The buzz around the marketing water cooler this morning is about a report by Lisa Bradner of Forrester entitled “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age.”  In the report, Lisa makes the provocative statement that our industry should change the name “brand manager” to “brand advocate” as a response to the fundamental changes brought about by the digital age.  Further fuel is added to the fire with Ad Age’s story about the report called “Why It’s Time to Do Away With the Brand Manager.”

The Forrester report makes a compelling story and the subsequent Ad Age article adds further proof of why Brand Management is about to undergo its’ biggest change since McElroy wrote his infamous memo in May 1931.

But there is one particular point that I think needs repeating:

We don’t need to get rid of Brand Managers -  we need to “return to marketing as the focus of Brand Management.”

As my colleague Bob Gilbreath points out in the article, marketing needs to be something much more important than “one of the six things a Brand Manager doe