5 Stages Of Brand Management

BSM requires the brand management to think about the existing stages a con-sumer goes through prior, during and after purchasing or using a product. BSM distinguishes between four major stages, which are need arousal, brand consid-eration, purchase and usage. The information about how decisions are made within the different stages is essentially important for IMC, as the different stages require different types of communication. Additionally, it is important to find out, which role the members of the target audience play in each stage. Literature re-garding buying behaviour identifies the five potential roles: initiator, influencer, decider, purchaser and user. Brand management has to analyse which role is likely to appear in which decision

As mentioned in the previous chapter about brand repositioning, the per-ception of a brand is still unique therefore, it is necessary to find a way to express the benefit in a creative execution. A brand benefit can be expressed in an objec-tive attribute, a subjective characteristic or an emotion. For example, purchasing food, beverages or fashion is driven by a positive motive, therefore the benefit should be a positive emotion, which should be as well associated with the brand itself. The selection of the right benefit has to refer to the benefits’ relevance for the target audience and it has to represent an appropriate motivation (cf. Percy 2008, p.

Obviously, there is a wide range of existing media today, which are all available for delivering IMC messages, but these have to be reflected in a critical concern. For media plan-ning it is of course important to identify the right media for each target audience but in IMC, it is necessary to identify those media that will support the process of satisfying former identified communication goals (cf. Percy 2008, p. 265).

Within this step, managers have to consider three important areas regarding how media differ in their intensity of delivering a message: the ability of delivering vis-ual content, the availability of time for processing the message and the ability to deliver high frequency. Additionally, it has to be considered what type of media makes the most sense regarding a company’s size and type of business. The se-lection of appropriate media refers therefore, to the market and its given character-istics itself. Rossiter and Bellman (2005) defined four major groups to consider large-audience advertisers (including b2b and b2c), small audience local retail advertisers, small audience b2b advertisers and direct-response