The New Challenges of Brand Management

In the digital age, brand is signaled by marketers, but meaning is cocreated with consumers.

- By Marcus Collins

The image and meaning a brand conveys have never been entirely within the owner’s control; they have always been in dialogue with the world around them. While marketers painstakingly craft brand messages and creative campaigns intended to appeal to their target customers, it’s the customers who actually make meaning and, consequently, shape a brand’s reputation. In the social media age, that meaning has become ever more freighted with cultural and political implications, not only for brand image but also for customers' own identities and reputations. This newly mediated discourse between consumers and brands has created new challenges for contemporary brand managers to not merely steward a brand’s communication and intellectual property but also manage the brand’s meaning as consumers themselves shape the meaning of the brand to relate to their own identities.

Historically, brands have been used as a proxy for quality and a basis for differentiation to aid consumption decisions. Merchants used to mark their wares with brands to distinguish them from similar goods offered by others — the origin of the trademark. By the 19th century, European governments had provided businesses with a clear path to legally secure their brand marks and combat imitators. In 1876, the British brewery Bass & Company became the first business to register its mark to become a “legal mark” protected by law; Coca-Cola would follow nine years later. This was the first evolution of brand, from “trademark” to “legal mark.”

As consumers recognized the provenance of products that bore a particular legal mark, they began using these marks as a guide for quality to aid their product selection process. This inspired companies to use suggestive selling techniques to help consumers choose their brands over those of their competitors — what we call