A Conceptual Framework for Creating Brand Management Strategies

Branding has become a business priority over the past few decades due to the growing awareness that brands are one of the companies’ most valuable intangible assets. Academics and practitioners have proposed models of components to simplify brands into a small number of parts, or dimensions. Nonetheless, there is a lack of specific approaches to brand management models that fit specific business scenarios. The objective of this study was to propose a general framework to create custom brand management strategies that fit specific business scenarios through a set of independent brand dimensions. The framework was applied to the specific case of SME alliance in a B2B export environment as an example of use. This study reviews the most cited brand management models in literature and classified them into 12 independent brand dimensions. The results suggest that regardless of the brand management model, all of them converge on the fact that creating a high-quality brand relationship with the customer is crucial for the branding process. Findings suggest non-evident relationships between dimensions. The findings also suggest that brand dimensions’ and brand dimension relationships’ importance in specific business scenarios shape brand management models in unique ways.