What are the financial aspects of brands?

Answer 1

In today's business environment, Brand managers need to be knowledgeable about the financialdimensions of their jobs as well as the marketing portion. Brand managers assume the role of mini-CEOs inthat they have complete profit and loss responsibility for their Brands. In such cases, the brand managermust be familiar with all aspects of business, including operations management, human resources, and soon. However, besides the analyses marketing managers perform to better understand customers,competitors, and the rest of the external market environment, several other analyses related to thefinancial aspects of the brand's performance are also necessary. As a result, to be part of a firm's overalldecision making, brand managers must understand the financial implications of their decisions. Financialdecision making is closely related to brand strategy. The ultimate objective of brand managers isprofitability, whether or not the short-term objective in the marketing plan is oriented toward share orprofits.Two key kinds of information are important to marketing decision making and strategy development.First, if the brand manager is to have profit and loss responsibility or set short- and long-term profitobjectives, he or she must have a good understanding of how profits are computed. As any financiallyoriented manager knows, computing profits is not a straightforward issue. There is no such concept as thebottom line; in fact there are at least three ways to calculate the "profitability" of a brand. The secondkind of information that is critical to a brand manager's understanding of financial performance isrelevant if there is .a brand line or many brand variants (e.g., different sizes, colors) because it analyzesthe performance of different brand variant.The financial analyses described can be used in a variety of ways. One way to use either profitability orsales analyses is for planning purposes. Profitability needs to be reported in a marketing plan. In addition,analysis of the relative sales performances of different brand variants can lead to a new marketingstrategy or the pruning of a brand line. These analyses can also be used ex post, or after the planning period, and at specific intervals within theplanning period. Such a use of financial analyses would be for control purposes. Obviously, it is importantto measure how the company has done or how it is doing the latter being particularly important formaking adjustments during the execution of the plan.A detailed look at several kinds of financial analyses that is important for brand management isascertained. Besides the sales and profitability analyses just mentioned, we describe a strategic approachto control that explicitly links "financial to marketing analysis. We also discuss capital budgeting from amarketing perspective.SALES ANALYSIS

OverviewConsider the advertisement shown below. Although it undoubtedly overstates the case just a bit, thepoint made by the graph and the text is clear: In many cases, it is impossible to determine how successfula brand or service really is without digging deeper into its sales records. The overall picture can be quiterosy while some real problems can exist in certain channels, regions of the world sizes, and so on.This realization leads to the iceberg principle. Many of the real problems facing a brand manager lie"beneath the water." Like