This post is part of my bachelor paper ‘The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management’. You can read the introduction other posts and the table of contents here. (Be warned, this is rather theoretical, or even philosophical and not necessarily immediately practical. It is, in many ways, very German. – it is a translated German model after all.)

As Grots & Pratsche (2009, S. 18) point out in their paper on design thinking, many of the challenges in today’s economy are too complex to be mastered by a single genius, a single department or a single company. Organisations always had to process and transform the complexity of their environment to survive and they continuously have to reconfigure and transform their coping strategies to keep up with what is happening around them. To implement this thought in brand management theory and to provide a higher level of abstraction, Tropp (2004, S. 170) integrates the aforementioned conceptualizations of brands, environmental challenges and management into a systems theory based model of brand management that is seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Systemic Brand Management Model (translated from Tropp 2004, p.170)

In this model, the brand management itself is included in the ‘brand model’ and three major management dimensions are identified (Tropp 2004, S. 168):

• Brand potential, which asks if brand management has the ability and potential to learn and use systemic thinking and acting,
• Brand relationship, which measures whether a brand builds and nurtures relationships between customers and a company.
• Brand experience, which asks whether a brand has the preconditions to intervene in the cognitive system of consumers.

Three philosophical pillars are suggested for brand management (Tropp 2004, S. 176f). These pillars are reflexivity, complexity and holistic thinking.

Reflexivity means that brand management is – first of all – self management, in line with management and organisational theory that sees organisations  as a communication system. In that sense, brand management is to a high degree self-organisation and self-referential.

Complexity means that the function of brand management in organisations is to vary and transform environmental complexity. To make this happen, brand management has to apply measures to increase complexity (variety) and to reduce complexity (redundancy). Variety is used to come up with new options, futures and possibilities – to produce ‘unpredictable outputs’, redundancy is used to reproduce the already known. Redundancy is the management part of the job, variety informs strategy and future action.

Holistic thinking aims at understanding the relationships, patterns and properties of and within systems. instead of focusing on linearity and analytical reduction and consequently argues for a circular view of causes and effects and for a more probabilistic planning.

The next chapter will finish with conclusions on the scope of brand management, before diving into what creativity might mean today in the now-defined domain.

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Grots, A. & Pratschke, M., 2009. Design Thinking – Kreativität als Methode. Marketing Review St. Gallen, 26(2), S. 18–23.

Tropp, J., 2004. Markenmanagement: Der Brand Management Navigator. Markenführung im Kommunikationszeitalter, VS Verlag.

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Related posts:

1. 2.3 Brand Management Paradigms
2. 2.4 Challenges For Brand Management
3. 2.1 The Relevance of Brand Management
4. 1. The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management

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