- What do brand managers do?
- Brand manager career path
- Brand manager salaries
- Qualifications and training
- Brand manager skills
- Pros and cons of being a brand manager
- Brand manager work-life balance
- Brand manager employers
- Related jobs
- More information
Do you love planning? Are you creative and constantly coming up with new ideas for improving your work? If you want a career working with innovative people and contributing your ideas to make a brand as successful as possible, a career as a brand manager could be for you.
Are you interested in a career as a brand manager? Explore the marketing and PR jobs available right now.
What does a brand manager do?
Brand managers are responsible for making sure the public has a positive, carefully crafted view of a company. Your job is to build up the perception that the public has of the company through every part of the company that it sees, from the design of logos to the marketing and ad campaigns. To do this, here are the responsibilities and tasks that you may have as a brand manager:
- Coming up with strategies for the branding of a company
- Having meetings with other departments to discuss the future of the company
- Collaborating with the marketing team on social media campaigns
- Helping to develop products, including the design and marketing
- Analysing the market including what is working, what isn’t working and how well your competitors are doing
Want to learn more about branding? Take this Bright Network Academy Sector 101 on Branding, led by Nestlé.
Brand manager career path
Like other marketing roles, brand managers have a wide scope for upwards employment in a company. Here are the steps that you could take in your career as a brand manager:
Entry-level
Many brand managers begin in a marketing executive role. Marketing executives analyse the needs of a consumer and make marketing and advertising campaigns based on what appeals to the consumer most. The priority of a marketing executive is to make sure your brand is prominent in the mind of the consumer.
After working as a marketing executive, you may become an assistant brand manager. This job requires working closely with the brand manager, implementing their ideas and suggesting your own ideas for improving the brand identity and marketing.
Career progression
A step before becoming a brand manager is often working as a marketing analyst. Marketing analysts conduct research into the performance of products and services available to understand how well they are doing. In this role, you report your findings to the company you’re working for and make recommendations for how to improve their analytics in the future.
Next, you progress to brand manager. As a brand manager, you take your experience and understanding of the market and combine it with your creative and innovative ideas to make a company stand out to customers.
Future career
Senior brand managers have more responsibility than brand managers and work on more complex projects. This may mean making big decisions for the future of a company’s branding if the consumer perception is not positive or if it doesn’t generate enough attention. Your work includes having input in the design of a product or service, how it’s marketed and who it’s sold to.
Marketing directors are in charge of the company’s entire branding. In this role, you come up with long-term marketing campaigns and set the budget for marketing, branding and other departments working in less senior roles. This is an executive position and it takes a lot of experience and skill to reach this level.
Brand manager salaries
A brand manager’s salary depends on the company, level of employment that you’re in and location that you work in. Generally speaking, being a brand manager is a lucrative career. Here are the salary levels that you could have when working as a brand manager:
- Entry-level brand managing positions like marketing executive earn an average of £26,000 per year
- Assistant brand managers earn an average of £32,000 per year, potentially reaching £40,000 per year at the higher end of the spectrum
- Brand managers earn an average of £41,000 per year with salaries ranging up to £60,000 per year
- Senior brand managers earn an average of £56,000 per year
- Marketing directors earn an average of £80,000 per year
Qualifications and training
To become a brand manager, you need the relevant education and experience that hiring managers look for in candidates. Here is what you need to work as a brand manager:
Education
Many brand managers have undergraduate degrees. You may decide to pursue a degree in marketing, advertising or another related subject. Similarly, you could have a degree in an unrelated subject and specialise in marketing at the master’s degree level.
You don’t need either an undergraduate or a master’s degree to work in brand management. You could get a college diploma. Typically, diplomas are more specialised than degrees because they are more vocational and give you the specific skills that you need for the job.
Work experience
Having work experience on top of your education helps you demonstrate your skills to an employer. You could get work experience through an industrial placement, internship or shadowing a brand manager. Having work experience could give you a head start in getting a job on the brand manager career path because it tells a hiring manager that you have experience, skills and potentially a good reference. It also helps you know if being a brand manager is something you’re actually interested in doing in the long run.
If you’re interested in work experience in brand management, check out the current brand manager internships available.
Professional qualifications
Once you’ve started your career, you can work towards professional qualifications. These help you demonstrate your interest, learn new skills and prove that you’re ready for a promotion or more responsibility. As a graduate, you don’t need any professional qualifications to get into the brand manager career path.
If you’re interested in brand manager professional qualifications, consider the certified brand manager qualification by AIPMM.
Brand manager skills
To excel as a brand manager, you need a good understanding of marketing, where a company is in the market and the analytics of business. Beyond this, here are the soft skills that you need to succeed as a brand manager:
Soft skills
- Analytical skills. To be a great brand manager, you need to understand what works and what doesn’t work in the market. Looking back on previous marketing schemes and analysing the sales, consumer engagement and other numerical indicators of success help you learn what was good, what was bad and how to improve in the future.
- Adaptability. If your marketing strategy isn’t working, you need to recognise it and change your approach. Being adaptable means you can develop your ideas and make a flexible plan so your strategy doesn’t fail.
- Accept small wins. You may begin your career working with small companies. These companies won’t immediately have national or international attention unless you’re exceptional at your job or very lucky. Accepting the small successes that you have along the way will help you learn and appreciate the larger successes later on in your career.
- Leadership. As a brand manager, you lead your team. This means delegating responsibility, training less senior colleagues, identifying areas of improvement for their work and setting the standard of work for your team. You should stand up for your own ideas but integrate the ideas that your team comes up with to make a better marketing strategy and a more inclusive working environment. Learn more about developing leadership with this Bright Network Academy module.
Pros and cons of being a brand manager
Being a brand manager could combine your understanding of business with your creative ideas for a product. Before signing up for the job, here are some things about working as a brand manager that you should consider:
Pros
- You get to meet lots of people from outside the company you work for who have similar interests to you
- You can earn a good salary working in brand management
- You can have a great pension scheme
- There are often benefits to working for larger companies like gym membership and paid sick days
- Very successful branding is not only great for the company but also for your working life. By having successful examples of your work and a great track record, you are more likely to move up in your own company or find higher-paying jobs
Cons
- You work long hours around big deadlines which can make having a good work-life balance tricky
- A poor branding decision could lead to backlash for the company and lead to fewer sales
- Due to the rise in social media, the way the public perceives the company you work for could depend on a small number of influential people posting negative things or other aspects out of your control
- A really bad branding decision could mean losing your job and finding it difficult to find similar work in the future due to the public nature of the job
Work-life balance
Brand managers work standard office hours of 9am to 5pm on Monday to Friday. You may need to work overtime and weekend hours around large deadlines. As part of your work, you go to events for the company, liaising with representatives from other companies and the press. This typically happens in the evenings outside of standard working hours.
Your work is office based where you can meet with colleagues from your team and other departments to collaborate on projects.
Brand manager employers
Your career as a brand manager could take you to some interesting companies. You may even work for some of the top companies in the world. Here are some companies that hire brand managers:
Related jobs to brand manager
More information
If you’re interested in a career in brand management, explore the brand manager jobs available right now.