[Research Round-Up] Two Surveys Take the Pulse of Senior Marketers

(This month's Research Round-Up features two recent surveys that examine the attitudes and plans of senior marketing leaders. While both surveys included B2B and B2C respondents, they provide several interesting insights particular to B2B marketing leaders.)

"2024 Global CMO Navigator - CX Edition" by Merkle (a dentsu company) 

Source:  Merkle

• A survey of 1,934 chief marketing officers from 13 countries (22% from the United States)
• Respondents represented more than 14 industry verticals
• 65% of the respondents worked at hybrid B2B/B2C companies, 19% were with B2C companies, and 16% were with B2B companies
• More than half of the respondents (54%) were with companies having at least 250 employees
• The survey was conducted in August 2024

The Merkle survey was designed to capture the attitudes and plans of global CMOs regarding several topics. One group of questions addressed economic and business conditions, and the surveyed CMOs were optimistic about both. For example:

• 88% of the respondents said the economy is in good or excellent shape

• 86% expected the economy to get somewhat or significantly better over the 6-12 months following the survey

• 87% said their company's revenue had increased compared to the previous year

• 89% expected their market budget to increase in the year following the survey

When the researchers asked survey participants what business results they are primarily responsible for as marketers, the top two results identified by the respondents were customer satisfaction and advocacy (54% of respondents) and growth of customer base (53%).

CMOs at B2B companies were 17% more likely than the average to say they are accountable for growing the customer base. B2B CMOs were also 6% more likely than the average to say they are accountable for median and long-term brand health.

The survey also asked participants what they expect the primary role(s) of the marketing function to be over the following 12 months. The top two roles identified by the survey respondents were understanding consumer/market trends (38% of respondents) and delivering business growth (36%).

B2B CMOs were 8% more likely than the average to identify delivering business growth as a primary role and 20% more likely than average to identify ensuring effective brand management as a primary role.

These findings are particularly interesting given that B2C marketers are usually seen as more focused on branding than B2B marketers.

Fall 2024 Edition of "The CMO Survey"

Source:  "The CMO Survey"

• A survey of 260 marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies
• 97.2% of the respondents were VP-level or above
• 58.3% of the respondents were with B2B companies
• The survey was in the field September 4-25, 2024

"The CMO Survey" has been conducted semi-annually since 2008. It's directed by Dr. Christine Moorman and sponsored by Deloitte LLP, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, and the American Marketing Association.

For several years, each edition of the survey has asked participants about overall economic conditions, current marketing spending patterns, and future spending expectations. Here are some of the findings on these topics from the Fall 2024 survey.

Economic Outlook

The Fall 2024 survey found that marketing leaders were somewhat less optimistic about the economy than a year earlier. The survey asked participants to rate their optimism regarding the overall U.S. economy on a 100-point scale, with "0" being the least optimistic, and "100" being the most optimistic. The mean rating given by respondents was 63.8, down slightly from 66.7 in the Fall 2023 survey.

The survey also asked if participants were more or less optimistic about the U.S. economy compared to the previous quarter, and 37.0% of the respondents reported being more optimistic. That was down significantly from 49.0% in the Fall 2023 survey.

Marketing Spending

In the Fall 2024 survey, respondents reported that marketing spending represented 7.7% of total company revenue, which was down from 9.2% in the Fall 2023 survey.

Respondents also said that marketing spending increased 5.8% over the 12 months preceding the survey, and they expected spending to increase 8.6% over the 12 months following the survey. In the Fall 2023 survey, respondents expected marketing spending to grow 7.2% over the following 12 months, which shows that forward-looking expectations aren't always accurate.

The relative change in spending on digital marketing vs. traditional advertising remains significant. In the Fall 2024 survey, respondents reported that spending on digital marketing grew 11.1% over the prior 12 months. In contrast, respondents said they expect spending on traditional advertising to increase by only 0.8% over the 12 months following the survey.

