Requirements for brand managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic: Identification and comparison

Wroblowská, Zuzana Article Requirements for brand managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic: Identification and comparison Trends Economics and Management Provided in Cooperation with: Faculty of Business and Management, Brno University of Technology Suggested Citation: Wroblowská, Zuzana (2018) : Requirements for brand managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic: Identification and comparison, Trends Economics and Management, ISSN 2336-6508, Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Business and Management, Brno, Vol. 12, Iss. 31, pp. 115-125, https://doi.org/10.13164/trends.2018.31.115 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/308886 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 115 Trendy ekonomiky a managemenTu Trends economics and managemenT issn 1802-8527 (Print) / issn 2336-6508 (online) 2018 31(1): 115–125 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13164/trends.2018.31.115 Requirements for Brand Managers in Ukraine andtheCzechRepublic:IdentificationandComparison Zuzana Wroblowská Abstract Purpose of the article: This paper represents a set of requirements placed on brand managers when they are first approached by recruiters in both Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Methodology/methods: To conclude a successful empirical research, Berelson’s content analysis method was used to study the texts of recruitment advertisements on career portals. Statistical verification of the results was conducted using the Pearson chi-square test. Scientific aim: The primary goal of the research project was to examine the situation of brand manager positions offered in the researched labour markets and to provide answers to the questions arising from the research assumption: “Employers do not publish different requirements for candidates for the job of Brand Manager in Ukraine and the Czech Republic”. Findings: The result of the actual research project in Ukraine confirmed a fundamental need for applicants for brand manager positions with work experience in marketing (51.4%), knowledge of marketing (33.8%), and experience in the field of the advertiser company’s business (31.1%). The application of information technology was found to be the third most important requirement in Ukraine, at 48.6%, unless the requirements for personality traits and skills were taken into account. The assumption regarding the matching requirements for brand manager positions in the two countries was rejected on the basis of the statistical verification process. The statistical test confirmed the shift of requirements even for & = 0.001 in the tested groups of signs. Conclusions: The data gained by studying publicly available recruitment adverts in the selected regions of Ukraine provided information on the most frequently published requirements for the required education and professional competencies based on professional knowledge, skills and type and length of experience. Comparison of the relative frequencies of requirements for brand manager positions in Ukraine and the Czech Republic indicated differences. Keywords: brand manager, knowledge, product management, recruitment advertisement, technical competence, transferable skills JELClassification:D83, M12, M31, M51 Zuzana Wroblowská: Requirements for Brand Managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic: Identification and Comparison 116 Introduction Technological progress in the late nineteenth century outstripped the average consumer’s ability to understand products, let alone know their producers personally. In response to this customer uncertainty, firms started to introduce brands in various industries. The pace of brand introduction, sophistication and importance accelerated in the early 1970s, and the digital revolution of the 21st century with cheap mobiles, big data, social media, and global connectivity has further accelerated this process. Nowadays we live in a branded world. Brands belong to a pool of resources that generate much of a company’s market value. Nevertheless, it is still true that brands are taken as imperfect concepts because they are ultimately human creations. It is people with their strengths and failings who bring brands to life and manage them. As such, a brand is only as strong as the weakest personal point within an organisation (Bedbury, 2003). In order for brand managers to succeed in an environment formed by deregulation, information networks, globalization, consumer participation based on awareness and the ability of consumers to spread their voice, and other external forces, brand managers have to possess sufficient knowledge and personal qualities to be able to influence a brand’s success in the target market. The interest of the author focuses on the qualifications, technical competence and professional experience as well as personality traits and behavioural competency of brand managers, because the job attracts both graduates and experienced workers. Ten years ago, the author started to set up and carry out her own long-term research project, the partial outcomes of which will be presented in this paper, as she failed in searching for complex characteristics of the job role of a brand manager in the Czech Republic, where brand managers as well as product managers do not belong to professions with given qualification standards. This year, empirical research has been conducted in Ukraine using the previously tested Berelson’s method of content analysis. This makes it possible to compare the requirements for brand managers in both countries and expand knowledge of the issue so that the under-researched topic will be of interest to researchers and practitioners alike. 1. Theoretical background The essence of classic marketing, the marketing planning process, and the arrangement of marketing function have been defined and characterised by many authors (McDonald, Wilson, 2012; Kotler, Keller, 2012 and others). Kotler, Keller (2012, p. 28) refer to the definition published on the website of the American Marketing Association which states that “marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” Product management meets the requirement created by empirical approaches to management, which emphasise the necessity of modern process management. Tomek, Vávrová mention Aumayr’s definition that “product management is a managerial concept focused on the necessity of a coordination of products and product groups” (Aumayr, 2006 in Tomek, Vávrová, 2009, p. 138). Gorchels (2005) integrates product management with brand management with a reference to it being the most common application of product planning in companies that produce consumer goods. Kotler, Keller (2012) see this relation similarly and they explain that when a company focuses on product categories to manage its brands, adequate resources for all categories