Branding and marketing have different objectives, but there is some overlap between them.
Your brand is what makes your company recognizable. A key part of branding is deciding what you want to be known for, and then making sure you live up to those standards.
We need to analyze each concept individually to understand how they work and the long-term effects they have on a business.
Branding vs Marketing
Marketing is concerned with identifying and reaching your target audience. Branding is concerned with creating an emotional connection with your target audience. Both branding and marketing have the goal of connecting with the audience, but they take different approaches to doing so. Marketing involves targeting the consumers you want to reach and finding out how to best reach them. Branding, on the other hand, is about creating an emotional connection with your target audience so they will connect with your product or service.
You then ensure that members of your team always behave in an honest way. Your brand is your company’s identity. A big part of branding is deciding what you want to be known for, and then following through with that. For example, you might decide that you want to be known as honest. You would then make sure that everyone on your team always behaves in an honest way.
Excellent. How do you plan to follow through with that characteristic?
The answer is that you need to make that a key trait of your business operations. For a company, creating the impression that you are honest and reliable might involve:
- Always admitting when you made a mistake
- Providing transparent pricing
- Not charging a consumer when you don’t provide the service
- Highlighting how honest the company is in all your marketing material
- Having competent customer service staff who can handle upset customers
If you want to create a strong brand, you need to take the necessary steps to establish consumer trust. Completing all of these tasks can help establish your company as reliable in the consumers’ eyes, which is what brand management is all about.
Visual branding is the most familiar element of branding to most people. It involves the company’s logo, color scheme, and fonts used in sales and marketing materials.
Marketing is different from branding in that it includes all of the activities done to promote a company, such as content released on social media, blog posts, and videos.
The purpose of marketing is to increase the size of your audience and to keep them coming back. Your marketing strategy will have a significant impact on how people see your brand.
Brand equity
We need to find a way to make customers want to choose us over the competition.
The answer lies in generating brand equity.
The value of a company’s products is increased thanks to a recognizable name. This is generated through marketing actions (advertising, PR campaigns, social media) and consistency in delivering the brand experience.
If done correctly, this will result in more customers buying from you, recommending you, and less likely to leave you for the competition.
Keller brand equity model
Professor Keller came up with a model for measuring and building brand equity.
The key to a strong brand is creating positive thoughts, feelings, and perceptions about your product or service.
It follows a pyramid model broken into four stages and six building blocks:
Brand identity – Who are you?
The first stage of the pyramid is creating brand awareness and recognition. You want consumers to connect your brand with a specific product/service, the industry you’re in, and the specific customer need you help satisfy.
To do this you are going to have to uncover the answers to a series of questions:
- How are consumers classifying your product or service?
- When asked, are they able to differentiate your USP (unique selling proposition) from competitors?
- Does your brand stand out during key stages of the buying process?
- Are these key stages documented?
The point of a brand is for customers to remember it when they see it in its specific product category or industry.
Brand meaning – What are you?
When consumers are familiar with a brand, they will want to know more about the company. This includes what the company stands for, if they are reliable, and what the quality of their products is. Additionally, they will want to know if the company has effective customer service.
Keller divides this section of the pyramid into two blocks:
Having strong brand equity means that a long-term performer generates a lot of loyalty from its customers.
Does this product or service make me look and feel how it is advertised?
Brand Response – What do I think, and feel about you?
The third stage of the pyramid is about whether the product and brand experience have met the customer’s expectations.
Keller also divides this section of the pyramid into two blocks:
These are all the negative aspects that take away from a consumer’s experience with the brand. This is usually done by evaluating the product’s quality, how it compares to other similar products, and how credible the brand is.
If you deliver on your brand promise, offer great customer service, and an even better final product, then you venture into brand advocacy territory.
Brand Resonance – What is our connection like?
This is done through consistent, honest communication that meets the needs and values of the consumer. When this bond is formed, the consumer begins to identify with the brand on an emotional level, which leads to long-term loyalty and customer equity When a brand and consumer have a strong connection with each other, it is called brand resonance. This occurs when the brand communicates effectively and truthfully with the consumer, and provides what the consumer needs and values. The consumer then starts to have positive emotions towards the brand, which leads to continued loyalty and customer equity.
Your true brand advocates are the customers who reach the top level of the pyramid. They would never leave you for the competition, no matter what. If you ever face any negative backlash or press, they will be the ones to jump to your defense.
Marketing
Branding is the identity of a company and marketing is the tool that finds an audience that buys into the company’s mission.
Providing education to an audience about a brand is the first step for a marketer. It is important to let the audience know who the company is, why the company is important, and how the company’s products and services will be beneficial to them. For most companies, sales are the most important aspect.
There are many different “institutions” and “processes” for delivering that end goal. Typically, these different entities or subcategories can be split into two groups:
- INBOUNDÂ marketing
- OUTBOUNDÂ marketing
Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on creating content that will attract customers without using traditional advertising methods.