An Emphasis on Brand Building

The survey also asked participants how much they expected their marketing spending to change over the following 12 months in five specific areas. The fastest-growing areas identified by respondents were marketing activities relating to new product introductions (8.1% expected growth) followed by brand building (7.0% expected growth).

One notable finding is that B2B marketers expect spending on brand building to grow at a faster rate than B2C marketers. Respondents with B2B product companies expected spending on brand building to grow 9.5%, and respondents with B2B services companies expected 6.2% growth. This compares to expected growth of 5.7% at B2C product companies and 4.8% at B2C services companies.

These findings suggest that B2B marketers are recognizing the importance of building strong brands.

The Recipe for Content That Creates Mental Availability

 

Key Takeaways

• If your company isn't in a potential buyer's initial consideration set, your odds of making a sale are no greater than 17%.*

• To improve your chances of being included in buyers' initial consideration sets, you must increase your company's mental availability with prospective buyers.

• Boosting mental availability requires marketing messaging and content that links your company to buyer needs and is memorable and easy to consume.

Why Initial Consideration Sets Matter

Creating an initial consideration set is an integral part of most B2B buying decisions, but most popular models of the B2B buying process ignore this pivotal step.

When a business person perceives a need to address an issue that may require a purchase, about 80% of potential buyers will create a mental list of companies they feel are worth considering before they do any research. And 90% of those buyers who purchase will ultimately buy from a company in their initial consideration set. (Bain & Co. and Google, 2022)

A potential buyer's initial consideration set is based on mental impressions that he or she has formed through touchpoints such as previous experience with a company, marketing messages, news reports, and conversations with colleagues and friends.

So, the perceptions that determine which companies will be included in the initial consideration set exist in the buyer's mind before he or she starts an active buying process.

What Is Mental Availability?

To increase the odds that your company will be included in your buyers' initial consideration sets, you must reach those buyers with the right messaging and content before they become active, in-market buyers.

More specifically, your objective is to increase your company's mental availability with your potential buyers.

The mental availability concept has been popularized by Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. In his landmark book, How Brands Grow, Sharp provided a simple definition of mental availability:  "Mental availability/brand salience is the propensity for a brand to be noticed or thought of in buying situations."

Mental availability is different from general brand awareness. It describes the likelihood that a potential buyer will think of your company in the context of a specific buying situation.

Many marketing thought leaders argue that effective brand marketing is the key to creating mental availability. While this is generally true, it doesn't provide specific guidance about what kinds of messages and content will be effective for increasing mental availability.

Messaging and content must meet three requirements to boost mental availability.

Link Content to Buyer Needs

First, the messaging and content must clearly link your company to specific buyer needs. As noted earlier, when a potential buyer perceives a need that may require a purchase, the buyer will create an initial consideration set of companies that he or she believes may be able to address the need.

The initial consideration set will include companies the potential buyer mentally associates with the specific need he or she is experiencing. It's these associations that create mental availability. Therefore, your job is to build and refresh the memory structures that connect your company to the specific needs your potential buyers are most likely to experience.

You can't predict what specific need will prompt a particular buyer to move into the market. Therefore, to increase mental availability, you need to build and refresh memory links that will connect your company to all the important buyer needs your company can address.

With broader mental availability, you increase the likelihood that your company will be included in the initial consideration sets of a larger number of potential buyers.

Make Content Memorable

Marketing messaging and content must also be memorable to increase mental availability. When your goal is to boost mental availability, most of the potential buyers you are targeting won't be ready to begin a buying process.

You communicate with those potential buyers at a given point in time, and you hope they will remember your message at a future point in time when they perceive a need and are ready to start a serious buying process.

As discussed earlier, your messaging and content must clearly link your company to the needs your potential buyers are likely to experience, but how you express those associations is critical to making your messaging and content memorable. 

In B2B, we tend to describe the benefits of doing business with our company in rational, "businesslike" terms - and sometimes in technical, quantitative, or economic terms.

