Brand Management is Revenue Management, move them to the same department.

If every encounter a customer has with the brand either helps or hurts the brand value, then everything in a business comes back to brand management. And if the goal is to maximize revenues, then brand management is revenue management. This is why these two roles should be moved into the same department to enhance collaboration.

As the recent HotelNewsNow.com article, Reputation management is Revenue management, hotel industry is starting to see the power of this relationship between Branding and Revenue Mgt... just starting. But even five years ago the people in charge of brand management (at the corporate or property level rarely ever talked to the Revenue managers. They were secluded to opposite sides of the building, the brand and marketing people seen as 'those people who have their heads in the clouds while everyone else does the work' and the revenue folks on the other side were 'those people who crunch the numbers while everyone else does the work'. Unfortunately, this is still the case in many organizations today, a result of Revenue Management being moved into its own department, to keep the Sales Department accountable, and Marketing continued to be grouped with Sales (in many cases under sales).

The problem of having Brand Marketing under Sales is that the Sales Department typically services a laundry list of corporate, MICE, leisure and group accounts... Rarely do any of these accounts generate more than 5-10% of revenues. Having Sales focused on so many small clients can diverge a Branding Strategy from having a top level approach. The benefit of having Branding and Marketing grouped with Revenue Management is that you can take market feedback from Social Media, Sales' different accounts, Competitive Pricing, Historical performance, and Forecasted performance when creating an ongoing Marketing Strategy and targeted campaigns. The most important point is that these campaigns would be more closely watched and it's effectiveness measured.

We have recently seen various examples of the effectiveness of marketing campaigns being created quickly when the branding and revenue management teams work closely together. Recently shown by Starwood's W Hotels when they were the first to market with a "New York Same Sex Marriage Package" only days after the court ruling.

Let's be honest a lot of revenue managers out there are already doing a lot of Branding tasks, weather it be servicing OTA accounts, managing property descriptions online or on GDS, deciding weather or not to participate in OTA or Corporate campaigns, tracking competitive rates, market share, and vying for better placement online. The goal would be to increase the efficiency of information flow within the organization and outward to the consumer. As Josiah Mackenzie mentioned in the aforementioned article, Reputation management is Revenue management, the opportunity is to, "take these analytics and do something more creative," move the information flow closer together by grouping Branding and Revenue Mgt together, and you can use all of the different feedback sources to do something more creative, FASTER, before your competitors.