Does the company still need a brand director?

As brand thinking becomes more prevalent in all positions, the role of brand director seems to become vague and redundant. The confusion of job seekers and the doubts of bosses actually reflect the lack of clear planning for brand management at the strategic level of the company. This article will explore the dilemma and solution of brand directors, and find a way out for companies from a higher dimension.

I received two questions, both related to the position of "Brand Director".

One job seeker said:

I worked as a brand director in the consumer industry for 7 years. I was laid off in December last year and have not found a suitable opportunity so far. I often wonder if this position is no longer necessary?

Another boss said:

The company is engaged in the traditional food industry and has many sub-brands, which sell well on e-commerce platforms. A new brand director has been hired, but apart from participating in some VI upgrades, he seems to have no other value. Is it necessary to keep him?

The two questions reflect that brand thinking has permeated all positions, and everyone is responsible for brand maintenance. Therefore, this is difficult to deal with. Should individuals transform? How should they transform? How should companies reasonably set up and evaluate the role of directors?

I have a deep understanding: the problem itself does not lie with the individual, but with the company's lack of clarity at the strategic level, which leads to a lack of clear planning for the use of talent. After all, when brand managers change jobs, most of them go to the company with their previous experience.

Therefore, if you want to find a "way out", you need to analyze from a higher-dimensional perspective to get a clear understanding and answer. From which perspective? I will try to sort it out, and you can see if you can find the feeling.

01

Did you know? There are two types of brands for enterprises:

1. Brand Management Marketing Department
2. Marketing and Brand Department

It looks simple, but it is small and complete. Let's talk about the first one: brand management market. What does it mean?

A typical group management model. In this model, the group has many product brands, and the daily operation of each brand is handled by its own subsidiary, while the group has a brand strategy department responsible for coordinating and guiding the development direction of these brands.

In actual operation, this model will encounter some challenges.

For example: the group brand level will provide some theoretical marketing methods, but subsidiaries, because they have their own KPIs and profit requirements, will not pay attention to the group's requirements, unless it involves some principled or holistic communication activities that must involve collective action.

This has resulted in the group's brand department becoming somewhat ineffective in practical applications.

In the past two years, I have seen a solution in my communication with Huawei and mobile phone manufacturers: the group will put the authority and expenses of media purchases of its subsidiaries in its own hands. In this way, with financial power, the right to speak will be more important, and the group can save a lot of money, thereby reducing media costs. This is not difficult to understand, right?

Let’s talk about the second one:

The marketing department is in charge of the brand, which literally means that the market is the boss and the brand is below.

for example:

The brand team is mainly responsible for the overall brand strategy, including shaping the brand image, designing advertisements, organizing marketing activities, and producing new media content; the media team is responsible for handling media relations, including media purchasing, celebrity endorsements, and brand cooperation.

The public relations department focuses on promoting product developments, handling public relations, and responding to crises; the event department is responsible for planning and executing various online and offline promotional activities and press conferences.

Seeing this, you will think about your own position: Hey, I am doing cross-border marketing, which department do I belong to? Where is charity cooperation? Don't worry, different companies have different focuses.

Some will put cross-border and public welfare into the media team, while for others, the activity group is divided into online and offline parts, and the online part will coordinate the entire competition.

When I was in charge of the marketing department in the early years, it was divided into five departments:

Channel placement (leading customer acquisition), public relations (focusing on publicity, cross-border cooperation, charity activities), new media operations, event group and integrated marketing. We cooperate with each other and do not work alone; when it comes to big competition, I will take the lead in coordination.

Therefore, this distribution type is more suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises.

A few days ago, after chatting with a person in charge of hospital supply chain, I discovered a situation: the marketing department and the brand department are on the same level.

What does it mean?

The role of the marketing department is more inclined to support sales and be responsible for lead activities.

Specifically, you need to conduct market research and develop promotion strategies. This includes selecting and developing sales channels and communicating with agents. At the same time, you will also support various marketing activities, such as participating in exhibitions, collecting potential customer information, and promoting sales and signing contracts. In addition, you are also responsible for public relations and training sales teams, dealers, and terminals. Therefore, the responsibilities can be summarized as marketing, public relations, and training.

What about branding? We need to do more standardized work, such as establishing a brand system, designing a brand manual, product promotion, advertising creativity, content production, and operating new media.

Sometimes, they also participate in the construction of corporate culture and sort out the mission, vision and values. Therefore, the brand department is more inclined to overall planning, communication and promotion, and product planning.

In any case, the three types basically cover the B2B and B2C industries. The first two are more suitable for cluster brands, and the last one is relatively traditional.

