Brand custodianship:

Abstract

Traditionally the management of brands has been entrusted to middle management. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that brands are of such critical strategic importance, that they are more appropriately placed under the direct responsibility of senior management. Indeed, we believe that senior managers should act as brand custodians. For this new responsibility, senior managers need integrative overviews of brands and their management. In this paper, we examine the functions that brands perform, the consequent values they generate, and delineate the critical dimensions that need to be managed. The contribution of the article is twofold. First, it offers senior managers a series of integrative frameworks to facilitate thinking about and managing brands. Second, the traditionally unitary constructs of brand function and brand equity are disaggregated into function and equity for two different sets of stakeholders, namely buyers and sellers.