Outline:
- Introduction
- What is Brand Management?
- Brand Management Services vs. Account, Resource, or Project Management Services
- Why Brand Management Matters
- The Best Brand Management Services: A Tailored Processes
- Wrap Up
Introduction
Imagine you’re planning a big family gathering. The whole family is coming into town, and you need everything to run smoothly—from coordinating invitations to pre-party preparations, to ensuring the caterer knows everyone’s dietary preferences. Plus, making sure Aunt Sally doesn’t sit by Cousin Paul.
That’s a bit like what brand management does for the businesses that partner with our team at Helms Workshop. Brand Management is the vital link between our branding expertise and your business goals in consumer packaged goods (CPG), hospitality branding, and beyond.
What is Brand Management?
Brand Management at Helms Workshop goes beyond simply being a liaison between our agency and our clients—it’s about being your dedicated partner in achieving your brand’s objectives. Think of it as your personal guide through the intricacies of branding and marketing.
Processes at every brand services agency are a little different, and ours are based on years of work with established brands like H-E-B and Jack Daniel’s, and emerging brands like Howler Bros or Lone River. Whether you’re familiar with the brand development exercise or are experiencing it for the first time, our brand managers are there to steer the process, answer questions or concerns that arise, and ensure that our team is thinking two and three steps ahead—while also dealing with immediate needs.
Our brand managers are not simply project coordinators; they are industry researchers, strategic thinkers, and client advocates rolled into one. For our internal creative teams, we protect the creative process, ensuring the team has the time and strategic input necessary to experiment, explore, and ultimately land on the strongest creative concept. We may also serve as a sounding board to guarantee our creative concepts stay on brief and deliver against our clients’ business objectives.
For our clients, we are in constant communication so we can be their voice in the room and make sure their goals, objectives, and feedback are clearly communicated and reinforced.
Brand Management is the vital link between our branding expertise and your business goals.
Brand Management vs. Account, Resource, or Project Management Services
Every branding agency defines their client service roles differently. Some agencies use the title Account Manager. Others use terms likes Integrator or Collaboration Manager, to mark the role as a central cog in the agency’s broader functions.
On top of that, you can add in tangential roles, such as Resource or Project Manager (which are sometimes separate roles, and sometimes not). With so much variance in terminology, it can all get a bit convoluted and confusing.
At Helms Worksop, we prefer the term Brand Managers. Our Brand Management team takes on roles and responsibilities that cover all of these functions, and often more. For clarity, we’ll break down the most common industry terminology in more detail:
- Account Management: Account managers serve as the primary liaison between the agency and its clients. They are strategic partners who immerse themselves in understanding clients’ businesses, industry trends, and objectives. They translate client needs and feedback into actionable tasks for the creative team, ensuring that projects align closely with business goals. Account managers also oversee project timelines, budgets, and client communications, striving to maintain seamless interactions and deliver exceptional service throughout the client-agency relationship.
- Resource Management: Resource Management within an agency involves optimizing the allocation of human and material resources to maximize efficiency and productivity. Resource managers oversee the availability and utilization of creative talents, ensuring that projects are adequately staffed with the right skills and expertise. They balance workload distribution, manage schedules, and anticipate resource needs to support the timely and successful delivery of client projects.
- Project Management: Project management encompasses the structured planning, execution, and monitoring of specific projects from inception to completion. Project managers are responsible for defining project scopes, setting timelines, allocating budgets, and coordinating tasks across creative teams. They facilitate communication, mitigate risks, and ensure that projects stay on track and within scope.
- Brand Management: Brand Managers do most of the same blocking and tackling as the roles listed above, but also focus on shaping and maintaining the perception of a client’s brand in the marketplace. This involves developing brand strategies, defining brand identities, and positioning brands effectively against competitors. Brand managers delve into market research, consumer insights, and competitive analysis to inform strategic decisions.
In summary, while each role—account management, brand management, resource management, and project management—has its distinct focus and responsibilities, within Helms Workshop our Brand Managers work cross-functionally to perform each of these responsibilities. Each function plays a vital part in maintaining close client relationships, fostering team creativity, optimizing agency resources, and achieving strategic objectives, ultimately driving the agency’s and clients’ mutual success.
Why Brand Management Matters
Industry Expertise and Insight: Our brand managers dive deep into your industry to understand trends, challenges, and opportunities. This knowledge allows us to provide informed recommendations and strategies that align with your business objectives.
Client-Centric Approach: Acting as the voice of our clients within our agency, brand managers ensure that your feedback is translated into actionable insights for our creative teams. They keep your business goals at the forefront of every project, ensuring that our solutions are not only creative but also effective.
Forward-Thinking: While managing the day-to-day operations and ongoing projects, our brand managers are also working with our clients to think strategically about what’s next—whether that’s the next step within an ongoing project or planning for future product launches, the design of a new website or advertising campaign work.
Project Coordination and Efficiency: From initial scope,project estimates, and timelines to final delivery, brand managers ensure seamless project flow and management. They uphold project processes to guarantee that your experience with us—from briefing to presentation to final handoff—is smooth and efficient.
The Best Brand Management: A Tailored Process
One of the great aspects of being a team member at Helms Workshop is that we experience a wide range of clients and businesses from food and beverage to hospitality, products, services, and more.
For brand managers, this also means that the same project process won’t necessarily work for the unique needs of each of our clients.
FOND is a great example. When we started working with the team at FOND back in 2017, the premium bone broth company was still a relatively new brand. That meant we needed to dig in to understand who they were, but also who they planned to become in the years to come. Understanding the future arc of their business helped us to craft an effective brand strategy that had longevity. The strategy then fueled visual and verbal design exploration for the overarching brand identity, packaging, sell sheets, website, and much more as we’ve continued working with them over the years.
When we partnered with the team at Everlywell, they were in a very different phase of their business, and required a completely different process to reach project goals. After a number of successful years in the market and impressive growth, they had just completed a new brand positioning exercise to guide them for the next phase of scaling the company. Everlywell tapped us to extend the revised strategy and new brand assets to develop a completely new packaging system that better reflected the brand’s mission and the product quality.
The packaging system would need to accomplish a lot, with ease and efficiency. It needed to be designed withinin a modular system, so that a single outer box could hold their 35 unique health test SKUs. In addition to working for an array of different swabs, containers, lancets and more, it needed to be easily adapted as they added new products. To top that, the packaging system would need to work in a traditional retail setting in addition to their current direct-to-consumer sales.
A contrast to Everlywell is our continued campaign work with Circuit of the Americas and Formula 1. We collaborate with the COTA team to combine the rigid graphic standards of Formula 1 with bold, spirited design that is new for each year’s event. It takes careful planning to maintain the integrity of the F1 brand while celebrating the speed and spectacle of the United States Grand Prix, and our home city of Austin. The elegant merger of structured logos and typography of the F1 brand with dynamic and vibrant themed illustration threads the needle perfectly.
Each of these projects followed a bespoke process to ensure success. While many of the project steps differ, there are core principles that we follow in all instances. Every project begins with strategy as a foundation, followed by development of a unique visual and verbal design system that is ownable for the brand, and then developing the complete design system through extension into collateral, photography, advertisements, and more to ensure brand consistency.
Wrap Up
Effective brand management is not just about managing projects—it’s about fostering collaboration, deeply understanding business, and delivering consistent results that exceed expectations. At Helms Workshop, we are passionate about helping brands thrive in competitive markets. Whether you’re launching a new product line or refreshing your brand identity, our brand managers ensure your vision becomes a reality.
Hopefully this article helps answer some of your questions about brand management, and the value the role adds to the creative process. Do you have more questions? Give us a shout!