To make your messaging and content more memorable, you need to capture in a visceral way what a potential buyer with a particular problem is experiencing, and you need to describe how your company can make that problem "go away."

Make Content Easy to Consume

The third important requirement for content that will effectively increase mental availability is that it must be easy to consume. By "easy to consume," I mean that the content doesn't require potential buyers to expend much cognitive energy.

This attribute is important because most members of your target audience are not actively engaged in a buying process and therefore won't be inclined to spend much time and effort consuming content that (at the moment) isn't a high priority.

As a practical matter, this means that most mental availability messages and content should be relatively short. That's why the 30-second or one-minute TV ad has been a staple of brand marketing for decades.

In B2B, we have the leeway to use somewhat longer content to build mental availability because most business people believe that keeping current on industry trends and innovative business practices is important for their career progression. Therefore, many business people will be willing to invest more time and effort to consume content if it's relevant to their work or career objectives.

The Bottom Line

If you want to drive revenue growth, you need to get your company into the initial consideration sets of more potential buyers. To accomplish this goal, you must boost your company's mental availability with potential buyers, and that requires the right kind of marketing messaging and content.

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*Research has shown that between 40% and 60% of prospective B2B deals do not result in a purchase. (Dixon and McKenna, 2022) Research has also found that about 80% of B2B buyers have a set of prospective vendors in mind before they do any research. And 90% of those buyers ultimately buy from a vendor in their initial consideration set. (Bain & Co. and Google, 2022)

Let's be optimistic and say that only 40% of prospective deals do not result in a purchase. Of the 60% that do result in a purchase, 48% of the prospects will create an initial consideration set (60% x 80%), and 43% will ultimately buy from a company in the initial consideration set (48% x 90%). That leaves only 17% of prospects that will buy from a company that was not in the initial consideration set. (60% - 43%).

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Image courtesy of Affen Ajlfe (www.modup.net) via Flickr (PD).

[Book Review] A First-Rate Guide to Optimizing the Value and Performance of Content

Source:  Content Science

Effective content has become critical to business success, as companies have faced successive waves of disruptive digital technologies. Therefore, the planning, creation, and management of content needs to be a core business competency.

This is the central message of Colleen Jones' new book, The Content Advantage, Third Edition:  Succeed at Digital Business With Effective Content (Content Science Publications, 2024).

The Content Advantage provides a detailed, evidence-based roadmap that business leaders and their teams can use to formulate a compelling content vision and strategy, design and implement efficient content operations, and optimize the performance of their organization's content.

Colleen Jones can speak with authority about content-related topics. She is the founder and president of Content Science, a professional services firm that works with companies in diverse industries to successfully implement content-dependent initiatives such as AI-enabled digital transformation, marketing automation and content technology selection and implementation, and customer experience improvement.

Before founding Content Science, Jones served as the fractional head of content and Mailchimp, and she has also led teams at Cingular Wireless and AT&T to improve customer experience across various touchpoints.

What's In the Book

The Content Advantage is about planning, creating, and managing all forms of content, or at least all forms of customer-facing content. It's not a book that focuses on content marketing per se, nor does it focus on specific types of functional content - e.g. marketing content, sales content, or customer success content.

Colleen Jones forcefully argues that content needs to be a core business competency and that content management should be a distinct business function.

Jones makes her views on this subject absolutely clear when she writes:

"This point bears repeating:  every company will need content as a core competency. And that competency will frequently cut across business functions . . . I now believe strongly in content as its own competency and that, at ideal maturity, it does not belong in other competencies or functions. Content is not design. Content is not marketing. Content is not product. Content is not information technology or engineering. Content is not support. Content is not public or media relations. Content is important to such competencies and functions, but content ultimately belongs in content." (Emphasis in original)

The topics covered in The Content Advantage will be familiar to readers with extensive content experience, but Jones brings a fresh perspective to many of these topics. Here's a brief overview of the major topics covered in the book.

