Marketing vs Branding – The Whats & Whys

When launching a new business or product, one of the first questions people ask is how do I get my products infront of my prospective customers. Do I focus on marketing, branding, or both, and what’s the difference between them?

Those are the questions that we’ll answer in this post.

With every business having different needs and goals, it would be impossible to identify a “one-size-fits-all” solution to tell you what you need. However, I will attempt to explain each sufficiently, so that you can clearly determine for yourself which one you’ll need, with a clear understanding of why you’d need it.

What is Marketing

When people initially think of marketing, they typically think of things like magazine ads, Google Ad words, radio ads, and billboards. Marketing ads are typically designed in a way to attract the public eye. Unfortunately, many marketers have a short-sighted view of their role, and stop there, but have no problem still collecting your money.

As a side note, when you meet with your marketing team, it’s important that you understand that the purpose of marketing is not just to capture the public’s attention, but to draw the right customer prospects to purchase your product or visit your website or doorstep. You will need to make sure that their marketing plan clearly addresses that.

Specifically, every marketing initiative should do the following:

1. Capture the attention of your target prospective customers. This demographic will need to be identified prior to implementing any marketing initiative.
2. Lead the targeted prospective customer to take action that would ultimately lead to a purchase of your products or services. That action could be things like clicking on a link, calling, visiting a website or your store, or even things like provoking thoughts to make life changes.

The fact of the matter is that there are hundreds of ways to market a product or service and even more ways to get the attention of the public. Despite what some marketers might say, not all exposure is good exposure. So, the question remains, what really is marketing?

Seth Godin who is referred to as “the godfather of modern marketing” has stated that marketing is a form of advertising that yields quantifiable results. For example, if you spend $100.00 on a keyword in Google AdSense, using analytic tools, you will be able to track exactly how many people saw that keyword, how many clicked on that keyword, and how many sales resulted from that $100.00 investment.

The same goes for billboards, wraps on city busses, magazine ads, radio ads, etc. With each of these, using analytics, you can track how many people come to your website, walk in your store, call your phone and purchase your products. This is marketing.

Marketing ads can be created for multiple outcomes. Some of these may include things like:

• Capture the attention of the public.
• Drive visitors to your website or business.
• Encourage people to take action in some way.
• Promote a memorable and positive public image.

While each of these types of ads can be effective in driving traffic to your company, they require different amounts of time before the customer’s response to the ads will be realized. For example, if a billboard captures your attention with a clever image or phrase, the individual’s attention might only be captured long enough to win a glance as they drive down the road. Looking at the list above, this type of ad might be considered a success for the first objective with the goal to “Capture the attention of the public.” But that win of the customer’s captured attention may only last for a few seconds or minutes. But perhaps that’s ok, knowing that the customer will see that same billboard every day, building familiarity with your company or product.

If we are equally as successful with the last objective on the list, to “promote a memorable and positive public image”, then the next time a prospective customer needs your type of product or service, they will remember you. This type of marketing impact can last for years.

Effective marketing doesn’t just focus on one of these. It’s designed to take advantage of all of these at the same time. This allows your sales cycle to benefit both short and long-term.

This is where branding is important.

What is Branding

When people think of branding, they typically think of company logos. While it’s true that logos are a part of branding, the truth is that branding is much, much more. Unlike marketing, the benefits and results from branding can’t be quantified. Why, you ask?

Branding is the art of programming the public to have an emotional response, a reaction, and more importantly a recognition when they see or experience your product. This is done through consistency and repetition.

For example, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, insisted on a minimalist look and feel for all of their products, ads, and even retail stores. It’s become one of the most successful brands of our time. Now, decades later, every product they sell, every ad they create, and every retail store they open continues to follow that same design guide. When people see one of their products, the minimalist design is recognized almost immediately as being an Apple product. Because of this, customers immediately know what kind of experience to expect with that product. This is due to their instantly recognizable branding.

Rolls Royce provides us with another example. Anyone who has a remote fascination with anything related to money, luxury, or cars, will immediately recognize the Rolls Royce brand as being one of the pinnacles of ultimate luxury. Ownership of a Rolls Royce vehicle is a sign instantly recognized by many, that the owner has achieved substantial financial success. This is the image that the Rolls Royce branding team has worked for decades to achieve. Sure, they have a logo that is easily recognized, but when you see their logo, name, or product, associated with anything else, you have an immediate sense that it too must be luxurious.