Typically, inbound marketing activities guide prospective clients along a 4-stage buyer’s journey – from brand awareness to brand loyalty:
Attract
In stage one, you want to let your potential customers know that you exist, what needs you can fill for them, and what products or services you offer that can help them.
The most effective way to reach your target audience is by creating content that is optimized for search engines. This is because people who are searching for information on topics related to your brand are more likely to be interested in your product than someone who is randomly seeing a commercial on television.
Convert
A customer’s contact information is exchanged for content that is more valuable to them. This could be an exclusive eBook, whitepaper, webinar series, or a free consultation.
After you have gotten an email address or phone number, you have a lead!
Close
If you were in the process of researching a product, would you want to be bombarded with sales calls right off the bat? A common mistake that companies make is to try and sell their product to leads immediately after contact. This can be off-putting to potential customers who may still be in the process of research.
If you were marketing a SaaS company specializing in eCommerce, you would be marketing Shopify or Avada.
Downloading an eBook guide on product bundling techniques does not necessarily signal that they are, at that moment, looking to buy a brand new eCommerce platform.
The emails could contain content that is relevant and addresses the specific concerns of the recipients.
A software that manages customer relationships, such as Hubspot or Pardot, can be useful as it allows you not only to set up workflows, but also to analyze which content is effective for your audience and what is not.
Delight
The last stage of the inbound marketing funnel is delight, which is often overlooked. Customers who are happy with your product or service are the most effective source of new business opportunities.
The primary goal of your customer success team is keeping existing customers happy. However, marketing can also help out by engaging with customers on social media, continuing to send them relevant content, and continually ask for feedback regarding the performance of your product/service.
Outbound marketing
Outbound marketing is a type of marketing that includes more traditional forms, such as advertising through TV ads, billboards, print media, commercial trade shows, SDR (sales development representative) cold calls, and unsolicited mass emailing.
Inbound marketing happens when the consumer comes to you, while outbound marketing is when you reach out to the consumer.
PPC and retargeting campaigns allow marketers to target their audiences very precisely.
Adwords allows advertisers to target their ads to a specific audience by including or excluding certain variables, such as age, sex, interests, etc. Advertisers can also “bid” for certain keywords on Google, which determines where their website or product landing page appears on the search results page.
1. Branding builds loyalty, marketing drives sales
A successful marketing campaign will pull in customers and incentivize them to buy a company’s products or services.
The way you brand your business affects everything that happens after a customer arrives in your store, offline or online. A coherent brand strategy should produce a good customer experience, which is important for customer retention.
Maintaining a presence in your audience’s mind is important, but the best marketing campaigns will not lead to sales if your service is not good.
According to an article by CrowdSpring, three-quarters of consumers make purchases based on a brand name.
If you have a strong brand, your customers will trust you and buy from you again. This can eventually lead to customer loyalty and ongoing sales, because it is much easier to sell to an existing customer than to a new one.
2. Branding is long-term. Marketing strategies change
Your company’s branding is part of a long-term business strategy. You decide what you want to be known for and work hard to create that association with your audience.
The practice of purposely creating and sustaining a certain image for your business is known as brand management.
Brand management is the process of creating and maintaining a certain image for your business. This includes ensuring that your business is known for positive traits and promoting these traits.
This often means that customers have negative associations with your company. For example, if your customer service is slow or if your products keep breaking.
Every so often, you’ll change something small about your brand. This might be your logo or the colors you use. These small changes are called a brand refresh.
Companies like Coca-Cola will do periodic updates to their visual identity, though the core product offering stays the same.
If something goes terribly wrong, you may have to rebrand.
Rebranding is when you change how your consumers see your company. Amazon has done this a few times, for example when it changed from being an online bookstore to selling everything.
The strategies that marketers and salespeople use change along with trends and new needs. For example, when TikTok became popular, marketers started using it to share content.
As time goes on, the kind of content you share through your marketing channels will change. However, businesses usually try to keep the same brand message.
Branding and Marketing
Marketing, on the other hand, seeks to produce a brand that customers will purchase. Branding is about shaping how customers think about a product. Marketing is about driving customers to purchase a product Branding is different from marketing because they create different results. Branding is focused on the “what” of the brand. The goal is to create a brand that customers will remember. Marketing, however, is all about getting customers to purchase the product. Branding is about influencing how customers think about a product. Marketing is about getting customers to buy a product.
On the contrary, marketing is more focused on the “how,” or the steps taken to promote brand awareness.
There is a common misconception that branding and marketing are one and the same. However, they are actually two different concepts. Branding is the process of creating a unique identity for a product or company, while marketing is the use of promotional activities to generate interest and sales.
Although there are distinctions, they work together to create the customer experience. Instead of treating them as separate entities, it might be more productive to think of them as part of the business process cycle.
The branding process is what helps you figure out your company’s core values, and how to make those values stand out. It also gives your values meaning and makes them more relatable to your audience.
In other words, your brand is the way you communicate your value to the world.
Your marketing team is vital to conveying your branding strategy to potential customers after you have established it.
The main goal of marketing is to make more people aware of your brand and what you have to offer, and to convince potential customers that your products or services can help them.