Chapters 1-2 - How digital technologies are continually changing the requirements for business success, why many traditional approaches to content don't work, and why effective content is essential if a company wants to survive and thrive in a digital world.

Chapters 3-5 - Why having a vision for your content is important, and how to construct a compelling content vision and effective content strategies and tactics.

Chapters 6-7 - Understanding and leveraging the five dimensions of content effectiveness, and how to use principles of rhetoric and psychology to make your content more influential.

Chapters 8-9 - Why "content intelligence" is important, how to set up a content intelligence system, and how to use your content intelligence system effectively.

Chapters 10-11 - How to model the maturity of your content operations, and how to take your content operations to the next level.

Chapters 12-13 - What a "content system" is, why content systems matter, the three content systems that are critical for all companies, and how to successfully start an end-to-end ("E2E") content initiative.

Chapter 14 - An overview of the types of artificial intelligence, and a review of the important issues to consider when incorporating AI into your content operations.

My Take

The Content Advantage is an excellent book that will be a valuable resource for anyone involved in planning, creating, or managing content for their company.

Colleen Jones speaks authoritatively about content, and the book includes several graphics and tables that contain findings from research conducted by her firm, Content Science.

The book is well-organized and clearly written. It isn't exactly "light reading," but Jones' writing style makes the material approachable and easy to understand. She also includes several real-world examples in the book, which makes the material more engaging and relatable.

Jones makes a strong argument for placing content management in a separate organizational function with dedicated leadership and resources. However, this approach will create some challenges.

The most significant challenge is determining how the relationships between the "content department" and other functional business units will be structured and managed. For example, how can company leaders ensure that their content strategy is aligned with their marketing strategy? Who ultimately decides what types of content will be developed, and what messaging will be embodied in those content assets?

These types of issues are critically important, and they aren't easy to resolve. If anything, this reveals the vital role that content plays in business success. And that is the core message of The Content Advantage.

Why We Need a New Model of B2B Marketing

The marketing model currently used by most B2B companies has significant flaws, and most of the tactics used to improve B2B marketing performance have been only modestly successful. What's really needed is a different paradigm of B2B marketing, one that is grounded in a clear, evidence-based understanding of how business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

Embracing a new marketing model will be difficult for some B2B marketers. To understand why, consider the following thought experiment.

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Suppose you've recently been hired to be the CMO of a B2B company, and you've been tasked to reinvigorate the company's marketing efforts. Through market research, you've identified several attributes of the potential buyers in your company's target market.

• Most of your company's potential buyers are not actively evaluating products or services like your company offers at any given time.

• A trigger of some kind is almost always required to motivate the potential buyers to begin a buying process. In this context, a trigger is an event that causes a potential buyer to feel a need or desire to fix a problem or seize an opportunity.

• Except in rare cases, marketing messages or content alone will not cause potential buyers to begin a buying process.

• When a trigger event occurs, most of your company's potential buyers quickly create a mental list of companies, products, or services that they believe are worth considering, i.e. an initial consideration set.

• This initial consideration set is created before most potential buyers have conducted any research and is based on the mental impressions they've formed from a variety of touchpoints, such as their past experiences with companies, products or services, marketing messages, news reports, and conversations with colleagues and friends.

• Almost all of your company's potential buyers make almost all of their purchases from companies that were in their initial consideration set.

Given these buyer attributes, what marketing strategy would you use?

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The buyer decision-making attributes described in this thought experiment make two strategic decisions rather clear. First, it would make no sense to emphasize marketing programs designed to persuade potential buyers to initiate a buying process because such programs would be largely ineffective.

Second, it's clear that a primary focus of your marketing strategy should be to increase the likelihood that your company will be included in the initial consideration sets of as many potential buyers as possible because that greatly increases your odds of success.

