What is the difference between Branding and marketing? These are two terms that seem to have a lot of overlap. If your marketing is good, it will have a positive influence on your branding and vice versa. While branding and marketing share overarching goals and often work together to achieve them, branding and marketing each have different roles and individual goals.
In general, opinions about the definitions are very different. So how can you compare the terms? In this blog, we define both the terms branding and marketing and conclude the differences.
To get clarity about what exactly branding entails, I better first explain what branding is not. Sounds strange but note:
- Branding is not a logo.
- Branding is not the mission or the vision.
- Branding is not the goal of the organization.
- Branding is not the personality of the company.
- Branding is not the position
- Branding is not the tone of voice of the company (the tone of communication)
It is not the individual of any of these components that you implement into your business, nor is it the creation of any of these components.
Definition of branding
Branding is all about the feeling, and the experience a consumer has with a company. Based on this experience, it is up to branding to transform this customer from a customer into a fan of the company. This special experience, the story, or the feeling that the company has managed to convey to you serves to connect people with the brand.
How do you make someone a fan of your company? And what can you do about branding?
Branding includes all long-term promotional and non-promotional messages. It is expressing your brand in the market. In other words, when you are expressing “branding”, you are expressing everything that your brand represents. The list of components as described above certainly comes into play. An individual component from the list does not make a fire. All the components together, the differentiation strategy to its personality and its purpose, whether visual or verbal or otherwise.
A brand consists of a name, term, design, symbol, slogan, or other characteristic that identifies a seller’s goods or service as distinct from those of other sellers.
A brand is a promise. It’s a promise your company can keep. You make and keep that promise in every product experience, marketing activity, business decision, and customer interaction.
Branding revolves around what a company’s products or services are. What are the company’s values? What is the value the company adds to the customer? Branding is all about why the seller is doing something.
Branding speaks to the hearts of fans and consumers.
What is marketing?
Marketing is about making it clear to the right people what the brand does and what the brand offers. How can purchasing a product or service from this brand have a positive impact on my life? Marketing speaks to people’s minds.
Marketing is the generous act of helping other people achieve their goals. But can you also adapt the word Marketing in this sentence for the word Branding?
Both have a common goal: Make sure that your customers are helped in a positive way by means of your product or service.
Marketing outlines the specific activities of how, where, and when a brand will promote products and services for its customer goals in the marketplace.
Marketing is about the tactics, how does the seller go to market? How will they promote their products and services? It is about, for example, advertising, and communicating the benefits of your product or service both functionally and emotionally.
Marketing consists of a collection of activities and tactics that brands use to influence the public to buy. It is more focused on sales than branding and is based on the short term.
Marketing is promoting a brand in the market to boost sales.
Some examples of marketing are:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Advertising, (Google Ads, Social media ads, etc.)
- Email Promotions (Messages from your email list with new products or services)
Seth Godin writes that the old way of marketing can be compared to the advertisements of today. It is the continuous repetition of your message across all the different types of media. Although this is the old method, it is now noticeable that this process cannot be compared to building branding.
The difference between branding and marketing
So what is actually the difference between branding and marketing? Well, branding is about selling for the long term and marketing is about selling for the short term. Both have a common goal, namely marketing and branding are both aimed at attracting customers for the company. Both want to grow the company. Without new potential customers knocking at the door, both branding and marketing efforts fail.
But how they are developed and the final product are each different.
Building a brand strategy is one of the entrepreneur’s first tasks after developing their business plan. Although unfortunately many entrepreneurs after they have developed their logo immediately switch to marketing and therefore do not think out the fundamental brand strategy. For example, when devising a marketing strategy, it is often unclear what the brand represents.
Designing a brand strategy aims to build relationships with their customers, in short, it wants more than just a transaction. You refine, as it were, who the company wants to serve, in order to develop the brand into a strategic entity that expresses the brand message.
These messages and their expressions are designed to shape the perception of the brand in the mind of the public to ultimately influence a long-term relationship.
When designing a marketing strategy, the fundamental brand strategy plan is taken into account. While marketing strategy tries to generate sales directly, without a brand strategy it has no direction. Unlike brand strategy, a marketing strategy wants to focus on the transaction.
As described in the marketing section, it’s about attracting customers through either social media advertising, SEO, content marketing, or the traditional way, with print advertising.
We hope that the difference has become clear as a result of this article.
If you have any questions about the branding or marketing of your company, let us know!
