Why Brand Management requires a separate programme

Brand management involves consumer psychology, business strategy, cultural understanding, creative thinking, and financial judgment, often all at once. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto Walk into any campus placement season and the same story will be playing out. Companies looking for people who can handle brand roles meet smart, hardworking graduates who have studied marketing, done their internships, and built decent resumes. They leave, more often than not, underwhelmed. The graduates can run a campaign and manage a content calendar. What they find hard to do is think about a brand: its meaning, its position and its long-term direction. That ability — the core of brand management — is simply not what most programmes are built to develop.Indian Management education was designed around a generalist philosophy that worked for much of its history. Marketing was a broad function and a broad education made reasonable sense. Over time, brand management grew into something with its own depth and demands. It draws on consumer psychology, business strategy, cultural understanding, creative thinking, and financial judgment, often all at once. But the curriculum has not moved with it.No real immersionIn most programmes, brand management occupies a few weeks within a marketing specialisation. Students encounter frameworks and case studies, get a working familiarity with the language of brands, and move on. What they do not get is real immersion, the kind that builds actual judgment. By graduation, most students have attended lectures, read cases, and ticked the boxes. But they have never really sat with a brand problem long enough to develop an opinion. What this produces, at scale, is a market flooded with people who are good at execution and thin on strategic brand thinking.Digital and social media created an entire ecosystem of marketing work built around doing. Managing platforms, producing content, running performance campaigns, tracking metrics ... these became the daily reality of early-career marketing jobs and education responded accordingly. Programmes loaded up on tools, platforms, and techniques. Graduates became highly competent operators.At some point in any maturing market, running good campaigns stops being the hard part. What becomes harder is knowing what the brand should say, who it is truly speaking to, and why anyone should care about it at all. Those are not campaign questions. They are brand questions. Peel away the jargon and the frameworks, and brand management is really about one question: What does this mean to the person we are trying to reach? The brand manager holds the answer to that question. She is not just running a function. She is deciding what her company stands for in the world.What to teachThat deserves more than a semester of electives. A brand programme worth its name does not borrow legitimacy from a marketing course. It stands on its own and starts with the basics. Why do people choose the brands they do? How do culture, context, and psychology drive those decisions? How does a call made about a brand today show up in the numbers a year or three down the line? It means teaching students to build strategy from genuine human insight rather than surface-level data. It means making the financial logic of brand investment legible, so that brand managers can hold their ground in a room full of spreadsheets. It means using analytics and technology as aids to sharper thinking, not as replacements for it. It means building all of this through practice: through live brand problems, real diagnoses, and recommendations that get stress-tested by people who have actually done the work.The brand manager today has to bring together the instincts of a psychologist, the discipline of a strategist, the sensibility of a storyteller, and the grounding of a business manager. That profile does not emerge from a generalist programme with a few brand electives. Specialist business education has been growing steadily in other parts of the world. India is beginning to follow. The appetite is there, from students who want deeper expertise and from companies that want people they can actually trust with their brands. The classroom needs to close that gap urgently. India’s brands are more ambitious than ever. The people building them should be too.The writer is Dean and Professor, The Specialist Brand School Published - July 26, 2026 12:00 pm IST