These strategies differ significantly from what most B2B companies are currently doing. Today, most spend a lot of money on marketing programs designed to entice potential buyers to start a buying process, while they spend far less on programs to get their company into buyer initial consideration sets.

This disconnect is important because research has shown that the buyer decision-making patterns used in our thought experiment accurately describe how many business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

What Really Triggers a Buying Process?

For example, in a 2021 survey of business decision-makers by WSJ Intelligence and B2B International, researchers asked survey participants what kinds of events triggered their decision to search for a new vendor/solution provider. The following table shows the percentage of respondents who selected each of 12 trigger events.

These survey results illustrate that a wide variety of events can trigger a B2B buying process, but they also show that events involving the consumption of marketing/sales/news content (shown in red in the table) won't be sufficient to trigger a buying process in most cases.

Why Being On the "Day-One List" Matters

Research has also confirmed the importance of being included in a potential buyer's initial consideration set.

In 2022, Bain & Co. and Goggle surveyed 1,208 people at U.S. companies who had been involved in buying several kinds of business products and services. From 80% to 90% of the respondents said they had a set of vendors in mind before they did any research. And 90% of those respondents said they ultimately chose a vendor that was on their day-one list.

The military concept of "decisive point" is a good analogy for the role and importance of the initial consideration set. A decisive point in a military operation is "a geographic place, key event, critical factor, or function that, when acted on, allows commanders to gain a marked advantage over an adversary on contribute materially to achieving success." [Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Operation Planning (Washington, D.C.:  U.S. GPO, 2011), GL-8.]

Being included in a potential buyer's initial consideration set is a decisive point in B2B marketing because companies that are in the initial consideration set have a significant advantage over those that aren't.

Two Critical Changes

The findings of these research studies (and others) make it clear that we need to change some long-standing and widely-held beliefs about how B2B marketing can effectively drive strategic business outcomes.

First, we need to recognize that marketing's ability to persuade potential buyers to begin a serious buying process is limited at best.

And second, we need to focus more of our efforts on ensuring that our company is included in our potential buyers' initial consideration sets. After all, you've got to be invited to the party before you can be asked to dance.

Top image courtesy of R/DV/RS via Flickr (CC).

Looking Back, Looking Forward - 2025 Edition

Source:  Shutterstock

The beginning of a new year is what behavioral scientists call a temporal landmark, a date that is more meaningful than others. Temporal landmarks often prompt us to make significant life changes or commit to pursuing new goals. 

If you doubt the power of temporal landmarks, just consider how often we make "New Year's resolutions" to lose weight or begin a regular exercise program.

Like many marketers, I used the final few weeks of 2024 to reflect on what happened during the year and plan for 2025. My objective for this blog has always been to provide information and insights that are timely, thought-provoking, and useful. To achieve this goal, the content of this blog needs to evolve to account for the always-changing landscape of B2B marketing.

Another Year Dominated By AI

Artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, was the hottest topic in marketing in 2024, as it had been in 2023. OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in November 2022 triggered an arm's race among technology companies to develop generative AI capabilities.

Spending on AI exploded in 2023 and continued at a blistering pace last year. In a November Forbes article, Beth Kindig, the CEO and Lead Tech Analyst of I/O Fund, wrote that AI-driven capital spending by four tech industry behemoths - Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon - will total about $240 billion in 2024, an increase of more than 50% compared to 2023.

Ms. Kindig's article also noted that AI-related capital spending will likely continue at these nosebleed levels into 2025 as the big tech companies build out AI infrastructure to meet demand that currently exceeds supply.

The capabilities of the large language models that power generative AI also improved exponentially in 2024. For a great overview of these technological advances, I recommend you watch this video by Christopher Penn, the Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights.

Generative AI is already having an impact on many aspects of business including marketing, even though we are still in the fairly early stages of AI adoption. AI will have an even greater impact on marketing this year as more AI-enabled software applications become available, the adoption of AI increases, and marketers become more adept at leveraging AI's capabilities.

