Urbanization of the World and the Consequences for Managers
Urbanization and its Problems for Corporates The world is increasingly being urbanized and this has implications for the corporate sector and the managerial class. To start with, with more and more companies being located in urban areas, the corporate sector has to deal with the problems associated with urbanization like lack of access to basic […]
Why the Business and Commerce Battles in the Digital Age are over Data as the New Oil
Why Data is the New Oil Data is the New Oil, proclaimed, India’s Richest Person and the one of the World’s leading Businessperson, Mukesh Ambani. He was referring to the fights over data in the digital age being similar to the battles over Oil in the Industrial Age. As Oil was the Lubricant that made […]
Stress Testing in Credit Risk Management
In the previous article, we have already studied how expected and unexpected losses are calculated using statistical techniques. However, there are certain events and their associated credit risks which are not captured by the analyses mentioned above. In order to include them in the calculation, another technique called stress testing is used. In this article, […]
Overcoming the Challenges of Delivering Projects on Time and Without Cost Overruns
Why Do 80% of All Projects Fail to Deliver on Time and What can be done About Them Research shows that nearly 80% of the projects fail to maintain timely completion of deliverables at each stage of the project as well as fail to finish on time. Project Managers often complain that the Triple Constraint […]
Roles and Responsibilities of a Sales Manager
A sales manager plays a key role in the success and failure of an organization. He/She is the one who plays a pivotal role in achieving the sales targets and eventually generates revenue for the organization. A sales manager must be very clear about his role in the organization. He/She should know what is supposed […]
Often, people get confused with the concepts of brand management versus product management. They tend to think that both are the same since they deal with a specific product being marketed and hence managed from incubation to sales. However, there are crucial differences in the way product managers and brand managers operate. For instance, brand management is all about creating a mind space for the product whereas product management is concerned with features and specifications as well.
Further, brand management is often done in consumer product companies that have more products and product lines and hence the overall emphasis on the brand image is more. On the other hand, product managers operate in environments where they have to take care of a single product and hence bringing it to the market is their brief and so they tend to concentrate on the big picture.
Moreover, brand management is associated with consumer product companies whereas product management is associated with software companies. This is because consumer product companies need a top of the mind recall for their products and brands since they mass market them.
In other words, consumer product companies reach out to a larger audience and wider customer base whereas software companies typically have lesser numbers of customers to contend with. Further, brand managers have to “sell” the product by creating an overall image for the brand that consists of creating a value proposition based on the perceived value that the product or the brand offers. Product managers on the other hand (in software companies) have to concentrate on the value proposition that features and technology deliver.
Apart from these differences, brand managers have to plan for brand obsolescence which means that they need to bring in newer products to keep the product line replenished. Product managers on the other hand need to concentrate on upgrades and versions of the same product instead of trying to launch an entirely different product.
There is also the aspect of the lengthy product lifecycle from conceptualizing to bringing to market in case of software products whereas brand managers typically deal with shorter lifecycles. This makes the task of a brand manager harder in some cases where the urgency is more whereas the product manager has some more time.
In other cases, the brand manager can relax after the product launch since sales drive the brand management rather than the marketing and branding exercises that would have been completed by then.
Product managers on the other hand have to be edge after the rollout since they have to be on the lookout for glitches and bugs in the software that might derail the project the delay the customer experience.
In conclusion, brand management is more about perception and the perceived value whereas product management is more about tangible and measurable value propositions. This is expressed in the customer satisfaction surveys where brand users of consumer products rate the brand according to the perceived levels of satisfaction whereas product users in software rate the product according to the specific and measurable benefits that it brings to them.
Finally, brand management is a high stakes game because brands fail at an alarming rate and any consumer company with some seed capital can enter the market. In the case of software products, the products are launched only when the companies have deep pockets and can stay the course. Of course, the dotcom boom and the subsequent bust was all about software companies trying to market themselves like brands and the reason for the bust was that they forgot the basic rules of product management. More on this in later articles.
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