02

It seems good. However, there will be some problems in the development of enterprises.

for example:

A marketing director of a robot vacuum cleaner shared his experience with me: In the past, the brand mainly focused on JD.com and Tmall stores, conducted integrated marketing on major platforms, and guided customers to place orders on the e-commerce platforms. This was done with one set of strategies.

But now the situation has completely changed.

Just on the Douyin platform, there are dozens of promotional tools, such as store promotion, influencer promotion, and content promotion. It not only involves advertising but also takes on business logic.

Each platform has its own content management rules. If the brand content does not comply with the promotion rules, it will be regarded as hard advertising and the effect will be poor after it is released.

In addition, if the company does not open a store on the platform and hopes that users will jump from these platforms to JD.com and Tmall to place orders, then the user churn rate will be very high.

Therefore, as the number of channels increases, major platforms are digging deeper into the growth value brought by KOLs and segmented content categories, which forces brands to change accordingly. Therefore, new media operations have become a top priority, after all, they are closer to users than people, goods, and markets.

In addition, marketing and operations will be semi-separated and unable to reach a deep consensus.

In the past, under the work model dominated by the marketing department, if there was a budget of, say, 1 million for second quarter activities, the head of the marketing department might divide it into 30% and 70% parts, with 300,000 for brand promotion and 700,000 for promotional activities.

Brand publicity is usually done in a centralized manner, which can have a more focused effect and a louder voice in the public domain; while promotion? There are more new targets behind it.

However, the leader of the operations department is more concerned about the primary consumption and secondary retention after the new customers are added. When it comes to quarterly reports, the first two seem to have good results, but in the next two months, the situation may return to the starting point, and the retention is not ideal. In the end, the two departments will blame each other.

Simply put: Marketing and operations seem to be working very hard on their own, but in reality it is difficult for them to outperform their work around the overall market, and it is more like a single point operation.

If we put the brand department before the market, we will encounter difficult problems.

On the one hand, the brand department lacks sufficient budget and it is difficult for it to have real power within the company. Because in many companies, no budget means no say, so the influence of the brand department will become weaker and weaker.

On the other hand, the brand department has enough budget for promotion, but will eventually face doubts from sales, marketing, and other departments. Once the performance is not good, they will say, didn’t you spend so much money on promotion, but still didn’t sell the product?

Once performance is good, operations and sales are seen as core strengths.

So, it's embarrassing.

Finally, the boss will also be inconsistent in his support for the brand and his pursuit of sales conversion. He will verbally say that the brand is important, but he will also invest money in advertising that directly brings sales conversion.

Another point is that people are now beginning to doubt the work of the brand department.

for example:

In the B2B field, the sales department thinks that brands are just for materials, so if you need anything, go to them. In the market, the brand department is meaningless, and publicity work is handled by public relations and integrated marketing.

When it comes to specific advertising, they think that if they want the type of pictures and copywriting they need, they can just contact the design and new media department. The communication cost is high, and they often say that this cannot be done, that cannot be done, and there are too many restrictions.

Therefore, market brands and operations departments are all promoting business development. Starting a company is a process of selling products and achieving profits, and the so-called business development means sustainably improving profitability.

03‍

So, what kind of market brand combination can drive marketing growth? In my opinion, there are three stages of growth:

1. Strategic Growth
2. Market growth
3. User growth

The success of an enterprise mainly depends on two things: marketing and innovation. Innovation can also be divided into two categories: one is the upward type, which is to jump from one category to another with stable growth potential; the other is to innovate on the basis of the core category, but it may not be effective immediately.

Strategic growth, also known as "muscle category growth", is based on strategic intent and effective category growth.

Just like Yuanqi Forest, which first discovered the opportunity in the sparkling water market and quickly occupied it, if it wants to develop further, it must continue to innovate, launch excellent products, and provide value to more customers.

However, if sparkling water sells well, it may not be successful to make cola or other categories; when you go to the mall to buy clothes, you will find that most stores are offering discounts. This kind of promotion may make the financial data look good temporarily, but it may not be of much help to the future main brand building. Therefore, market growth should be adopted.

Market growth means making more purchases and opening up channels in terms of traffic. In the past, no matter which market or brand was the pioneer, they all focused on this goal. If I use the Golden Circle Rule to answer it, I can say:

The common goal of enterprises is to increase sales and brand influence (why). In order to achieve the goal, effective tools such as influencers, live broadcasts, and short videos are used (how). High-quality content is produced and promoted to attract target customer groups and encourage them to make purchases (what).

As for user growth, it comes more from relationship management, private domain management, etc.

If you think it’s abstract, let me express it in another way:

Regardless of whether it is a small company or a large enterprise, and regardless of which brand dominates the market, the core tasks are summarized in two aspects: building a brand and generating traffic. Regardless of what tools and strategies are used, in the final analysis, these two things are being done.