How This Blog Will Change in 2025

I plan to make a few changes in my approach to this blog in 2025. Most of these changes are based on my decision to apply greater selectivity to the content I publish here. This means I will probably publish fewer posts in 2025 than in previous years.

Since 2023, I've published three types of posts here - research round-ups, book reviews, and general information/opinion posts. Here's what I'm planning for each of these types of posts in 2025.

Research Round-Ups

These posts typically include brief descriptions of two to four research studies. In 2024, my three most popular posts were research round-ups.

Most of the generally available research about B2B marketing consists of surveys of marketers. While this kind of research can be useful, research that focuses on the thinking and behaviors of business buyers is even more valuable.

This year, I'll be looking for surveys of business buyers, and I'll also be looking for studies based on research methodologies other than surveys, such as the study I discussed in my most popular post of 2024.

Book Reviews

I published eight book reviews in 2024, and while no book reviews made the 2024 "top 10" list, I believe books remain an important knowledge resource for marketers. I'll continue to publish book reviews this year, but I plan to be more selective when choosing books to review. Therefore, I'll probably publish fewer book reviews in 2025 than in 2024.

General Information/Opinion Posts

In January 2023, I published a post that made the following argument:

"Marketing success in 2023 and beyond will depend on marketers' ability to leverage the capabilities of technology and data science and to effectively apply the principles of behavioral science that describe how people make decisions. These two distinct, but complementary, abilities now constitute the yin and yang of high-performance marketing."

This argument is even more true today than it was two years ago. The smart use of artificial intelligence has the potential to drive remarkable gains in marketing productivity, but those gains won't be realized unless marketers also design and implement strategies that reflect how business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

I've published several posts discussing the cognitive aspects of B2B buying over the past few years, and I'll continue to address those topics in 2025.

Leveraging behavioral science principles in marketing is necessary, but some marketers believe more is needed. A relatively small but growing cadre of B2B marketers are arguing that the current paradigm of B2B marketing is out-of-step with how most B2B buying decisions are actually made.

These marketers contend that we need a fundamentally different approach to B2B marketing, one that is grounded in an accurate understanding of real-world market dynamics and buyer decision-making.

I largely agree with this point of view so I'll be discussing this topic in several posts over the next few months.

Here's to a year of successful marketing in 2025!

Our 10 Most Popular Posts of 2024

This will be my last post of 2024, and I want to thank everyone who has spent some of his or her valuable time reading this blog. My goal here has always been to provide content that readers will find informative, thought-provoking, and useful, and I've been immensely gratified by the attention and engagement this blog has received.

For several years, I've used my last post of the year to share which posts have been most widely read. For this list, I'm only considering posts published in 2024. I've ranked the posts based on cumulative total reads. Therefore, those published early in the year have an advantage.

So, in case you missed any of them, here are our ten most popular posts of 2024.

    1.    [Research Round-Up] The Effectiveness of AI-Generated Images for Marketing 

    2.    [Research Round-Up] Insights From "The CMO Survey" and Nielsen's Annual Marketing Report

    3.    [Research Round-Up] The Latest From NetLine On B2B Content Consumption   

    4.    The Powerful Head Start B2B Marketers Shouldn't Ignore

    5,    [Research Round-Up] New Study Shows the Continuing Value of B2B Thought Leadership

    5.    Why B2B Marketers Need to Care About "Opportunistic Learning"

    7.    Decoding the Critical Components of Buyer Trust

    8.    Halos, Horns, and Content Marketing 

    9.    Is B2B Brand Marketing Making a Comeback? 

    10.   Is B2B Marketing Fulfilling Its Revenue Growth Mandate?

Happy holidays to everyone, and best wishes for a great 2025!

Illustration courtesy of Dark Dwarf via Flickr (CC).

B2B Brand Management Basics - Part 2

This is the second in a short series of posts discussing some of the basic principles of B2B brand management. In Part 1, I described the ongoing debate in B2B marketing between the advocates of brand building and the proponents of demand generation marketing, and I observed that B2B brand building seems to be making a comeback.

