It’s often confusing to see the intersection where brand and marketing design end and brand management begins. Brand and marketing managers are the gatekeepers of a business’s brand’s identity.

And sometimes, for smaller organizations, this job may fall on the person—or people—serving as the design team. But we wanted to clarify a few things to help you see how and where graphic designers and brand managers differ in their professions.

What do brand managers do vs. graphic designers?

There’s a lot of crossover between the jobs of brand managers and designers working for and within organizations. But there are a lot of differences too.

Brand managers have a broad set of skills that touch on marketing, research, design, and often strategy. But their main focus is on preserving and presenting a brand’s elements in a way that solidifies the company’s positioning. In addition, brand managers play an advisory role to marketing, sales, and executive teams.

Now on the flip side, graphic designers will also use many of the same skills mentioned above. However, they are more hands-on in executing brand and marketing campaigns. It’s common for designers to work on a launch from start to finish, including conceptualizing and strategizing the campaign’s web, print, and other assets.

However, brand managers have more control over ensuring that these assets and elements consistently align with the brand’s visuals and messaging. Graphic designers are responsible for ensuring each new social media image, brochure design, microsite, and all other creative designs follow established brand guidelines.

The skills needed to maintain the brand

Brand managers and graphic designers’ jobs require paying attention to every detail concerning brand consistency. Logos, colors, and other visual elements are essential, but as Wayfair Brand Manager Jared Rosen said:

“Brand identity is more than just finding the right logo to place on coffee cup sleeves or mount above your front door. It’s about crafting a personality that amplifies the core elements to your brand’s DNA.”

And to do it, brand managers and designers share these other core skills that ensure they’re able to convey the essentials of a business to customers across multiple platforms:

Understanding the brand’s customers
Consumers make decisions about brands whenever they engage with them. And not all of them feel the same way about those companies. But when brand managers and designers conduct and evaluate the research gathered about their customers, they can create more relevant and engaging experiences.

For designers especially, having enough data about a brand’s business goals and its customers ensures that they aren’t just making something that’s eye-catching but a marketing piece that genuinely makes sense strategically.

Great communication skills
Communicating effectively between strategic and creative teams is part of keeping a brand consistent yet continuously evolving. For instance, brand managers have to be able to look at quantitative and qualitative information and evaluate it.

They have to be able to discuss this data with other members of their team. This information-sharing includes parsing out the parts that will help designers and other creatives deliver print, web, and video pieces based on strategy.

Ability to adapt to change
Managing multiple projects, adjusting to consumer trends, and looking for opportunities to enhance the brand are things brand managers have to deal with daily. But they aren’t the only ones who have to deal with changes in direction.

The life of a graphic designer involves being flexible when strategies, creative direction, and even factors outside of anyone’s control cause campaigns to be changed, temporarily sidelined, or even scrapped.

And both groups have to take it in stride.

When brand managers and designers work together across an organization, they’re more likely to have more affinity for their work. This leads to more dedication to the brand, its products, and its cultural impact on society.

Conclusion

The job of a graphic designer closely correlates to that of a brand manager. Both clearly understand the ins and outs of brand design and maintenance.

However, brand managers deal with the day-to-day of ensuring that everything seen by consumers accurately reflects the business, its voice, and its appearance.

On the other hand, designers are the bridge brand managers need to create the assets that convey the brand’s identity to consumers and continue building positive associations with a business. Each of these roles uses their shared and individual skillsets to ensure that the brand remains relevant and uniform as it continues to evolve.