At Enthuse Creative, we break down our service offerings into three categories: brand strategy, brand design, and brand management. These offerings roughly correspond to your business’s maturity and growth stage. Your business may only need brand strategy and design every few years, but if it is growing and scaling, you will likely require brand management services, which are more high-touch and ongoing.

Brand management is the ongoing process of creating, developing, and maintaining a brand’s identity, reputation, and value in the market to foster consumer loyalty and trust.

Brand management is responsible for directing a brand’s movement in the marketplace over time and in real time. You’ve got to balance the need for creative assets and messaging that meets the moment and the market, with the need to continue to maintain brand position, perception, and performance.

These needs must also be balanced against the need to keep the brand secure and sustainable, which are also important concerns of brand management. A brand management agency or consultant may be just the professional you need. Brand management is an important investment in your business that should be accounted for and reflected in your overall business strategy and plan.

We see three advantages of brand management for sustaining and growing your business:

As a B2B company grows—expanding its sales team, marketing channels, partnerships, and even international reach—it risks inconsistent messaging, tone, and visual identity across markets.

With growth comes responsibility and risk. One of those risks is that messaging and identity become inconsistent. As more and more needs arise for brand assets, and these often need to be produced and distributed quickly across a range of channels, materials may drift further and further away from the brand strategy that was devised.

Brand management helps enable growth by providing a system for deploying branded assets that are right-sized and ready for whatever direction the business is going in. Strategy sets the messaging guardrails, design creates reusable tools, and management ensures everyone knows how and when to use them for scale. With good brand management, a brand has everything it needs to quickly and effectively attack new growth opportunities while ensuring clarity and consistency.

In B2B, long sales cycles and high-ticket deals mean trust is everything. A single weak presentation or mismatched marketing campaign can undermine years of credibility-building. It can take a long time for sales to happen, and it may be a long time in between when clients need your services. How do you keep your reputation and relevance strong as time passes?

As your brand exists in the market and obtains and sustains a presence, it creates brand equity. Strategy defines the desired equity, design builds an identifiable, visual symbol of it, and brand management protects, safeguards and nurtures that equity over time.

Brand management helps protect against inconsistency or incongruency in a growing business. They give you a set of principles and practices that ensure the brand looks, feels, sounds and shows up as intended, no matter the audience or arena. Brand management also guards against staleness by ensuring that there is a system to review and refresh assets that have become outdated.

As more and more people touch the brand and use it, there is a natural tendency to develop variants of the brand identity or message in the wild that don’t necessarily reflect what was originally intended. Or, it becomes clear that a core aspect of the brand needs to change to keep up with shifting cultural or customer sentiments. How does a brand respond in a way that is true to the brand essence? Brand management can help by providing guides for how the brand continues to show up.

Brand management not only keeps the brand away from dangers and risks like inconsistency, it also revises and moves it toward new and better applications of the strategy. It oversees refinements to the design and display of brand elements and elevates the brand from an accessory to an asset.

Brand management creates systems—brand guidelines, asset libraries, training—that allow teams to produce on-brand content quickly without micromanagement and ensure everyone knows how and when to use them for scale.

Brand management is about both movement and maintenance. The nature of the brand management you need will be reflected in the type of provider you choose, and it will reflect where your business is. Businesses may have brand management as an internal function of their communications or marketing department, or leverage an outsourced specialist. Strategy and design are well-understood elements of building a brand, but management can be overlooked or underappreciated.

Strategy, Design, and Management all work together to deliver the brand identity and value to your audience. Strategy sets the “what” and “why,” design delivers the “how it looks,” and management enforces the “always like this” so customers get the same brand experience.