When a product or service on the market wins your loyalty, chances are there's a savvy brand manager behind the scenes. Brand managers oversee the integrity of a brand across the entire marketing spectrum, using a range of technical and interpersonal skills to understand trends, manage teams, and execute campaigns and product/service launches. The wide scope of brand management work, which requires analytical, creative, and problem-solving skills, is one of the reasons leadership roles in this area are often well compensated.
The Brand Management concentration from D'Amore-McKim immerses you in the knowledge, tools, and techniques that successful brand managers use in their daily work. You'll start with a foundational course in brand management from Northeastern's Marketing Group, where you'll design, execute, and test a strategic brand plan for a local organization. This is a unique opportunity to experience a brand manager's daily responsibilities for yourself: interpreting market trends, defining the competitive landscape, developing a brand story, conducting and analyzing consumer research, budgeting, establishing a cross-platform communication strategy, executing campaigns, and measuring brand performance.
Building on that experience, you'll choose marketing elective courses in domains like Marketing Research, New Product Development, Managing Customer Engagement in a Service World, Consumer Behavior, and Driving Marketing Performance to develop the skills most relevant to your own goals. For example, you may want to study data-based consumer insights at a deeper level, learn about new product development and product portfolio growth, or acquire consumer-focused innovation strategies in the service sector. This approach develops both depth and breadth as a brand manager—a strength that employers value.