Every member of a company is responsible for its success by enhancing its brand equity. Perhaps you are a brand manager responsible for a specific brand or portfolio of brands. Maybe you are the president of a company or a marketing director. Or maybe you are an account planner, or account manager, or even president of an advertising agency. Perhaps you are in charge of developing a hypothetical advertising campaign for an advertising or marketing class. Regardless of your title or situation, how your brand or company is positioned and perceived in the marketplace is crucial to your success.
Positioning your brand and then figuring out how that positioning is to be reflected in all forms of communications can be a daunting task. Ensuring that all the time you spend positioning the brand is properly executed internally within the company and externally among the consumers is vital to the growth of the brand. There is nothing more disturbing to a brand manager than when the sales force sells the brand as an inexpensive alternative to another brand while the agency is advertising it as a premium product. Or perhaps you have positioned the brand to appeal to a discriminating adult only to find that your media plan is targeting the great unwashed. Yet these types of disconnects happen every day in hundreds of companies.
It can be a difficult task to pull together a brand's position and to get that position properly reflected in all the appropriate marketing communications in the marketplace. The process itself can be confusing and sometimes elusive. The simple fact is, you cannot develop relevant communications and then hope to evaluate its impact on the brand without proper planning. The purpose of this book is to help bring clarity to the job of linking brand positions and communications. This task revolves around the art and science of account planning.
Account planning can be a job or a department, or it might be a process within an advertising agency or within a marketing group. No matter how account planning is being handled on your brand, it is one of the most important aspects of getting your brand ready for the growth it deserves.