I also noted that Proctor & Gamble invented the business function we now call brand management and that most of what we know about building and managing strong brands originated in B2C companies. As a result, many B2B marketers don't have extensive experience with brand management.

The purpose of these posts is to entice B2B marketers to learn more about a skill set that is increasingly vital for B2B marketing success.

Let's start with three basic questions.

What Is a Brand?

The members of most professions share a common view of the core elements of their trade. If you ask 20 accountants what "net profit" means, you're likely to get 20 similar answers.

That's not true for many aspects of marketing. If you ask 20 marketers what "brand" means, you'll probably receive a wide range of definitions.

The American Marketing Association defines "brand" fairly narrowly: "A brand is any distinctive feature like a name, term, design, or symbol that identifies goods or services."

Philip Kotler, who is often described as the "father of modern marketing," offers a similar definition:  "A name, term, symbol or design (or a combination of them) which is intended to signify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of the competitors." 

Many marketing thought leaders have defined "brand" more expansively. Here's a sample from a longer list collected by Heidi Cohen.

• Seth Godin - "A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another."

• Ann Handley - "Brand is the image people have of your company or product. It's who people think you are. Or quoting Ze Frank, it's the 'emotional aftertaste' that comes after an experience (even a second-hand one) with a product, service or company."

• David Ogilvy - "The intangible sum of a product's attributes:  its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it's advertised."

• Al Ries - "A brand is a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of a prospect."

Strictly speaking, the AMA and Kotler definitions are more accurate. Most marketing academics would argue that the thought leader definitions conflate "brand" with other concepts such as brand image and brand preference. However, those definitions are likely to be more meaningful to many brand managers.

Which brings us to the second question.

What Is the Goal of Brand Management?

The prime directive of brand management, whether B2C or B2B, is to create, build, and sustain brands that win in the marketplace. "Winning in the marketplace" is typically measured using some combination of high-level performance metrics such as revenue growth, unit sales growth, market share growth, and profitability.

In some large consumer package goods companies with a substantial number of sizeable brands and mature brand management functions, brands are often treated almost like independent businesses. This approach shapes the role of the brand manager, and that's the subject of our third question.

What Are the Responsibilities of a Brand Manager?

Brand managers are sometimes described as "mini CEOs." While that description is an exaggeration, it does capture the broad scope of a brand manager's responsibilities, particularly in companies that view their brands as distinct businesses.

In these companies, the brand manager is responsible for developing the brand's business strategy. This strategy includes (among other things) how the brand will be positioned in the marketplace, how the brand will be marketed, and how the brand's products will be priced and distributed. Brand managers are also deeply involved in managing brand innovation, including product improvements and new product launches.

The specific responsibilities of brand managers will obviously vary across companies, but there are common themes. I recently pulled a few brand manager job descriptions from actual online job postings. Here's a mashup of some of the important brand manager responsibilities contained in those job descriptions.

• Formulates and executes annual marketing plans for the brand, ensuring alignment with the objectives of maximizing brand growth and profitability.

• Manages the brand's marketing budget to maximize short-term and long-term business growth.

• Oversees the design and quality of the brand's products to consistently meet brand standards and fulfill the brand promise.

• Analyzes relevant data to anticipate trends, assess strategic implications, and drive new product development.

• Collaborates with the Company's finance department and other relevant business leaders to review sales and financial data to identify customer issues and opportunities while monitoring overall business health.

• Fosters strong relationships with business management and sales teams by preparing impactful sales presentations, participating in sales calls, and facilitating open communication for effective problem-solving.

Even this partial list shows that a brand manager is often tasked with broad job responsibilities that require both marketing and general business expertise.

The next post in this series will discuss what is probably the single most important concept in brand management - positioning.

Image courtesy of Limelight Leads via Flickr (CC).