Management differences between single brand and multi-brand.

If starting a business is just to open a Zhajiang noodle restaurant, don't think too much. Just make your noodles well and have a name. Zhajiang noodles are delicious, but you can't leave after eating them. But suddenly your business in Zhajiang is so hot that you want to sell roast duck. You think [delicious] is already a slag river surface. To make roast duck, you need a new brand, such as "Eating Duck", so let's enter the topic of our class, managing single-brand and multi-brand enterprises.

In the brand structure of an enterprise, there are three situations:

1. Single brand. For example, when you first started selling dregs, you couldn't walk after eating. Large enterprises include ge, Siemens, CITIC and HNA. The main business of these enterprises is named after the group.

2. There is a leading brand among many brands. For example, Coca-Cola, the company has Coca-Cola, Sprite, Minute Maid, Ice Dew and so on. Coca-Cola is the leading brand, named after the company. Another example is the public. There are Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda, Lamborghini and Porsche brands. The leading brand is Volkswagen, which is consistent with the company name.

3. There are no leading brands among multiple brands. The most typical ones are Procter & Gamble, Unilever, COFCO and China Resources. Their company name is the company name, and there are many brands below. Do you know which brand is Fulinmen? Whose are the Great Wall Wine and Instant Noodles from the Grains Dojo? They are all from COFCO.

Whether it is a single brand or a multi-brand, there are two choices: brand intensive management and decentralized management.

What kind of enterprises will adopt intensive management and what kind of enterprises will adopt decentralized management?

1. Enterprises with intensive brand management are generally enterprises with high historical status and value of group brands, B2B enterprises. For example, GE, Siemens, and many state-owned enterprises in China all started their expansion with products of the same company name. For B2B enterprises, because corporate customers attach great importance to the overall strength of the company, B2B enterprises can reduce the cost of brand communication by developing new business and using group brand endorsement.

2. Enterprises with decentralized brand management mainly need to strengthen category management, B2C enterprises. For example, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and L 'Oreal, among these enterprises, the importance of product brands is high, and the budget, personnel and resources are also tilted towards product brands. Group brands tend to [rub] the resources of product brands.

Because we are talking about brand structure, we mainly talk about how to manage brands from the perspective of enterprises and groups.

First, let's talk about how to manage a single brand.

If you are the head of brand public relations in a single brand enterprise, you need to do the following work:

1. Promote corporate brand with business theme communication. Single-brand enterprises should formulate business strategies and communication strategies according to the needs of users and social development. For example, Industrial Internet proposed by GE, Cognitive Commerce proposed by IBM, Improving Enterprise Efficiency advocated by Xiaomi, and Carrying out Cost-effective in the end are all communication campaigns made by a single group brand to enhance its corporate image.

2. Promote the corporate brand by spreading the theme of reputation. Single brand bears the main responsibility in employer brand communication, corporate social responsibility and crisis management. Employer brand is to make employees love the enterprise and let outsiders want to work in this enterprise. Single-brand enterprises such as Siemens and Baidu have strong advantages in campus recruitment, employer brand promotion and corporate social responsibility project coordination. In crisis management, because all products are branded with the Group, the risks cannot be reduced, and if any product goes wrong, the Group can't escape.

3. Values and cultural exchange. The values of single brand enterprises are simpler and more unified, and they are more concentrated in human resource evaluation standards and financial management. During the period of enterprise transformation, whether building a brand or reshaping a brand, values and corporate culture are needed first. We often say that the whole party should unify its thinking. When I was working in GE, every time my business changed, the CEO would say that I was most dependent on my colleagues in human resources and brand public relations. All the changes begin with the change of culture and the change of human resource evaluation standard. In this process, cultural communication is particularly important, especially brand public relations department.

What I want to explain here is that in the long run, a single brand is increasingly unsuitable for market development. Especially B2C enterprises should be extra cautious about brand extension. For example, although LeTV's problems are basically not at the brand level, all businesses use one brand, such as LeTV, LeTV Film, LeTV Sports and LeTV Auto, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages, but in the long run, it may do more harm than good. In the ecological chain that Xiaomi is doing now, more than 70 enterprises it invests in are not holding shares, some have rice characters, such as purple rice, cloud rice, green rice and smart rice, and some have no rice characters, such as 1.

More, the most life, this is a certain degree of brand strategy and brand protection. In the future, we will see more and more enterprises adopt multi-brand structure.

Let's talk about several key tasks of brand management in multi-brand enterprises:

1. The division of labor between group brands and sub-brands is clear: the group is responsible for CE0 image management, investment strategy information dissemination, government relations, advertising procurement optimization and official comprehensive media relations; Sub-brands are responsible for product information dissemination, industry associations and industry media. In this regard, we have many cases of enterprises. For example, under SAIC-GM, there are Cadillac, Buick and Chevrolet brands. Their media delivery is centralized, and the media resources of brand public relations are relatively concentrated. Of course, this is because their sub-brands are all cars.

We also have multi-brand enterprises with diversified businesses, such as United Technologies, which owns aircraft engines, helicopters, elevators, air conditioners, security equipment and other industries. They must do a good job in the division of labor between group brands and product brands. The group is responsible for large-scale investment projects, government relations and official media relations. And the spread of products is left to the product brand.

In crisis management, group brand and product brand also need to have their own division of labor to determine when to take risk reduction and when to rise to the level of group brand. There are two situations. One is that Lancome brand 20 16 invited artists advocating Hong Kong independence to attend concerts in Hong Kong. After being exposed by the Global Times, it caused anger among netizens. Lancome Global Headquarters handled and issued a statement in time.

The letter of apology, the crisis quickly resolved, did not rise to the group brand L 'Oreal.

However, the KFC Six Wings incident on 20 15, after continuous fermentation and controversy, was finally resolved by a lengthy and profound apology letter sent by the chairman of China District of Parkson Company, the parent company of KFC.

2. Multi-brand theme cooperation. SAIC-GM's "Green Future" gas car environmental protection project, L 'Oreal's corporate social responsibility project to help rural women, and Unilever's sustainable development project "Small Action, Big Difference" are all cross-business, integrating multi-brand themes, and all brands are involved, forming a corporate reputation management strategy that is beneficial to both group brands and product brands.

3. Group brands provide talent training and high-end resource services for product brands. Compared with a single brand, the brand department of multi-brand group is generally weak, and the company will pay more attention to the product brands that are closer to sales. The group brand has more strategic resources because it is not so eager for quick success and instant benefit.

People of product brands usually say [how high your group is, how can you stare at performance every day] in a tone of pretending to praise, but because of this, the public relations people of product brands lack a sense of belonging and professional training. Group brands can provide this service, so that brand public relations talents can help product brands train, and the rotation of different brand departments can provide so-called [high-end resources], such as the relationship between the government and the central media.

In fact, the group and product brands can often rub resources against each other, and the group often needs to borrow the advertising resources of product brands to maintain important media relations.

Content from: Practical Guide to Brand Public Relations | Li Guowei