometimes) and decide what to keep, what to sell off at a discount, and what is worth eliminating immediately. This is a tougher process than you may imagine as many of the SKUs (even the negative margin items) may be important for a sales rep or an account as a loss leader. Thus, a brand manager needs to see and understand the whole picture of where each SKU fits into the brand ecosystem outside of just profitability and brand fit. This is one of the ultimate team collaboration processes as it involves nearly your whole cross-functional team and forces you to use skills involving marketing, finance, supply chain, management, and sales. As a brand manager, your biggest win in the company comes if you can eliminate the right products and increase your margins without sacrificing revenue or customer relations.
Brand management is an ever-evolving field that varies across different brands and companies. Overall, you will need marketing skills and cross-functional knowledge to be successful. A mentor of mine once said “Brand Management is 50% marketing and 50% entrepreneurial, and that ratio can literally change every day depending on what your brand needs.”