Eight out of ten Spanish companies recognise the importance of brand management to achieving their goals

The second edition of the barometer ‘La salud del branding in Spain’ (The health of branding in Spain), sponsored by the Spanish Association of Branding Companies (AEBRAND) in collaboration with the ESADE Brand Institute, confirms the growing importance of brand management for Spanish companies, but also that many companies still do not approach this task with a strategic orientation and specific teams.

Corporate brand management is essential to achieving business goals

The conclusions of the report, based on a survey of 275 companies, show that 80% of companies believe that brand management plays a significant role in their ability to achieve their goals, although only 60% identify their brand as a high-value intangible asset. Of special note is the growing involvement of steering committees: at 70% of the surveyed companies, brand management is discussed by the steering committee, compared to 60% in 2014.

One of the specific benefits of brand management that companies identified was its role in the internationalisation process. Brands are key to this process for 80% of the surveyed companies, a significantly higher share than the 63% recorded in the previous edition of the report.

Most companies do not yet allocate the necessary resources to their brands

‘The study highlights the contradiction between the importance that companies claim to place on their corporate brand to achieve their business goals and the meagre resources that they actually allocate to its management. Despite their awareness that brands are key intangible assets with regard to their external and internal audiences, they need to better integrate brand management into their business strategies and properly share it with their employees’, explained Conrad Llorens, president of AEBRAND and founder and CEO of SUMMA Branding.

Spanish companies consider brands to be high-value strategic assets

According to Ana Varela, executive director of the ESADE Brand Institute, ‘Brand management is increasingly understood not only as a priority activity, but also as decisive to achieving business goals. Steering committees and senior management committees are increasingly involved in brand management, and there is a growing tendency to centralise decision-making at multinational companies.’

Indeed, 80% of companies admit that they do not allocate enough resources to brand management, and barely 40% have teams specifically dedicated to this issue. At the vast majority of companies today, brand management is primarily shared by the marketing, communication and general management departments. It is moreover highly centralised, with most companies (60%) carrying it out from their headquarters.

With regard to the relationship between the corporate brand and internal audiences, whilst 60% of companies claim to communicate and share their brand culture with their employees, only 30% carry out training actions in this regard.

Corporate brand and product brands

The report’s findings underscore the differences between corporate brand management and product or service brand management. Corporate brand management is primarily geared towards building the company’s image and reputation, and to strategically guiding the organisation as a whole. In contrast, product and service brand management seek to establish relationships with the end client or consumer.

Despite these different purposes, the relationship between corporate brands and product brands is a close one, full of synergies: whilst the corporate brand lays down the guidelines for the product brands, it is subsequently enriched by the latter’s market performance.

Building the corporate brand

The most frequently mentioned key factors for building the corporate brand, accounting for 70% of all responses, were vision, corporate values and organisational culture.

The vast majority of companies claim to carry out or be interested in developing branding services in relation to digital environments (branding strategy in online environments, digital communication actions and websites). Branded content is also a service in increasingly high demand, with nearly half of the sample claiming to intend to invest in it in future.