A great marketing value proposition with a bad website, blurry logo and weak messaging can be just more harmful to your business than helpful. Both marketing and branding depend on each other in order to be effective. This article is about the goals of marketing and the goals of branding.
Branding is an art. It involves choosing the right colours, symbols, messaging and design for your company. Branding is the feeling that people have when they encounter your brand. Everything your business does has a branding impact like your marketing, your solutions and especially your reputation.
Marketing is the promotion of a product service or the brand itself in order to drive sales. SEO, SEM, content promotion, advertising all of these are marketing. Anything on the front lines of the brand that drives sales is marketing.
Branding v/s Marketing
Branding comes first, marketing comes second
We are all familiar with this saying “the chicken or the egg which came first?” while jumping on to the business version of that saying, it would probably be branding or marketing which one has more preference?
While building your dream business, branding always comes before marketing. Also you can’t exactly market a brand you haven’t designed yet.
You will have to focus on your branding before you even think about putting a marketing strategy in place. You must have the answers to these questions like, What do you want to bring to the marketplace? Who are you as a brand? What are your core values? And, most essentially, how are you going to communicate that to your target customers?
As once your branding is in place, you’ll need to have a better understanding of who you are, who your customer is, and the best ways to connect with that customer—and can build a marketing strategy that brings that to life.
Branding is the what and why and marketing is the how
Branding is concerned with the ‘what’ of the product like what the products and services are? What do they do? What is the value that’s delivered? Branding is why the seller does something.
Marketing on the other hand is about strategy. It is how the seller will go to the market and how they will promote their goods. Marketing is about advertising or communication. It communicates both functional and emotional ways.
Branding is long term while marketing is short term
Branding is involved with long term equity or long term value. It’s more about memory, experience or perception in the consumer’s mind.
Contrastingly, marketing is concerned with generating immediate action. It’s about short-term activity.
Branding is macro while marketing is micro
Branding is concerned with that of a big picture. It’s about overarching perceptions and attitudes.
Marketing is involved with details concerned with actions being taken. It is usually about the activities that’s happening which generate sales.
Branding is trajectory and marketing is tactics
Branding is really connected with the long-term direction. Where are we going with our strategic direction of the brand? Where is the company positioning itself in the marketplace relationship to its competition?
Marketing is about tactics. It is concerned with the actions that you are going to be taking. What is the action you are going to take? Where are you going to take that action? When are you going to take that action? It’s about moving forward and about taking short term actions.
Branding builds loyalty and marketing generates action
Branding is related to what the consumer feels about the long term brand and how that loyalty is built.
Marketing is related to short term quick and immediate action. Anything that is going to create immediate results for the brand.
Branding defines value while marketing monetizes value
Branding seeks to instil that deep emotional resonance into the consumer about the brand. It seeks to create that long term affinity and preference.
Marketing is about turning that value into money. Marketing seeks to extract tribute or extract money from the consumer for those functional, emotional benefits that the brand is delivering. Monetizing the value is what marketing is about.
This has been an argument taking place for a long time. Not a lot of people have the clarity or the ability to articulate the difference between the two. People have to know your brand in order to be trained to feel a certain way about your brand and then you will have to do marketing. Branding makes us feel a certain way with colours, music and so on and marketing is how we explain what we offer in such a way that people want to buy it. So both of them are needed to run your business smoothly.