must be ensured (Kotler, Keller, 2012, p. 649). Brands are widely accepted as key intangible assets, as stated by Abdolmohammadi Zuzana Wroblowská: Requirements for Brand Managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic: Identification and Comparison 117 (2005 in Nguyen et al., 2015). Kotler, Keller (2013, p. 35) adopt the definition of a brand from the American Marketing Association – with the “brand” being a name, term, sign, symbol or design or their combination serving to identify products and services of one or more vendors to differentiate them on the market. Keller (2013, p. 31) contrasts a product and a brand, stating, “a product is anything we can offer to the market for attention” and explaining “a brand is therefore more than a product because it can have dimensions that differentiate it in some way from other products designed to satisfy the same need”. The essence of brand management was defined by Kapferer (1998), an author of the brand identity concept when he underlined the superiority of strategy and a consistent integrated vision. The second key concept is brand value, and Aaker (2003) included the relationship between value and brand loyalty. The creation of brand identity is one of the four steps of the CBBE model (Consumer-based brand equity), in which the manager entrusted with building a powerful brand manages to build a loyal relationship between a consumer and the brand through the determination of brand identity (Keller, 1993 in Nguyen et al., 2015). Kotler, Pfoertsch (2006, p. 3) emphasise that brands fulfil the same purpose in B2B markets as in consumer markets, because “they facilitate the identification of products, services and businesses as well as differentiate them from the competition”. To derive requirements for brand managers is to state their role in the process of strategic brand management, where the strategic, tactical and operative tasks are as follows: (1) identifying and establishing brand positioning, (2) planning and implementing brand marketing programmes, (3) measuring and interpreting brand performance, and (4) growing and sustaining brand equity (Keller, 2013, p. 58). In their research oriented at methods of brand identity determination, Nguyen and her collaborators (2015) show that currently brand value must be increased through managing the activities of the customer brand experience instead of intensifying and increasing the number of contacts with the brand. Their findings indicate that the set of main tasks of the brand manager’s job role extends with impacts into the structure of requirements to the executor of this job role. Although the requirements for human factors in brand management organisation are not specified in more detail by Kotler, Keller (2012), its demanding nature can be inferred from the inclination of these authors to using a brand-asset management team to manage brands with support of team work at the highest level of the business organisation hierarchy (Kotler, Keller, 2012, p. 649). The organisational structure and job design of key role bearers affect a number of outcomes; nevertheless, there is no “one best way to design jobs and structure organisation,” as Noe and his collaborators point out, because the organisation needs to create a fit between its environment, competitive strategy, and philosophy on the one hand, with its jobs and organisational design on the other (Noe et al., 2017). 2. Objectives and research methodology The purpose of the paper is to present and discuss the partial results of the author’s empirical research project and to link them with the knowledge base. The empirical research is designed to review the requirements which are faced by candidates for brand manager positions at the start-up phase of the recruitment process, specifically at the time of the publication of job vacancies. The aim of the analysis is to compare the sets of requirements published on job sites in Ukraine and the Czech Republic and to answer the following research assumption: employers do not publish different requirements for candidates for the job of brand manager Zuzana Wroblowská: Requirements for Brand Managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic: Identification and Comparison 118 in Ukraine and the Czech Republic. According to MINFIN (2017), the expected outlook of GDP growth between 2.1% and 2.3% in Ukraine in the period selected for data collection led the author to choose this country for comparison with sets of requirements for Czech brand managers, although there are many different external and internal factors in Ukraine, as mentioned by Sokil, Ubrežiova (2017). For the purpose of this paper, the analysis is limited to sources of information about requirements for work experience and practice, education, technical competence and transferable skills. When performing the empirical research itself, Berelson’s method of content analysis (1952 in Miovský, 2006, p. 118), was applied. The method is suitable for collecting a large amount of information from available recruitment advertisements placed for candidates for vacant positions in marketing. When researching the advertisements for vacancies in the three selected regions of Ukraine (Kiev, Lviv, and Dnipropetrovsk), the main selection criteria for the source of information were its availability and ability to present requirements for candidates and information about the vacancy in the broadest scope possible. In five weeks in April and May 2017, advertisements for positions titled “Brand Manager” were gathered from publicly available advertisements on the Work. ua job website. This gathered 79 adverts. If the position had a different title, such as “Senior Brand Manager”, the advertisement was not included in the set. After removing duplicates, the final sample contained 74 adverts. The data processing was performed in line with the procedure applied in the thesis by Wroblowská (2011) and elaborated on in the author’s monograph and other scientific papers (Wroblowská, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c), which allows for international comparison. The data segments were transferred in an electronic form. Work with the transferred texts was subjected to so-called manifest content analysis according to Plichtová (1996 in Miovský, 2006) when only the explicit content of the text is examined. Requirements where the frequency of occurrence exceeded 5% in at least one of the compared data files were analysed. Tests were performed at significance levels of 0.1%, 1%, and 5%, to examine whether the null hypothesis regarding the independence of the analysed variable on the sign representing the country realising the content analysis of recruitment advertisements can or cannot be rejected. The statistical verification of the results was undertaken using test criteria in the Pearson chi-square test according to Řezanková (2007). 