The process of branding is programming your target audience to have a certain emotional response or feeling when they see, feel, or experience your products or service. This process takes much longer and is not something that is quantifiable like marketing is. For example, you can’t just buy a company logo and expect the public to have your intended emotional response when they see it. It takes repetition of seeing your branding to make that emotional association when they walk through your door or see your website.

Common emotional associations used in branding initiatives include things like quality, reliability, safety, luxury, thoughtfulness, romance, speed, good health, and several others.

That said, your companies’ brand should typically include things like

• Logo (of course),
• Color scheme – to be used in your ads, on your buildings, communications, and even products.
• Font types – to be used in your ads, and any other customer facing communications. (Emails, letters, etc.)
• Design plan – This identifies things like the layout, colors, fonts and more for your ads to create a consistent look from one ad to another.
• Image plan – This identifies a consistent look for pictures or videos included in your ads. Things like color schemes, hues etc.
• Branding focus – This identifies the key words, perceptions, responses, images, and feelings that you want the public to associate with your products and company.

By following your branding guidelines, you will be able to create marketing initiatives that provide a consistent branded look and feel across all of your ads, products, services, and any other customer-facing communications or engagements.

What Marketing does for your Brand

Smart marketing initiatives can do more than just drive people to your website or doorstep. It can also strengthen your brand.

Using the Apple example above, if you look at any of their marketing on billboards, magazine ads, posters, etc., you’ll always see their minimalist approach with both the product and the ad itself. This consistency builds recognition with each ad the public sees. It didn’t happen at first or even the first year, but over time, people have come to associate this minimalist look with Apple. This strategy has made their products easily identifiable over others and has resulted in instant recognition and massive sales.

While the success or failure of their individual ads and ad campaigns can be quantified with relative ease, there’s no way to quantify the branding effort that was applied to those ads. Because the benefits may not be realized for years to come, it would be nearly impossible to put a number on how successful their branding was on those ads.

Smart marketing should always include your branding elements so it continues to program the public with an emotional response every time it’s seen. While branding can provide substantial sales, those sales are not immediate and might not be realized for years as the familiarity of your brand continues to grow.

What Branding does for your Marketing

By creating each ad, according to your established branding guidelines, you are building brand recognition through repetition. This will both create a familiarity with your products and business, and also begin to evoke your intended emotion. With both familiarity and emotion applied to the equation, your ads will be more effective.

For example, if you are shopping online for a watch, and you come across two nearly identical products. They look similar, have a similar price, specifications, and customer reviews. One is a brand that you clearly recognize and the other is one you’ve never heard of. Which one would you go with? Nearly everyone would choose the brand that they recognize. This is the power of branding.

Why do I need Marketing?

Regardless of how successful your branding initiative is, you will nearly always need at least some level of marketing. After all, marketing is the vehicle that will get your product or service seen by your target audience.

In a nutshell, your marketing initiatives are what bring in the sales. Marketing campaigns are typically seen as a way to get sales sooner than later. Yes, if you want to grow your sales, you will most likely always need to be running an effective marketing initiative.

While the metrics may not always be as simple or straightforward as this, using the example of Google AdSense as referenced earlier, it’s relatively easy to figure out if you spend $100, you can expect a certain number of click-throughs that will then result in a certain number of sales.

Why do I need Branding?

The math is pretty simple. If done correctly, your branding effort will be integrated into your marketing effort and cost very little over and above your normal marketing expenses. But by integrating your branding into each and every marketing ad, and customer interaction, your brand becomes more and more recognized. With that increased recognition, comes increased marketing results.

As mentioned above, if a customer is looking for a product online and the choice is between two products with similar price and quality, the customer will almost always choose the brand they recognize.

In a nutshell, while it may take time to establish brand recognition with your customer base, a well-recognized brand can effectively give you the results of a high-dollar marketing effort on a medium or even low-dollar budget.

Which one is right for you?

By now you can hopefully see that both marketing and branding initiatives would be ideal. If you only need short-term sales and don’t care about long-term brand recognition, then you of course won’t need to worry about branding.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to establish a recognizable name in your respective industry, you will need to establish your brand, and convey that consistently in all of your marketing initiatives and customer points of contact.

Simply put, marketing is the short game, while branding is playing the long game. By applying both, you will be able to benefit both now, and in the future, only with a greater marketing efficiency in the future.