Andreas Roell of The ClickZ Network wrote a great article about brand management. According to Andreas, oftentimes branding is overlooked until there’s a crisis, but when a fiasco is looming, it’s overtly evident exactly how important a brand reputation can be. When publicity hits a brand negatively, marketers are suddenly in panic mode abou brand’s reputation.

Brand problems can range from information leaks to incidents that result in stock market meltdowns. Product launches, acquisitions, and other events all require the same marketing know in order to offset negative events through reputation management. While no one wants to think about a brand’s decline, there there are ways to deal with it.

According to Clickz, here are the reasons why using online video can work:

1. Video content drives news
2. Search engines can pick up video
3. It’s what people are watching
4. Videos go viral

If you are proactive and reach out to bloggers with videos posted on video sites, when you need to communicate with your key publics, you’ll have outlets to reach out to. “The best defense is a strong offense” is a perfect quote to signify the worked needed for this effect.

All those names – competing for attention and brain share – keep piling up into a considerable number. Some authors claim that about 10,000 new brands are created every day. Whatever the right number is, it’s a disproportionately high population compared with the tiny number of great brands. The management of most companies tends to believe that their brand is great.

The ultimate metrics to define a great brand can be seen on the skin of its audience. There are cool brands such as Nike, Sony, Nintendo and Xbox that epitomize greatness without burning the skin of their fans. How can we then define the essence of such greatness?

The essence of greatness is in the capacity of a brand to foster the sales of a product/service by creating an emotional link with its audience. As such, a great brand balances the delivery of functional benefits with emotional ones.

In practice, you could ask yourself the following questions: Does my brand have any substantial positive impact on sales and market share (If market share is difficult to assess, consider your sales level against industry averages or against the estimated sales of your main competitors)? Does my brand hook our customer-base and make them loyal to the company?

Building a great brand is therefore serious business, albeit a blend of art and science. Whatever your brand and its specific situation, the path to greatness remains the same and is almost entirely based on the way the brain stores, recalls, and processes memories. Considerable progress has been made in the last 15 years in this research field, to the great benefit of marketing and branding.

In a nutshell, great branding starts with a rigorous assessment of your audience and of the brand positioning in the minds of those people. What beliefs pop up in their mind when they think about your brand and its category? What are the good and bad memories coming back to mind? In the case of a car make, for instance, people may remember that this was the automobile of their first kiss, but they may as well remember a tire recall. In the case of a law firm, memory may associate with a painful divorce and broken family, for example. As it transpires, a brand interferes with a considerable level of noise in the collective memory of its audience.

Marketing and its sister branding are too important to be left to marketers alone. In a corporation, it is everybody’s business to be cost-conscious as well as customer-driven. In fact, it is the purpose of brand management to transform a company into a customer-centric organization to the point where the traditional walls that separate functions become permeable.

In a customer-centric organization, management can thus be defined as a discipline of action that integrates holistically all the corporate functions to deliver systematically value to customers beyond their expectation.

Although the development of a brand strategy typically involves a limited number of executives and their aides, the successful implementation of a strategy is everybody’s responsibility. Indeed, a major source of failure in the attempt to build a great brand is the lack of consistency among all the contact-points with the customer. In such a case, the brand message makes a promise on which the organization does not fully deliver. A sure way to ensure that the customer will consistently enjoy the brand experience is to implement processes throughout the organization.

It takes as much time to build a brand as it takes a person to build a reputation. The difficulty is not as much to perfect a strategy as to be focused, differentiated, and consistent everywhere, every time. Will it take one, five, ten or over twenty years? That essentially depends on the memory and openness of the brand’s audience.

For instance, it took about 15 years for Nike to build one of the strongest global brands, thanks to (1) a focused brand positioning, (2) consistent 360-degree delivery, and (3) its association with All-Star basketball player Michael Jordan. Nike truly distinguished itself in its ability to deliver a consistent message across 360 degrees. Indeed, over a long period of time, Nike consistently delivered its brand message at each contact-point with its customers, from product, to advertising, to distribution, to merchandising, to website.

Fans of Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls could enjoy a remarkable consistency between Niketown and Nike’s TV commercials, as the gothic atmosphere depicted on the small screen could also be experienced three-dimensionally by the visitor at the Niketown store on North Michigan Avenue in the Bulls’ hometown.

The concept of branding applies to any individual, organization, product, or service, as long as there is a transaction between human beings. Branding relies on fundamental principles of psycho-sociology – essentially the way our memory processes, stores, and recalls information. Not to actively manage one’s brand name is therefore the equivalent of putting one’s head in the sand and wishing for the best.

Many law firms, for example, assume that branding would negatively impact their reputation. However, branding should not be confused with television commercials. Whereas relationships and quality work are still fundamental to the success of a law firm, brand management can help a law firm in many ways, including (1) making clients more loyal to the firm as a whole than to specific professionals within the firm; (2) communicating a focused message to attract new clients, who increasingly shop around for razor-sharp legal expertise; (3) retain talent and attract bright new graduates, for whom the reputation of a firm is often an important non-cash factor.

There are branding steps that can have a considerable impact on revenues without the need for big budgets, such as the brand positioning strategy, the naming of the product, the packaging design, the delivery process of a service, the consistency of the brand experience at each contact-point with the customer, to mention a few.