3. Results This paper presents and discusses data and results which are directly related to the paper’s goal. Partial results related to personal predispositions and so-called soft skills which are based on the characteristics and capabilities that arise from these traits will be presented in another scientific paper. 3.1 Secondary data applied in the research project When preparing the methodology of the independent research, no new information was available from empirical research intended to research the human factor of brand managers apart from those which had been published already, see Wroblowská (2011, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2016d). The career portal Jobs.cz was the source of the analysed recruitment advertisements in the Czech Republic. 3.2 Content analysis of requirements placed on brand managers The sorted data segments from the researched advertisement texts are presented in the form of a frequency chart in Table 1. The table also presents information about the results of the survey conducted in the Czech Republic, for details see Wroblowská Zuzana Wroblowská: Requirements for Brand Managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic: Identification and Comparison 119 (2016a). The sample of analysed Czech advertisements consisted of 56 advertisements, while in Ukraine, as previously explained, the sample of single advertisements totalled 74, when applying the same selection rules. Table 2 signals that the representation of individual characters differs in the evaluated groups of requirements. Table 3 gives an idea of the procedure of applying the independence test. The test criterion was the Pearson chi-square test. This tested at significance levels of 0.1%, 1%, and 5%, whether the null hypothesis regarding the independence of the analysed variables on the sign representing the country which offers vacant positions, can or cannot be Table 1. Employers’ requirements for brand managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Source: Author’s own study. Table 2. Overview of the results of individual requirement group testing. Groups of tested requirements chi-square value df test result Q education, technical competence and general skills 68.0580578 9 H0 rejected Sstrategic and business-oriented thinking 5.7142857 2 H0 not rejected Rrequired practice and work experience 25.6503224 6 H0 rejected T technical competence, knowledge and skills 14.9558695 5 H0 rejected Source: Author’s own study. Zuzana Wroblowská: Requirements for Brand Managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic: Identification and Comparison 120 Table 3. Two-dimensional analysis for the group of required practice and work experience. Source: Author’s own study. Zuzana Wroblowská: Requirements for Brand Managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic: Identification and Comparison 121 Figure 1. Comparison of the relative frequency of requirements for work experience and qualifications applied to candidates for brand manager positions in Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Source: Author’s own study. Zuzana Wroblowská: Requirements for Brand Managers in Ukraine and the Czech Republic: Identification and Comparison 122 rejected. Table 3 was processed for the group of required practice and work experience that are classified under the letter “R”. The representation of the individual characters in the tested groups of requirements differs, as illustrated in Table 2. The statistically significant difference in the distribution of frequencies of the analysed requirements was confirmed for & = 0.05 in all tested groups. The changes in the representation of the requirements in individual groups are statistically insignificant even on the level of & = 0.001 for the group of “education, knowledge, business management skills and transferable skills” classified under the letter “Q”. At the significance level of & = 0.001 and & = 0.01, the null hypothesis was not rejected while testing the narrowly specified group marked with “T” that do not include general, transferable skills and university education. A visual comparison of the frequencies of requirements for candidates for the position of brand manager in Ukraine and the Czech Republic is illustrated in Figure 1. A statistically significant difference in the distribution of frequencies of requirements integrated into the group marked with “R”, including required practice and work experience, was confirmed for & = 0.001, & = 0.01, and & = 0.05, as is proved by the calculations in Table 3. The analysis of the results will be addressed in the next chapter. 4. Discussion In the main part of this chapter, the results will be analysed and the degree of fulfilment of the goals will be evaluated and discussed. The starting point for deriving requirements for brand stewards, who are brand managers in a number of companies, is to state their role in the process of strategic brand management. The expert public has attributed the role of coordinator to brand managers and product managers; nevertheless, the author found that the role of brand managers as implementer of marketing plans prevails in real practice (Wroblowská, 2011). These findings of the author correspond to the view of Tomek, Vávrová (2009), who point out that the execution in practice may result in different positions in the organisation structure of product management and the staff performing it. But there is no doubt that to succeed in their job role, brand managers must demonstrate behavioural competency, technical competence and general, transferable skills. Table 1 shows us that the Ukrainian job requirement with the highest frequency of almost 92% – “university degree” – was followed by the requirement for work experience in marketing required by more than 50% of advertisers. The requirement “proficient in MS Office application and/or a good level of work with the Internet” (48.6%) is the third most important in Ukraine. Surprisingly the requirement for an advanced level of English language did not exceed 40% in job advertisements from the selected Ukrainian regions. Recruiters more frequently set requirements relating to non-transferable competences or, to a certain extent, only transferable competences, like business management skills (20.3%), with the abovementioned exceptions of IT literacy and the requirement for an advanced level of English. In spite of that fact, we can see that knowledge and experience in the field, at least preferred experience in the advertiser’s field are also required. Sokil, Ubrežiova (2017) have identified lack of knowledge and experience as one of the main threats to Ukraine’s ability to connect its product and service markets with international business. This together with the results illustrated in Table 1, give rise to the following statement. The interest in candidates who have held a brand manager’s post for less than 3 years shows that the Ukrainian labour market does not offer enough sufficiently experienced knowledge workers. Recruiters simply ask for what is realistic.