Most people know that brand building is all about function, selling point, product value, and publicity. So the question is, how can we get traffic more efficiently? In other words, what kind of team structure is needed to achieve these goals?

04‍‍

Let’s look at an example:

There is no doubt that lululemon is the fastest growing company in recent years. Its growth model mainly consists of five aspects: technology products, stores, customer experience, training, and online and offline communities. This is a circular system.

Note: Each store is considered an independent business unit (BU), which acts as part of a community and promotes the brand by connecting key opinion leaders (KOLs) in the community through in-store educators.

What does it mean?

In layman's terms: nesting doll game. What is nesting doll? An infinite loop of layers; the store is like an independent planet, all the planets revolve around a huge sun, and the sun represents the central platform of the brand, on which ordinary users and KOLs coexist.

KOLs create attractive content, which enhances their influence and guides users to become new KOLs. Combined with the spillover influence and activities of stores, an enhanced loop is formed.

Have you ever seen snowflake crystals?

At the beginning, there is a tiny particle as the core, and the surrounding water vapor gradually condenses to form links around the core, allowing the crystals to gradually grow and eventually form snowflakes that are many times larger than dust.

If you don’t believe it, we can still find patterns from the evolution of strategy.

In 2015, their growth model was simplified from the original five core directions to focus on three key aspects: brand community, products, and customer experience ; in 2019, they further clarified the strategy and formed the "Power of Three" framework, which focuses on innovative products, omni-channel user experience, and new market development.

So, what can you see evolving from this framework?

Innovative products represent strategic growth, focusing on product development; user experience represents operational growth, focusing on community operations; new market development represents traffic growth and focuses on external omnichannels; so, how does it do it externally? Three steps:

1. Establishing a Brand Growth Center
2. Forming a content platform
3. Managing digital communication channels

Looks vague, right? Don't worry, I'll explain it one by one.

In the past, brand management was mainly limited to system construction and system promotion. For example: VI, LOGO mission, vision, values, brand promise, appeal, declaration, story, and all promotions also revolved around a series of actions.

Different growth centers involve not only system construction and promotion, but also multi-brand (sub-product) strategic management, integrated marketing, and the formation of more complex digital system content.

Why is this necessary? I mentioned above:

In the past, a few major holiday competitions and celebrity endorsements were enough to complete the annual communication. Now it is different. Brands need to find KOLs and go to different platforms. Media must prepare a large amount of new content every day to meet the platform requirements and conversion requirements.

What do you think we should do? We definitely need a digital content hub. In essence, the content hub is not only responsible for content creation and accumulation, but also for content labeling and classification so that it can be quickly applied to various marketing activities.

To make it easier for you to understand, I consulted a technical friend and he said:

The first step of the company's digitalization is to purchase a SCRM system to import users from various e-commerce platforms into the private domain ecosystem, and at the same time accumulate two CMS databases, one of which is mainly used to manage materials, such as various event materials, product materials, and media materials.

The other one mainly manages external touchpoints and connects all public and private channels, such as sales channels, media placement, digital self-media, etc. In this way, the entire "brand content middle platform" and "external communication channels" are all connected.

I felt it was very troublesome, so I asked him to guide me and make a picture, as follows:

You may think that after all this talk, I still haven’t fully explained what the new growth structure is. Let me be more specific. A marketing growth center has three major modules:

Top-level strategy – This includes brand system building, asset management, multi-brand portfolio strategy and large-scale compaign planning.

Digitalization – covers media channel management, public relations, charity, advertising campaigns, and business.

Content middle platform – responsible for the production of pictures, texts, short videos, creative design and other marketing materials.

This model is mainly built around the brand and truly moves towards DTC.

In addition, there are two other modes that may interest you.

1. E-commerce platform model ; for example, building a dedicated brand center around a specific e-commerce platform (such as Douyin Mall).

2. Amoeba Model : In this model, multiple brands or project groups operate independently. Each combination includes product, operation and marketing teams, and is responsible for its own budget and profit and loss.

So, will brand directors disappear?

I think it depends on which aspect you are more suitable for: asset management, brand system construction, marketing activity planning, digitalization, public relations, etc. In addition to having a full perspective, you also need to find the part that you are most specialized in based on the marketing growth center.

Summarize

When you can’t figure it out, return to the user.

The era of finding a marketing director and having a brand take charge of the marketing center is over. Enterprises must not use strategic laziness to cover up tactical diligence. It is time to think about what kind of efficient organizational structure is needed in the new era.

Author: Wang Zhiyuan

Source: Wang Zhiyuan (ID: Z201440)