Citation: Cid, A.; Blanchet, P.; Robichaud, F.; Kinuani, N. A Conceptual Framework for Creating Brand Management Strategies. Businesses 2022, 2, 546–561. https:// doi.org/10.3390/businesses2040034 Academic Editor: Lester Johnson Received: 20 November 2022 Accepted: 5 December 2022 Published: 8 December 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Article A Conceptual Framework for Creating Brand Management Strategies Allan Cid 1, * , Pierre Blanchet 1 , François Robichaud 2 and Nsimba Kinuani 3 1 NSERC Industrial Research Chair on Eco-Responsible Wood Construction (CIRCERB), Department of Wood and Forest Sciences, Laval University, 2425 De La Terrasse Street, Quebec City, QC G1V 0A6, Canada 2 Forest Economic Advisors, LLC, 298 Great Road, Littleton, MA 01460, USA 3 FPInnovations, 1055 Rue du Peps, Québec, QC G1V 4C7, Canada * Correspondence: allancid@icloud.com Abstract: Branding has become a business priority over the past few decades due to the growing awareness that brands are one of the companies’ most valuable intangible assets. Academics and practitioners have proposed models of components to simplify brands into a small number of parts, or dimensions. Nonetheless, there is a lack of specific approaches to brand management models that fit specific business scenarios. The objective of this study was to propose a general framework to create custom brand management strategies that fit specific business scenarios through a set of independent brand dimensions. The framework was applied to the specific case of SME alliance in a B2B export environment as an example of use. This study reviews the most cited brand management models in literature and classified them into 12 independent brand dimensions. The results suggest that regardless of the brand management model, all of them converge on the fact that creating a high- quality brand relationship with the customer is crucial for the branding process. Findings suggest non-evident relationships between dimensions. The findings also suggest that brand dimensions’ and brand dimension relationships’ importance in specific business scenarios shape brand management models in unique ways. Keywords: branding; brand management; brand management strategy 1. Introduction Branding has become a business priority over the past few decades due to the growing awareness that brands are one of the companies’ most valuable intangible assets [1]. The importance of brand image is such that the most valuable brand in the world, Apple, was valued at around 408 billion US dollars in 2021 [2], this value is comparable to the GDP of Vietnam, estimated at around 409 billion US dollars in 2021, a Country that makes part of the top 40 economies of the world [3]. In practical terms, branding has been used to promote goods and services since its inception, but there are several approaches to branding today that go beyond commercial activity. Several branding approaches and their definition can be found in the literature, such as personal brand, corporate brand, investor brand, industry brand, NGO brand, government brand, local brand, and the national brand, among others [4,5]. There is no single definition for the brand concept. Kapferer [6] said: “there are as many brand definitions as there are experts working in the field of branding”. Several authors have proposed the study of the brand based on different classification criteria. These criteria are chronological [7], functional [8,9], and semiotic [5,10], among others. According to de Chernatony and Riley [11], academics and practitioners have pro- posed models of components to simplify brands into a small number of parts. These proposed models are based on different sets of elements, either tangible or intangible, Businesses 2022, 2, 546–561. https://doi.org/10.3390/businesses2040034 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/businesses