Child Labour or Brand Management?

Increasingly often, I find myself meeting with brand managers in the marketing department of multinational or national companies who are quite young, inexperienced yet have a great deal of responsibility affecting a brand's profit and loss. Young, aspiring brand managers can potentially bring new perspectives to enhance the value of new or well established brands. These young brand managers are very enthusiastic, have drive and good intentions. Yet there are concerns about the levels of responsibility they are asked to shoulder, and about the amount of support available to these managers. I would compare this situation with an intellectual equivalent of using child labour - getting the most out of the least qualified and least able to defend themselves.  

Large multinationals have historically recruited brand management staff just over the actual headcount requirement on the assumption that there will be some attrition. Another assumption was that more hires in comparable functions would increase competition for advancement in a hierarchical organization which, in turn might lead to enhanced performance. In smaller companies, fewer are hired but benefit, arguably, from exposure and proximity to more seasoned executives. 

One question that comes to mind is if the young brand manager has sufficient experience to effectively manage the practical and strategic aspects of a brand, to be a real brand guardian. Many companies are outsourcing different disciplines within the marketing of function and brand managers are increasingly tasked with integrating or orchestrating these functions, and with expressing opinions which affect the quality and quantity of work developed by outside agencies or outside suppliers. Alternatively, brand managers might interact with house agencies yet face the same challenges of managing in-house and external resources.

I suspect that the primary reason for having increasingly low experience/low supervision brand managers is cost cutting. First, companies invest less in long term, programmed training and it is expected that talented brand managers will learn on the job. Second, companies are loading more responsibilities onto fewer people. This allows less time for non-programmed learning which is quite often as valuable as formal training. Third, line managers of these young brand managers are equally overloaded with not only higher level brand management functions but reporting responsibilities to a board, a division or category management leader.

Managing a brand requires, among other tasks, dealing with marketing communications agencies at different levels - from client service to account executive staff. The young brand manager is the one engaging and often put in position to dialogue with the agency to provide feedback including copy judgement. If the brand manager is not well prepared i.e., qualified by training then empowered by his/her line managers to convey opinions the outcome is often poor quality feedback or unrealistic timing to the marketing communications partners. This can have dire consequences, particularly if the brand manager's line manager/supervisor does not have first hand involvement with the marcoms development process at the critical briefing and planning stages. The consequence of this situation is that feedback does not fully capture the more senior marketing managers' point of view, more feedback is required and often contradictory to the initial appraisal of the work and the agency responds piecemeal, often ignoring some underlying issues on the brand. Over time, this leads to problems for both client and agency: a poor agency evaluation, unrealistic expectations of the agency, or inefficient utilization of the agency's resources as evidenced by the quantity of re-work and changes. The ultimate impact is the client not being a client of choice and the agency assigning second tier talent to work with brand management. 

Companies should renew attention on nurturing and developing talented brand managers. This entails investment. That, in turn, might entail very real reductions in short term profitability to fund training and to lighten workloads to free up time for non programmed but equally valuable learning. But it is very likely that the dividends will be better managed brands, more profitable brands.

Agencies also have a role: if the brand manager is too young to be a brand guardian and a truly competent project manager, the marketing communications agency leadership should raise this with the client's more senior staff. The outcome can only be favourable: managing client expectations early on paves the way to openness in addressing potential problems. It can also open the option to staff a client account with more senior agency executives with a higher reporting line in the client organization on a regular basis, thus also developing deeper relationships in the client organization, better understanding of the client's brands and ultimately, better work.

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