Will Your Brand Managers Make, or Break, Your Results?

I still consider it to be my biggest professional failure. About twenty years ago, a friend and I had a start-up that focused on developing databases for businesses. Needless to say, we were always looking for big opportunities.

At the same time, my sister-in-law was the manager of the housekeeping department of a large hotel. In her role, developing schedules for the hotel cleaning staff took time. A lot of time.It was done manually and more than a day a week of her time was dedicated to developing those staff schedules.

My partner and I realized that this was the type of work that could be handled relatively easily by a computer, saving hotel housekeeping departments hours of staff time and the hotels themselves a lot of money in staff hours.

We thought that we had a great opportunity. We even paid a business incubator to do a market assessment and they concurred.

It took a year to develop the software and as soon as it was complete and bug free, I started marketing it to hotels.

It was then that I realized that we had made a critical mistake. My university-educated sister-in-law was an exception. The vast majority of the people who managed the housekeeping departments of hotels had been promoted from the ranks of the housekeepers themselves. Twenty years ago, this group of people wasby and large not at all computer literate. The people we expected to use our software were neither familiar nor interested in how to use a computer, never mind scheduling software.

Were I fundamentally failed is that I did not ask the right questions nor effectively challenge the assumptions that we had based our business plan on.

It was my first experience in Brand Management and it taught me some incredibly important lessons.

One of those lessons was that Brand Managers can make or break the results of an organization.

The ability of the Brand Managersto do their job effectively determines if the organization gets the most possible from each of it’s brands. Brand Managers determine what the messaging, strategic and tactical focus are for a brand and where investments are made.

In addition, their organizational and leadership abilities drive the work that gets accomplished in support of that brand.

If they do all of that well, the company gets the best possible ROI on it’s brands. If they do it badly, a lot of time, money and resources are wasted needlessly.

So, how do you know if your Brand Managers are up to the challenge?

I was a Brand Manager for over ten years, have many friends in that role now and I have even mentored a few.

In my experience, the fastest way to get a read and who is good and who is great at delivering results is to ask the Brand Manager what the key questions are for their brand.

What I mean by key questions is, for your brand, what are the things that you need to know to truly understand how themarket functions and why the customers behave the way that they do.

A Brand Manager who can deliver great results has the ability to identify where the key insights that will drive messaging, strategies, tactics and ultimately, performance, will come from. They may not have all of the answers yet, but just knowing the right questions will have already gotten them most of the way there.

Those key question will vary depending on the market and brand situation but some examples are “Who is buying the brand for the first time?”, “Who keeps buying the brand?”, “What is driving market growth?”, Why are the competitors doing what they are doing?”.

The second and a very important element of the “key questions question” is, for the answers that the Brand Manager has, do they know which are well researched fact and which are assumptions?

The classic mistake that less experienced Brand Managers make, like I did with the scheduling software, is to not properly verify the quality of their data and assumptions.

As I learned the hard way, this can lead to a lot of wasted time and effort.

One of the most important signs of a Brand Manager who can maximize the ROI of a brand,is that they understand what is fact and what is guesswork.

There are other skills that make for a high performing Brand Manager and I will be talking about them in another article. But, for my money, if you want a fast read on how much of a handle your Brand Manager has on their business, asking them what the key questions are for their brand is one of the best ways to do it.