Branding and marketing make your business stand out amongst your competition if done well.
As small-to-midsize business (SMB) leaders strategize on how to grow their brands, it's important to understand how branding and marketing are distinct. Because branding and marketing are different animals, they require unique strategies, and when decision-makers understand how the two are different, they can better decide how to allocate funds toward each endeavor.
Knowing the differences between branding and marketing, some of their similarities, and the principles that drive them will help you design strategies for each, minimize redundancies, and create smart budgets that support your efforts.
Differences between branding vs. marketing
Branding is the process of creating an identity for your business, products, or services, while marketing involves selling and promoting your offering to a target market. In other words, while branding is about engineering identity, marketing, as the name suggests, is about getting products to market and making sure they sell well.
Chris Gerbig of Pink Lilly explains the distinction well: "I see marketing as more of a transaction or a task. It's something you do. It's the process of trying to get customers to your website, trying to sell them. Branding is more of the intangible. It's more about the perception of your business."[1]
What is branding?
Branding involves creating effective psychological and emotional associations in the minds of consumers when they interact with your offering or business. This involves creating a brand that conveys the values your company espouses, as well as what your product or service promises customers. Branding can also convey your company’s mission.
In this way, branding seeks to inspire feelings that make customers want to buy your product or service.
Branding strategy
Branding strategy systematically stimulates specific feelings in your target audience. Some of the more common strategies include:
Corporate branding: Focuses on highlighting a company's mission and values.
Value branding: Underscores the affordability of a product or service.
Innovative branding: Focuses on how your offering is cutting-edge or introduces new approaches to solving old problems.
Emotional branding: Aims to connect with customers on an emotional level by tapping into their personal values.
Eco-friendly branding: Underscores your brand's commitment to supporting the environment and using environmentally-friendly production processes.
Heritage branding: Emphasizes a company's track record and history to establish trust with customers.
A good example of emotional branding is the Pepsi logo. When Pepsi introduced the Pepsi smile, it turned the logo's white wave into rows of teeth. The different types of smiles speak to the emotional brand promise Pepsi wants associated with each type of soda. Presumably, Pepsi makes you smile with happiness, Diet Pepsi makes you grin with the satisfaction of drinking healthier, and Pepsi Max makes you laugh because it tastes so good but has no sugar at all.
By leveraging emotional branding, Pepsi seeks to inspire a combination of joy and confidence.
What is marketing?
Marketing encompasses the activities used to sell and promote your products. Effective marketing always focuses on a specific target market, using techniques meant to generate sales with that particular segment.
As a result, marketing may be more flexible than branding. For example, you may have developed a product and a brand, both of which remain the same no matter who you're trying to target. But when you market your product to people who are 55 to 70 years old, you will typically use a different approach than when you focus on those between the ages of 25 and 35.
To maximize the effectiveness of marketing, decision-makers often:
Conduct market research. This involves gathering data about what your target customers need and want. You then analyze the data and use your findings to craft your strategy.
Advertise using a variety of channels, such as online ads, print, television, and radio.
Leverage public relations campaigns that focus on managing your brand’s reputation in the media, with the general public, or with specific stakeholders.
Engage with customers directly as part of the sales process. This may involve phone conversations, online chats, text messages, or email campaigns.
Using a combination of these techniques, marketers first understand what customers need, then make sure they understand how the company's solution meets that need.
Marketing strategies
Marketing strategies combine knowledge of your target consumers and marketing methods to get them to purchase your product or service. Some common strategies include:
Content marketing: This involves using blogs, videos, infographics, articles, white papers, e-books, and more to create awareness and motivate customers to buy.
Search engine optimization (SEO): SEO focuses on creating content that helps your website rank higher in search engine results. It involves using keywords, creating quality content, and structuring your site and content to generate more organic traffic.
Social media marketing: Social media marketing seeks to make your brand popular with an online community. To do this, you create posts and directly interact with potential customers through chats, forwarding and reposting content, and reacting to other posts. This is an important focus for small-business marketers because only 39% have access to social media monitoring software, compared to 60% of large-business marketers.
Email marketing: With email marketing, you use email for your messaging, which includes information about your offering and its features, as well as company news, product releases, and even how-to guides that make your offering easier to use.
Partnerships with other companies: When you partner with another organization, you combine efforts, audiences, and even products. This gives you access to their audience while doing the same for them.
Key differences
The biggest difference between branding and marketing is that branding is about forging relationships, while marketing is transactional. Branding may center around building a relationship with your target audience, perhaps over a long period of time. Marketing is all about getting your target customer to make a purchase in the short term.
Another key difference is the feelings marketing and branding seek to create. Marketing is always about creating a feeling of "need." You want the customer to feel like they have to have your product because it solves a key personal or business problem.
But with branding, the feeling you’re trying to encourage can be anything that syncs with your brand image. For example, some branding is designed to make customers feel courageous, while other branding creates feelings of calm or peace.
Principles of branding and marketing
Effective branding and marketing, while different, share some of the same underlying principles. The following can be applied to any branding or marketing strategy to maximize its impact:
What are the similarities between branding and marketing?
Branding and marketing are similar in that they have the same goal—to encourage sales. Both disciplines are customer-centric. It's important to craft both branding and marketing around what your customers need as opposed to what you think is cool about your business.
In addition, both branding and marketing focus on building your company's image. Whether you're building a branding or marketing strategy, you want to differentiate yourself from the competition.
At the center of both branding and marketing is effective communication. You should assume customers don't yet understand your offering or brand identity and then use strategies to communicate that clearly.
Narrow your search for branding agencies with our list of companies in the following areas:
Create your own branding and marketing strategies
Branding and marketing are different in that branding focuses on forging an identity for your offering or company, while marketing is about getting customers to make purchases. At the same time, both branding and marketing require a customer-centric approach that effectively communicates your company's image.
Using the branding and marketing strategies outlined above, you can systematically create approaches that build an effective identity and motivate customers to buy your product or service. Your next step is to dig deeper into what effective branding and marketing involve and understand how to choose a winning branding or marketing agency.