Broad Spectrum Brand Management Tactics: Marcoms

Brand managers or researchers take brand management as an activity built around masses to increase brand awareness among them and, with luck, they establish brand preferences for them on the basis of it. A more practical and useful tactic is branding via consumers which include several methods like wide spread use of interactive, digital media, public relations and event management have a prominence today which was not so evident in the past; street-smart communicators have embraced buzz and viral.

The interface between brands and their publics irrespective of whether they are existing ones or prospective customers lead users, bloggers, media commentators or fans. These are known as “Marcoms”. Marcoms (Marketing communications) make the brand visible and audible to all public. Apple that is an archetypal iconic brand knows well the power of marketing communications to create brands that consumers embrace passionately. It was no accident thing that YouTube videos and Flicker photos appeared at the time of the iPod launch. This popular view of brand management is not only dominates business practice but also help about learning on a specific subject or object.

Normally Marcoms have developed in the form of textbook format in which stories are told, perpetuated, refined and elaborated. Much of this re-telling of the story is a straightforward description. At a more sophisticated level, this re-telling is framed in the language of brands as cultural icons, whereby the immersion of the brand management team, advertiser, or agency in populist worlds enables stories to be co-developed which have meaning for a brand’s public initially cultural insiders and lead users then to be cultural followers, such stories are constructed around myths that address contradictions exist in the society. The Book of Myths

Brand management that does not deny the importance of Marcoms, also takes heed of Non-Marcoms aspects of business: consumer psychology, consumer habit and routine, and social psychology; human resource management (HRM), organizational behavior and employer branding; management and financial accounting, brand valuation and brand finance, brands on and off the balance sheet, and brands in the boardroom; intellectual property, trademarks, counterfeits and the legal aspects of branding, linguistics, signs, semiotics and symbolic meanings; graphic and product design.

None of this Marcoms or Non-Marcoms approach is easy. To be effective there needs to be coordination and integration across several disciplines of them. Effective brand management should be seen as a slow spanning activity in which managers are proficient at making connections and linkages. So for broad spectrum branding one requires multi-disciplinary thinking, practice and education.